What I really like about the chance to rewrite my German doctoral thesis as an English academic monograph is the possibility to re-structure the book, and to make it about the reader (hopefully, some people will read it…). When I started the PhD journey, I took my time researching and later on, writing and researching. While writing, new problems turned up, details were unclear (to me), and more research and more reading needed to be done. In the end, the German dissertation shows this thought process, no matter how many times I edited. I can still tell which parts I wrote first, and where I already found out where this writing is going. Maybe you can see this as well when reading the German (Open Access) version.
First of all, there were the usual expectations to a doctoral thesis on an extensive literature and methodology review, detailed source interpretation, and broad contextualising (incl. to place the own research in research fields which turned out to be not that relevant for my work). I am grateful that I spend quite a lot of time on this, and especially on the introduction where I summed up relevant research on the vast field of “Herrschaft” (authority, rule, government, power…) and political history (incl. political thought or history of ideas) and really dug deep to also form my own understanding of power, authority, and rule in the early modern period.
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Quelle: http://csarti.net/2019/07/writing-a-dissertation-vs-writing-an-academic-monograph/