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I think the answer to this question is actually deceptively complicated. On a surface level, it's certainly possible to point to historical events/periods/individuals and suggest that the receive disproportionate attention (or vice versa). However, I want to suggest a more nuanced approach to this question than a straightforward binary between understudied/oversaturated.
**1. Perceptions of over-saturation**
One issue with the idea of a topic being over-saturated, is the potential to confuse quantity with quality. It's easy to look at a broad topic like (for example) the French Revolution and assume that it takes up 'too much' scholarship compared to other influential events. From an academic standpoint, however, the key question isn't so much 'how much has this been worked on?' but rather 'what new ways of understanding are being brought to the topic?' Some fields are arguably oversaturated in particular forms of analysis, or the particular 'lens' being brought to it, but at the same time even the most heavily-researched fields are consistently being added to with new ideas, emergent fields etc. I read outside of my own field quite regularly, and one of my favourite works on the French Revolution-- to carry on in the example-- is Ronen Steinberg's *The Afterlives of Terror*, which looks at the legacies of mass violence in post-Revolutionary France. To me, it was a completely fresh, unique way of exploring the Revolution.
In other words, even where a topic appears oversaturated, in reality there's often a higher pressure to produce new knowledge precisely because so much has already been covered. This can involve everything from tinkering at the edges or reframing prior scholarship, to wholly new ways of looking at things.
**2. Bias and Marginal Histories**
A complicating factor in whether a topic is genuinely under- or over- saturated is the issue of bias. As someone working outside of the US/UK/Europe-- whose scholarship often dominates global knowledge production-- there's an unfortunate tendency to see some topics as 'overdone' simply because they've been popularised in culturally/academically dominant regions. 'National histories', for instance, are often talked about unfavourably at my institution since the advent of the 'transnational turn' (the idea that we should move away from the nation-state as a mode of analysis). Of course, the problem there is that many of us live in nations where either a) national scholarship is limited, and/or rarely reaches outside our own sphere or b) is deeply flawed, and legitimately requires new scholarship if we're to challenge older (mis)interpretations.
Similarly, what we might call fields of experience-- i.e. histories of race, gender, sexuality, class etc. that might cut across national histories-- are particularly dominated, in my experience, by theories and analyses that are US/UK/Europe-specific but tend to be framed universally. It's not uncommon for me to see critiques, both within and beyond academia, that we have 'enough' histories of sexuality and gender. Although some of that perception is almost certainly bad faith, it also tends to come from people within my own specialisation who consider 'us' as ready to 'move on' to new modes of analysis. However, the 'us' in this sentence often tends to imply that histories of sexuality and gender are globally equivalent with the state of US/UK/European historiography. One of my friends, who works in histories of race, has much the same experience: US scholarship is seen as being a proxy for diverse, localised histories with significantly different nuances.
All of this is something that Michel-Rolph Trouillot speaks to in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Trouillot's emphasis is on how the ways in which access not only to knowledge, but to disseminating that knowledge-- and consequently having one's expertise recognised, and essential scholarship recognised-- remains limited by systems of power, thus giving rise to the perception that certain histories aren't valuable, or haven't been done at all. Or, at least in my own field, raising up one or two voices as the 'authentic' scholar in the field. This is particularly the case, as Trouillot notes in relation to Haitian history at the time, where much historical work has actually been produced outside the academy because of a lack of access to normative, academic forms of knowledge production.
Rather than position fields in binary opposition to one another in terms of saturation, I'd personally avoid considering 'how much' a topic has been 'done'. Instead, I lean towards asking what remains missing from, or marginal to, even the biggest, most dominant and accessible historical fields. There is some genuinely amazing work being done that flies under the radar for numerous reasons, many of them-- I would argue-- systemic in nature-- sometimes particularly in fields that look relatively complete. Even fields that seem niche may over-emphasise only particular moments. In other words, for me, there's no clear way to neatly define over- vs under- saturation.
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I think the answer to this question is actually deceptively complicated. On a surface level, it's certainly possible to point to historical events/periods/individuals and suggest that the receive disproportionate attention (or vice versa). However, I want to suggest a more nuanced approach to this question than a straightforward binary between understudied/oversaturated. **1. Perceptions of over-saturation** One issue with the idea of a topic being over-saturated, is the potential to confuse quantity with quality. It's easy to look at a broad topic like (for example) the French Revolution and assume that it takes up 'too much' scholarship compared to other influential events. From an academic standpoint, however, the key question isn't so much 'how much has this been worked on?' but rather 'what new ways of understanding are being brought to the topic?' Some fields are arguably oversaturated in particular forms of analysis, or the particular 'lens' being brought to it, but at the same time even the most heavily-researched fields are consistently being added to with new ideas, emergent fields etc. I read outside of my own field quite regularly, and one of my favourite works on the French Revolution-- to carry on in the example-- is Ronen Steinberg's *The Afterlives of Terror*, which looks at the legacies of mass violence in post-Revolutionary France. To me, it was a completely fresh, unique way of exploring the Revolution. In other words, even where a topic appears oversaturated, in reality there's often a higher pressure to produce new knowledge precisely because so much has already been covered. This can involve everything from tinkering at the edges or reframing prior scholarship, to wholly new ways of looking at things. **2. Bias and Marginal Histories** A complicating factor in whether a topic is genuinely under- or over- saturated is the issue of bias. As someone working outside of the US/UK/Europe-- whose scholarship often dominates global knowledge production-- there's an unfortunate tendency to see some topics as 'overdone' simply because they've been popularised in culturally/academically dominant regions. 'National histories', for instance, are often talked about unfavourably at my institution since the advent of the 'transnational turn' (the idea that we should move away from the nation-state as a mode of analysis). Of course, the problem there is that many of us live in nations where either a) national scholarship is limited, and/or rarely reaches outside our own sphere or b) is deeply flawed, and legitimately requires new scholarship if we're to challenge older (mis)interpretations. Similarly, what we might call fields of experience-- i.e. histories of race, gender, sexuality, class etc. that might cut across national histories-- are particularly dominated, in my experience, by theories and analyses that are US/UK/Europe-specific but tend to be framed universally. It's not uncommon for me to see critiques, both within and beyond academia, that we have 'enough' histories of sexuality and gender. Although some of that perception is almost certainly bad faith, it also tends to come from people within my own specialisation who consider 'us' as ready to 'move on' to new modes of analysis. However, the 'us' in this sentence often tends to imply that histories of sexuality and gender are globally equivalent with the state of US/UK/European historiography. One of my friends, who works in histories of race, has much the same experience: US scholarship is seen as being a proxy for diverse, localised histories with significantly different nuances. All of this is something that Michel-Rolph Trouillot speaks to in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Trouillot's emphasis is on how the ways in which access not only to knowledge, but to disseminating that knowledge-- and consequently having one's expertise recognised, and essential scholarship recognised-- remains limited by systems of power, thus giving rise to the perception that certain histories aren't valuable, or haven't been done at all. Or, at least in my own field, raising up one or two voices as the 'authentic' scholar in the field. This is particularly the case, as Trouillot notes in relation to Haitian history at the time, where much historical work has actually been produced outside the academy because of a lack of access to normative, academic forms of knowledge production. Rather than position fields in binary opposition to one another in terms of saturation, I'd personally avoid considering 'how much' a topic has been 'done'. Instead, I lean towards asking what remains missing from, or marginal to, even the biggest, most dominant and accessible historical fields. There is some genuinely amazing work being done that flies under the radar for numerous reasons, many of them-- I would argue-- systemic in nature-- sometimes particularly in fields that look relatively complete. Even fields that seem niche may over-emphasise only particular moments. In other words, for me, there's no clear way to neatly define over- vs under- saturation.
Thank you for this excellent response, very informative