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Category Archives: General Interest Column

General Interest Column: A. W. Strouse on, “How To Be Unprofessional”

07 Sunday Jun 2015

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General Interest, graduate student life, professional development

How to be Unprofessional

A.W. Strouse

Plenty of empirical evidence demonstrates that humanist doctoral students are utterly screwed:

  • The mean attrition rate in humanities Ph.D. programs is roughly half.
  • Time-to-degree averages about ten years.
  • There are practically no decent jobs for humanities doctorates.

And anecdotal evidence confirms, too, that many graduate students feel tormented by their advisers, tortured by poverty-level stipends, and generally just stressed the hell out.

So, what should we do?

Personally, I see this doomsday scenario as a radical opportunity. In such a dire situation, it would be irrational for me to simply conform to the norms of professionalization in the hopes of winning a tenure-track position. Therefore, I feel liberated. If I have nothing to lose, then I can to take big risks, go for broke, and enjoy my studies.

As I recently argued (in a special issue of Pedagogy [1] dedicated to issues in graduate education) I want to create a more “unprofessional” kind of “professionalism.” I’m not talking about skimping on footnotes, sleeping with undergraduates, or staging “occupations.” I’m talking about making a conscious decision to take pleasure in my studies and to resist, in whatever ways possible, the forces that often make graduate school unpleasant. My theoretical explication of “unprofessionalism” can be found in the article; here are some practical policies:

  • Don’t complain to or commiserate with other graduate students. It’s boring, unproductive, and self-indulgent.
  • Write only one course paper per semester. During my last three semesters of coursework, I would arrange my schedule so that I only had to write a full research paper for one of my courses. I would audit some of my classes. And for the full-credit courses, I would write a historiography paper (usually to compliment the full paper); or I would create a translation, an edition, etc. This made my life much less stressful, and it made my papers much stronger.
  • Read widely. I’m currently reading Paul Vitz’s biography of Freud. Freud has nothing whatsoever to do with my dissertation, but I’m completely fascinated by Vitz’s thesis that Freud was an unconscious Catholic.
  • Get out of the library. I usually work from home. But when I’m reading at the library I always make sure to take a long walk to my favorite bakery, where I eat a big cookie. Life is too short!
  • Get out of academia. Go to the theater, go to a roller coaster park. Tutor, garden, volunteer. Don’t wait until summer break—do these things during the most stressful part of the semester.
  • Grade papers with a timer. Any highly literate person should be able to read and grade an undergraduate’s six-page paper in five minutes. When I grade my students’ essays, I set a five-minute timer for each paper. Often I go over the time limit, but it’s pretty exhilarating to race against the clock.
  • It’s OK to cancel office hours sometimes. Occasionally I hold my office hours in Central Park, or I cancel them altogether and walk up to the Metropolitan Museum. (I love to look at those pious portraits of Low Land burghers[2], whose neurotic work ethic and propensity for self-flagellation still inspires so many of us.)
  • Your students will respect you more if, just once during the semester, you use a four-letter word.
  • Don’t ask permission. A few semesters ago I decided to teach Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in a required, freshman composition class. I knew that my supervisor would tell me it was a terrible idea to teach Middle English in an introductory course, so I never mentioned it to anybody until after the fact. The course was, of course, an overwhelming success, because students love to be challenged.
  • Ask for opportunities. In my experience, most of the people working in the university are kindhearted, bright individuals who recognize the struggles that graduate students face, and they’re more than willing to help—but they often don’t know how to help. But almost every time that I have asked for an opportunity, it has been afforded me. All you have to do is: figure out who to ask, figure out how to ask, and then ask.
  • See the big picture. Graduate students are in such bad shape for a reason: the folks who dictate national economic policy believe strongly in privatized, individualist entrepreneurship. We are impoverished, because (in theory) such material pressures will force us to compete, innovate, and create—in ways that benefit society at large. That ideology may or may not be flawed. But, for now, it’s all we’ve got to work with. And, to some extent, it is working. On the micro-economic level (i.e., in terms of my own quality of life) being a graduate student kind of sucks sometimes. But, on the macro-economic level, the system produces quality researchers and teachers for what is arguably the world’s best university system.

Looking at the situation from a global perspective, I’m grateful that the American taxpayer is willing to fund my quixotic investigations of medieval poetry. I see it as my duty to repay society for its investment by working hard, teaching well, and creating new opportunities. It’s my responsibility to make the most of my time as a graduate student, and sometimes that means challenging preconceived ideas about what it means to be a graduate student.

A.W. Strouse is a poet who studies and teaches medieval literature at the City University of New York. Strouse’s articles have appeared in Romanic Review, Pedagogy, and Names; and Strouse’s recent book of poems, Retractions & Revelations, is available from Jerk Poet[3].

[1] http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pedagogy/toc/ped.15.1.html ↩
[2] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Hugo_van_der_Goes_007.jpg ↩
[3] http://www.jerkpoet.com ↩

General Interest Column: Lucy Barnhouse on “The Medievalist Abroad: Widening the Conference Circuit”

31 Sunday May 2015

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conferences, General Interest, graduate student life, interdisciplinary medieval studies

The Medievalist Abroad: Widening the Conference Circuit

          Conferences can be bane or blessing or both, depending on factors ranging from one’s teaching schedule to where one’s degree of extroversion. The atmosphere of collegial exchange at a good conference is one I find invigorating, even if it’s usually savored through a haze of over-caffeinated exhaustion. I confess, though, that process of applying for conferences is one I’ve often faced with dread. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time poring over the annual calls of prestigious conferences, wondering how to fit my current research under the umbrella of a given topic. Time spent doing research in Europe forced me out of these bad habits, through forcing me out of the North American comfort zone of the Kalamazoo-plus circuit. I started searching CFP listings by location and date, or by keywords like “medicine” instead of “medieval.” Exploring these new conferences, I discovered a counterintuitive truth: presenting at conferences where medievalists were in the minority both stimulated my writing process, and resulted in stimulating feedback.

During the past summer conference season, I had my first experiences of attending conferences where I was one of very few medievalists. I found these conferences—on historicizing security, on the history of medicine, and on urban history—helped me hone valuable skills. This process began even before I attended the conferences themselves. Writing abstracts—and papers—helped me think about my topic in new ways. For instance: how might my work on medieval leprosy contribute to a conference on “(In)visibility, (In)security, and Gender in Historical Perspective?” Is “Healthscaping Pre-Modern Cities” the conceptual frame I never realized my fourteenth-century property disputes needed Preparing to speak on how one’s own work relates to such broad topical themes or theoretical frameworks provides a great excuse for delving into secondary literature.

Such research is something that I, at least, find perpetually slipping down my to-do list. Conferences not only imposed a deadline for doing it, but a purpose, in giving me a shared vocabulary with non-medievalist scholars. In my case, presenting research on a late medieval leper hospital to an audience of historians, sociologists, and scientists provided an opportunity for reading up on legal anthropology. It also opened my work to the bracing questions of an audience with no assumptions. Writing for an audience with no background knowledge forced me to sharpen my central ideas, making them clear enough to be concisely expressed. Presenting for an audience primarily made up of non-medievalist scholars means there is no chance for the room to get caught up in fine points of source analysis or historiographical controversies. There are, of course, times when a room full of people ready to talk through a coffee break about the semantics of Old Norse or the fine points of a liturgical procession is just what is wanted and needed. But participating in other conversations proved a salutary exercise.

I found it refreshing and stimulating to discover how scholars with very different sources are engaging with similar—or different—problems and questions. Topical conferences on medical and urban history proved very educational for me. I spent a lot of time listening… and taking copious notes that I’ve since used in preparing and teaching classes on modern Europe. I also found myself engaging in unexpectedly familiar conversations. It turns out that historians of hospitals in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries are also dealing with debates over the moral quality of patients, and tensions between private charity and public funding. The ways in which these questions have been debated in the medieval historiography are often tied to broad narratives about the Middle Ages, and finding them outside it felt very liberating.         Conferences sponsored by umbrella organizations can also be especially good opportunities for workshops and networking. The conference of the Society for the Social History of Medicine even included a workshop designed for graduate students and early career researchers (more of this, please, conference organizers everywhere.) At the same conference, panels with papers on pre-modern topics brought the medievalists together in bunches, throwing together thirty or so people from multiple disciplines and career stages with the shared interest of medieval medicine. This proved a shockingly efficient method of facilitating the exchange of contacts and citations with other graduate students, and of getting into conversations with established scholars who might have been mobbed—or at least nervously avoided by me—at an all-medievalist conference.

My summer of interdisciplinary love helped sharpen my own sense of what makes my research distinctive, and what connects it to the questions others are asking. It also built my confidence in presenting that research to non-specialist audiences, an experience I’m glad to have had before going on the job market. All of the steps of the conference process—from brainstorming to reception—proved helpful, in slightly different ways than they are when the expected conference is made up primarily of medievalists. Being forced to approach my own topic from a variety of perspectives was an exercise that made a pleasant change from obsessive tinkering with paragraphs and anxious contemplation of chapters. I’ve since presented for an audience of scientists, humanities scholars, and the interested public, and have more presentations to lay audiences scheduled. I’ve also become something of an evangelist for presenting at conferences not designed by and for medievalists. It provides an opportunity to participate in new conversations, to make new friends… and to communicate to others what’s so great about the Middle Ages, asserting that we belong in these larger conversations too.

Lucy Barnhouse

Lucy Barnhouse is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department of Fordham University, New York. Her dissertation, “The Hospitals of Mainz: Legal Privileges and Social Functions,” examines the effects of canon law on the development of late medieval hospitals. She spent the academic year 2013-14 in Mainz as a Fulbright Scholar, doing archival research, and has presented the results of this research internationally. Her work focuses on how the legal status of medieval hospitals as religious institutions influenced the place of hospitals, including leper hospitals, in the religious and social networks of late medieval cities.

General Interest Column: Sarah Kathryn Moore on “The Interdisciplinary Advantage: Being a Medievalist in a Small Program”

26 Tuesday May 2015

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General Interest, graduate student life, interdisciplinary medieval studies

The Interdisciplinary Advantage: Being a Medievalist in a Small Program

There is no official medieval studies program at my university. Nor is there any organized certificate program; there isn’t even a university-run group or lecture series. Besides myself, there are three or four other students reading in or writing dissertations on medieval English literature (in a department with well over 100 postgraduates). In other departments, the situation is similar: two or three postgrads each in Romance languages, history, art history, music, religion. I’m not at a small school—my university is the largest in the northwestern US. I’m happy at my institution and I have a wonderful advisor, but I must admit that my first few years in the program were a struggle.

Being one of the only medievalists at a large university can be isolating. Selecting relevant coursework with an eye toward both breadth and depth, acquiring languages, navigating interdisciplinary conferences: these are challenges that my colleagues in, for example, 20th century American literature don’t have to address. I have been reduced, more than once, to figurative hair-tearing and gnashing of teeth when communicating with departmental or university representatives who don’t understand the unique challenges of my sub-field. Cross-disciplinary coursework is not encouraged by my department and language acquisition is seen by my peers in other fields as a year-long requirement to get out of the way rather than as a necessary part of their scholarship. My department’s attitude is similar, and there is no support, financial or otherwise, for school-year or summer language coursework.

As medievalists, the necessity for interdisciplinary coursework is a unique challenge. No matter our field, we must have a working knowledge in history, religion, the arts—and of course we all need multiple foreign languages. Not to mention the fact that “medieval studies” covers 1,000 years and three continents, and we’re expected (by potential employers, and others both within and outside academia) to be familiar with these vast temporal and geographical ranges.

However, this necessity can also work to our unique advantage: for one thing, we have natural allies outside our primary department. Furthermore, we’re able to neatly sidestep the ever-present academic pitfall of tunnel vision—the necessity of learning broadly as well as deeply is frustrating when not supported by our department and/or university, but it also provides us with chances for vital, informed scholarship. Moreover, it gives us ready-made opportunities for cross-disciplinary conversation and collaboration. And where the individual departments at my university can sometimes seem indifferent toward medieval studies, there are structures in place to support interdisciplinary projects.

When I decided to start a reading group for medievalists at my university, the first people I approached were my professors. I found them hugely supportive—after all, they know as well as I do what it’s like to be at an institution with a small contingent of medievalists. My advisor connected me with a new student I hadn’t met, who was eager to donate her valuable organizational (and grant-writing!) skills and her boundless enthusiasm to the project. Several professors also put me in contact with other postgraduate medievalists I hadn’t met—students who were dissertating and weren’t often on campus, for example—as well as advanced undergraduates with a strong interest in medieval studies. Some of these undergraduates are returning students with a good deal of knowledge and even publications under their belts, and many brought impressive language skills to the table as well. Once I started getting the word out (primarily via departmental email lists) I was also connected, through other students and professors, with local community members loosely affiliated with the university, many of whom had relevant postgraduate degrees and were delighted to be in touch with other medievalists. Within a year, what started as a reading group in the school library grew into an official “Graduate Interest Group” with generous funding from university’s Center for the Humanities, which also provides publicity and meeting space.

At a school with a smaller medieval studies program, one may be afforded the opportunity (or forced) to look outside the home department for support. The support I felt I lacked from my department was more than made up for in the support of other postgrads, professors, and the Center for the Humanities (whose raison d’être is to support interdisciplinary scholarship, making our alliance a win-win situation). As a medievalist in a small program, I’ve discovered that it is possible to get the support I need—financial, curricular and emotional—but I have had to be both creative and proactive in searching for it.

Sarah Kathryn Moore is a graduate student in English literature at the University of Washington in Seattle.

This essay was originally published in a slightly different version at The Venerable Read in August 2011

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