Taking stock

Thanks for the good wishes on the last post, everyone!

I missed this blog's anniversary. The year (plus a bit) that I've had this blog have been fairly momentous for me. When I started this blog, I had just come finished a job that nearly burned me out. I had a one-year contract at a different school, and I was starting to explore non-academic career options. I thought I'd make one more try on the job market and then do...something else.

That one try on the job market, though, produced interviews, and an offer. I always said I only needed one offer, as long as it was the right one, and this job is practically my ideal. So now I make a transition from a contract lecturer to a tenure-track professor. I look forward to the transition, but also find it daunting.

My original intent for this blog was to focus on my research interests, on topics related to women's monasticism in the Middle Ages. Looking back, I can see that its focus has drifted a bit, to include more discussion of teaching and of my life in academia in general. I am sure it will continue to evolve over the next year. I think chronicling the transition from contract to tenure-track may be useful, but I also expect to fold more discussion of research and writing back in. 

Thanks for reading and commenting, everyone!

Well, perhaps not quite nothing

The article I've been revising for ages was accepted. *throws confetti*

One of the things which has always struck me as distinctive about the academic life is how achievements are delayed. One works and works over a piece of writing, sends it off, and doesn't hear much until weeks or months later. By that time, ideally, one has moved on to other projects, and isn't in the same mental space any more. It seems to me to make it difficult to celebrate achievements and milestones, because the moment of doing the work and the moment of hearing its reception are so far separated.

I've got nothing

In the (nearly) two weeks since I've been back, packing has consumed my life. I don't seem to have much brain left. I have a half-finished post on my dilemmas in ordering books for next semester, but it seems pretty banal.  I have some random thoughts on organizing my books (currently almost all boxed), and I'm not sure that's worthy of a post yet. In short, posting is likely to be light for the next month or so, until I start to get settled at the other end.

Triumphant return

Was off in New State for a week. Now I'm back. If all goes well with inspection & financing, we'll have a house to live in, hurrah. I also got to see my new office, which has more-than-ample shelving. More hurrah.

Now we just have to get everything packed and ready to move in about six weeks. Yikes!

I took work with me on the trip, but ended up getting nothing done. Except, I replied to the email of a student who wanted to finish up an incomplete from three years ago. I told her/him I couldn't possibly, what with all the packing/moving/unpacking/house-buying/new-job-starting. Three years seems long to me anyway--s/he should probably just take the course over, and not with me.

Academic Moving

Today I have been sorting through the last 5-6 years' worth of notes. Since I have to pay to ship these across the country, everything unnecessary must go.

Notes relevant to research I'll keep; likewise copies of articles, which I keep either for reference or because I may assign them in a class someday.

But do I really need to keep all my printed-out class notes? When the same files are on my hard drive? I tossed the ones for classes I don't anticipate teaching in the near future (or, perhaps, ever again), but I'm undecided about the others. 

Notes for graduate classes can also be purged, I suspect, especially since I haven't really looked at most of them in ages.

Terrifying discovery: my senior thesis. I'm afraid to look at it too closely.

Edited to add:

I did throw away student evaluations of my grad school teaching. I've taught my own classes for years now, no one cares how well I led discussion sections at the age of 25. Evaluations for my own older courses may go, too--I'm undecided.

I'm calling it done

There comes a time to just declare a piece of work done.

Sure, I could revise and edit and revise and edit and revise and edit some more. At this point I'm not sure how much that would actually improve the piece.

I have a couple more references to check. Why is that I still forget to write down the page ranges of articles? I know I'm going to need them in the references.

I also need to write the letter that goes with the article responding to the reviewers.

Neither of those things should be too time-consuming, so I should get it out sometime next week.

Teaching the 14th Century

This semester I taught a  "later" medieval history survey (1000-1500), which meant that the 14th century material was sandwiched between the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, and, well, the regular Renaissance. Judging from the final essays, what students remember about the 14th century is this:

• the Black Death
• famine
• the Hundred Years' War
• the Avignon papacy and the Great Schism

We did do some other things, I swear; we read some Boccaccio and Dante, we looked at Catherine of Siena, and I think there were a few other things in there. Yet clearly, for most of them, the takeaway from this century is death, corruption, and more death. 

The problem I have with this is not so much that their impression is incorrect as that it seems...incomplete. It leaves out a lot of interesting phenomena, such as lay literacy and devotion, and ignores that we can know a lot more about the lives of peasants and artisans from this period than about members of the same social groups in earlier centuries. One of the things I tried to do in this survey was show the complexities of events, and I think I succeeded with some portions of the course. We discussed problems with the idea of "renaissance," for example, and I think we managed a complex, multidimensional examination of the 12th and 15th centuries, and perhaps even the 13th.

Yet somehow, it seems very difficult to convey the complexity of the 14th century--or at least, very difficult to do so in the two or three weeks allocated to it in this survey. Any attempts I made to get beyond the Great Catastrophes of the 14th century just didn't sink in. Perhaps the spell of famine, plague, war, and death is just too difficult to break.

At present, I can easily imagine an upper-level seminar on the 14th century: that could be a great course, with the opportunity to really delve into some rich materials and explore the connections between everything that's going on in that period. But I'm still not sure how I would boil that century down into a concise unit without having the same results I saw this semester.