In history PhD programs across the United States, comprehensive exams (or “comps,” preliminary exams, or “prelims”) mark a pivotal milestone between coursework and dissertation research. Typically administered after two or three years of graduate study, these exams are designed to assess a student’s mastery of the historiographical fields relevant to their research. Depending on the program, students may be examined in one or two major fields (such as US history, modern Europe, or the Atlantic world) and/or one or more minor or thematic fields (such as gender history, global history, or critical theory). Formats vary but generally include written components—ranging from timed essays to take-home questions—and an oral defense before the student’s committee. Ideally, these exams are opportunities to demonstrate the ability to synthetize arguments, discern historiographical patterns, and situate one’s research within broader scholarly conversations. In short, they are meant to certify that the student is prepared to contribute original scholarship to the discipline. The areas of examination also help PhD candidates, when they enter the job market, position themselves for jobs with specific research and teaching areas.
That is the ideal. In practice, the experience of preparing for comprehensive exams is far more uneven. Some students receive detailed reading lists and structured guidance from engaged advisors; others are expected to design their own lists in relative isolation. The persistent lack of transparency around these structural realities exacerbates the stress of the process. Stated plainly: comprehensive exams are high stakes, but they are not a referendum on one’s worth as a scholar. Whether you pass with confidence or barely make it across the finish line, what matters is not how polished your performance appears, but how you have grown intellectually. One of the goals is to begin to discern how to hold your ground within a field whose complexity necessarily exceeds the grasp of any one individual.
The comprehensive exam is a strange hybrid: part intellectual calisthenics, part memory sport, part existential reckoning. You spend months reading countless books and articles—sometimes with fascination, sometimes with grim determination—all in the service of becoming “qualified.” But what does that qualification entail? It does not mean you have to read everything (you won’t). It does not require you to recall every clever turn of phrase or illustrative case study (you won’t). What comps test is your capacity to identify historiographical arguments and retrieve useful frameworks under pressure. Reading for comps has to become architectural rather than ornamental. You are not decorating a parlor for seminar discussion; you are constructing internal scaffolding that will support high-speed analytical recall. This requires a shift in both reading habits and note-taking strategies.
While seminar reading privileges depth and critique (Clio and the Contemporary has published helpful advice on taking notes for seminars here), reading for comprehensive exams prioritizes structural retention and retrievability. While this may appear to entail a retreat from interpretive subtlety, it is in fact an adaptation to a distinct task: not exhaustive engagement, but strategic synthesis. For this reason, the questions you pose while reading must change.
The questions you should ask are:
- What is the author’s central thesis, distilled into one or two sentences?
- What is the author’s historiographical intervention or contribution?
- What primary sources and methods does the author employ?
- What theoretical lens guides the analysis?
- Whom is the author in dialogue with—or challenging?
Here’s an example of how to use these questions and what to prioritize when reading: when thinking of Weapons of the Weak by James Scott, you need not trace every detail of Malaysian rural politics, but you should retain Scott’s argument for “everyday resistance” and “infrapolitics,” and his broader intervention in political theory. Likewise, Gender and the Politics of History by Joan Scott, is less about its case studies than its reframing of “experience” as a problematic epistemological foundation. In both cases, the emphasis should be on what the author does (i.e., what they shift in scholarly discourse), not on exhaustive summary. Your structure of reading and note taking should also adapt to the challenges of comps. What follows is a walk-through for reading and taking notes.
To begin the process, you should set aside about twenty to thirty minutes for pre-reading. Start by recording the full bibliographic citation in a citation manager of your choice, such as Zotero or Notion. Once the reference is secured, turn to the table of contents and scan it carefully, tracing how the argument develops across the work. Then devote close attention to the introduction and conclusion, reading them thoroughly in order to extract the central thesis, the research questions, the author’s positioning in the historiography, and the broader stakes being advanced.
After this preliminary stage, you can turn to a more selective reading of the chapters, which should take thirty to sixty minutes in total. Skim the opening and closing paragraphs of each chapter to identify the sub-arguments at play. From there, choose one or two chapters for closer engagement, ideally those most relevant to your own research field or dissertation. As you work through these chapters, make a point of noting the thesis in one or two sentences, summarizing three to five arguments at the chapter level, and observing the sources and methods the author employs—whether oral history, state archives, or ethnography. Attend as well to the intervention being made in the historiography, such as a reframing of gender or a critique of modernization theory. Alongside this, you may wish to jot down your own critical responses, whether in the form of questions, limitations, or provocations. Be attentive to key concepts or keywords, and assign thematic tags such as empire, migration, or state violence, so that the text can be readily integrated into your broader intellectual map.
When you have finished, set the text aside and immediately spend ten minutes on recall. Open a blank document and, without referring back to your notes, reconstruct from memory the thesis, the source base and methods, the intervention, and at least one open-ended critique. Only after you have written down what you remember should you return to your notes to fill in any gaps.
Finally, make sure that the reading enters into an ongoing cycle of spaced review and synthesis. Periodically quiz yourself with questions such as which authors critique the “civilizing mission” framework or which employ methods from subaltern studies. Once you have read five to seven works in a subfield, write a meta-note: a reflective paragraph on recurring themes, shifts in historiography, and generational divides. By moving through these stages—pre-reading, triaged engagement, immediate recall, and spaced review—you transform reading into a structured practice that fosters retention.
As an example of the format outlined above: an entry for Antoinette Burton’s Dwelling in the Archive would read:
- thesis—archives as gendered and affective imperial spaces
- method—feminist and postcolonial readings
- sources—letters, memoirs, photographs
- intervention—challenges neutrality of archives and reframes their epistemic function
- thematic tags: “empire,” “gender,” and “memory”
Taking notes this way differs significantly from seminar preparation, where marginalia, impressions, and quotations may suffice. Comps notes must endure. They must be legible to your future self, long after the book’s details have faded. That durability requires systematization. To achieve this, I used Zotero, while other students prefer Notion databases or even color-coded index cards. (Note: Clio and the Contemporary has a piece on digital tools for graduate students here). The medium is flexible but having a method is not. Without consistency, your secondary-source archive will collapse under its own weight.
Equally as important as how to take notes is learning how to triage your reading. No one reads every book cover to cover during comps. Nor should they. Focus instead on introductions, conclusions, and selected chapters. This deliberate process is by no means “corner-cutting”; think of it rather as strategic processing. Prioritize chapters that intersect with your research interests to maintain motivation and facilitate long-term integration. The goal is not total comprehension. It is an efficient extraction of durable insight.
After each reading, I ran a low-stakes memory test: open a blank page, write what I remembered, and assess whether it aligned with my goals. I followed this with spaced repetition, reviewing notes every few weeks and asking synthetic questions: “Which authors problematize historical narratives of nationalism?” “What distinguishes postcolonial historiography from its colonial antecedents?” This kind of meta-cognitive rehearsal is what enables you to draw on Partha Chatterjee, Benedict Anderson, and Eric Hobsbawm without flinching when asked, for example, to compare theories of nationalism under exam pressure.
Another technique I found indispensable was writing “meta-notes”—concise reflections following a cluster of related readings. For example, after several texts on gender and empire, I might write: “Earlier works emphasize state and labor regulation (e.g., Stoler, Cooper); later works shift toward memory, affect, and archival subjectivity (e.g., Burton, Muehlebach). Movement from structural to affective registers.” These reflective syntheses became the building blocks of my thematic exam answers and of my own intellectual orientation.
Crucially, I did not undertake this process alone. I shared notes with peers, organized discussion groups, and traded thematic outlines. These meetings were as much about intellectual accountability as they were about emotional survival. Hearing others confess confusion or gaps in memory reminded me that comps are really rituals of formation and of becoming the kind of scholar who can think across contexts and disciplines.
Remember, you do not need to read every footnote or finish every monograph. You need a system that enables you to remember the right things: arguments, interventions, and stakes. Read with precision. Take notes with structure. Test your memory. Build community. Comps are grueling, but they offer a rare opportunity to map the terrain of your field in broad strokes. When you begin to perceive the contours of that landscape, you will find that you are not simply preparing for an exam. You are becoming a historian.
Featured image: Giovanni Francesco Costa, Scholars Consulting Books and a Globe, c. 1747, etching, hand-colored with watercolor and gouache, on laid paper, 8 1/16 x 11 11/16 in., National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Clio and the Contemporary 