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Rough Theory 
Sure, but you have to admit you’d be curious to read it… street cleaning and public life, allergies and disease, Victorian attitudes to cleanliness, vacuum cleaners and feminism… and it would need to be called, as seems traditional: Dust: the tiny particle that shaped a large world.
Oh it has all kinds of potential – they could even follow the lead of my world history teacher, start with the formation of the world, and study what happened next…
What I really enjoyed about this exchange, though, was the sort of coy cynicism involved in the suggestion that you might have to change the title from “the” history to “a” history to get the project accepted – in its own way, it’s actually a lovely criticism of a particular dimension of academic work.
I also enjoyed the fundamental randomness of the whole conversation – the notion that you might want to “do a dissertation”, abstracted from some specific intellectual interest driving you to do it…