Clio's Disciple

Medieval survey revamp, part 3

2012-01-03T14:57:00.003-05:00

Christmas and New Year's were both relatively quiet round these parts. Now I have a little time to sort out upcoming classes, which brings me back to my revamped medieval history survey.

I teach both a medieval and an early modern survey (and, in fact, I'm teaching both in the spring). For some reason, the early modern survey has always been easier for me to teach, even though (or because?) the Middle Ages is really my specialty. It has just always seemed easier to find cohesive themes for the early modern course. I've taught the medieval course something like 10 times, half of them at this institution, and I've made significant changes nearly every time.

I discussed earlier stages of my thoughts on this revamp here and here. Ultimately, I decided to keep the reader I've been using, in combination with another primary source reader and two longer primary sources. (One of these will be the Song of Roland, because it's been too long since I've taught it.) We won't be reading all of either reader, but we'll be reading substantial pieces of both. The textbook is going to become an optional purchase, in the full awareness that most students will, therefore, opt not to purchase it. My hope is that, though I will need to lecture more often, that the lectures will allow me to establish my own narrative more clearly

As for written assignments, I'm planning to include some short skill-building assignments along with a couple of longer essays. I used a very minor research assignment in a fall class that I liked--basically, it requires students to look up something from a day's reading assignment in a few other sources (both print and online), and write up a brief version of what they learned along with an evaluation of the sources they used. Other assignments will focus on close reading of primary sources. I also regularly do a map quiz. A lot of American students know very little about modern European geography, let alone where regions like Burgundy are/were. Grades on the quiz are nearly always bimodal: students who studied get A's, students who didn't do very poorly. Hm, it occurs to me that students who did acquire the textbook may have an advantage since it has maps. I'll give the others a list of atlases to check.

Might need some more monks in this syllabus

2011-12-16T15:11:00.004-05:00

I have a bit of an academic lull before final papers come in. So I was just doing some planning for spring classes.

I only realize now that I've arranged my workload rather oddly. This fall I've taught a first-year seminar (capped at 15) and two upper-level classes (each with about 12 students each). In the spring I'll be teaching one upper-level class (quite small) and two introductory ones, each of those with 25 students. I think I'm going to be doing a lot more grading in the spring than this fall.

The spring upper-level course is on medieval monasticism. And may be the only time I'll ever teach it, since the enrollment is pretty low. It's such a pleasure to put together a course where I actually have a deep knowledge base. However, I did realize as I put a tentative reading list together that most of the secondary scholarship I included is about nuns. Now, in my course on monasticism, nuns are not going to get just a day or a week on the syllabus, but are going to get integrated into our discussions of every development in monasticism. And most of the primary sources are by and for monks, so men are not going to be neglected. Still, a bit more scholarship on the monks and friars would probably be wise.

Portrait of an institution

2011-11-05T23:20:00.004-04:00

This is a response to Historiann's post calling for more detailed discussions of particular higher ed environments. Notorious, Ph.D. has already responded with a wonderful post on what the real problem with higher ed is, and Dr. Crazy has also responded with a great post on failure. Both of those posts are much better than this one, so I'd recommend you go read them.

I' m getting to this a little late, and so I'm trying to figure out what there is for me to say. And what I'd like to do here is talk about what things look like on the ground at my particular college. Institutions like mine don't often feature in the discussion of What's Wrong with Higher Education. The challenge, for me, is figuring out where to start, and how to be both detailed and succinct without giving too much away. (I realize my pseudonymity is pretty thin, but I'd like to hang onto it while I'm still untenured, thanks.)

Let's start with some basics.

I teach at a small private college in the Midwest. We draw our students primarily, but not exclusively, from the Midwest; we also get a certain number of students from all over the country, and a growing number of students from overseas. We have a compact, pretty campus, and a small, generally dedicated body of faculty, staff, and administrators.

Our biggest problem is money. Or, more precisely, the lack thereof.

Some private colleges have large endowments and lots of resources. We do not. Our endowment is small, and so most of our annual income comes from tuition. We also offer substantial amounts of financial aid to attract the students we want, and there is constant tension surrounding the issues of tuition increases and financial aid. Our limited financial resources affect the campus in all sorts of ways. Compensation and benefits, replacing departed employees, the ability of students to print and photocopy materials, books, lab equipement, building maintenance, and on and on. Most, if not all, of the fat has already been cut from the budget. Many staff members are doing what used to be the jobs of multiple people. Every request to replace a departing faculty member gets closely scrutinized; and in most cases, failing to replace a departing faculty member would mean a mortal wound to the corresponding department and its majors. We have dilapidated dorms, classrooms, and athletic facilities. We have nice, recently-built or renovated buildings as well, but the financial strain shows in the physical appearance of the campus.

More nebulous is the psychological weight. But the knowledge of our financial limitations has its own cost: in morale, in general anxiety, in distrust between faculty and administrators, in a certain cramping of ambitions that we know are not financially realistic.

But within our constraints, we try to give our students the intense, stimulating liberal arts experience that we think they came here for. They have small classes, a fairly traditional curriculum, individual attention from their professors, and opportunities to do advanced work, internships, and various special projects. If they choose to take advantage of them. We have some fabulous students, and many who are, perhaps, a little less fabulous, but who work hard and put in the time and find niches in which they shine.

There are also students, though, who don't take advantage of their opportunities. As part of my college service, I sit on the committee that applies sanctions to students who are struggling academically. And there the comments we get from instructors are remarkably consistent: students who miss class, who don't turn in papers, who don't respond to the professors' attempts to reach them. This is not a large university; these students are not getting lost in the crowd. They are, for some reason, not taking advantage of the attention and support they can get at this small institution. (Maybe they don't want that attention, who knows.)

And here's where things circle back around to money. A question facing my institution now is whether, and how, we can get out of our financial bind. Do we increase our endowment, find some wealthy philanthropists to cultivate? (We'd undoubtedly have to spend money on the effort.) Do we bring in more students, thus bringing in more tuition? (We'd have to spend money to do that, as we'd rapidly need more faculty, more dorms, and more classrooms.) Can we bring in more students without compromising our academic standards? Does it do anyone any good for us to admit students who might be able to pay, but who may not be able to meet their professors' expectations?

So, one view from the trenches. Our problems are not faculty who do research instead of teach, or graduate students that we exploit as teachers, or big time athletics that suck money and energy away from our academic mission. Our problems are lack of resources, dependence on tuition, and worries about how we handle our weaker students.

Medieval survey revamp, part 2

2011-09-24T12:26:00.005-04:00

If I had a camera, I'd take a picture of my desk. It is covered in a pile of Penguin Classics, source collections, and other stuff. I pulled off the shelf just about every book that seemed possibly appropriate for a 100-level medieval history survey. Following the suggestion of Dr. Notorious, I made a list of themes, and jotted down both short and long sources that I'd like to teach related to those themes. One thing that became clear as I did this is how strongly this list deviates from what I've been teaching in this course. It is definitely time to freshen up the reading list (and probably the assignments). Of course, I've made a list of possible readings that is longer than I think the students can actually manage, so it'll need a bit of winnowing down.

Revamping the medieval survey

2011-09-19T13:04:00.002-04:00

A couple of weeks into the new school year, I seem to have adjusted. For the first week or so, I felt keyed up all the time and wasn't sleeping that well. Now I seem to be back into the rhythm.

I have a class full of first-year students who are charmingly fresh and eager. I'm trying out some new assignments, although I'm already finding that some of them work better than others. The information literacy exercise I've asked them to do seems to work well, for example.

Because the bookstore is bugging me for book orders, I'm thinking again about my medieval survey course. I've now taught it three times here, and I've never been quite satisfied with it. I feel bored by the textbook and overly constrained by the reader. I find myself thinking about the equivalent course I took as an undergrad.

My undergrad medieval history professor (later my advisor) had a signature approach. He didn't use a regular textbook, per se, and didn't lecture. (Somehow I learned the dates of things anyway, but I don't quite remember when and how.) Our reading included some long primary sources, and packets of shorter sources put together by him. He organized the class around a series of polarizing questions, and forced us into arguing with each other. (His favorite rhetorical tactic in class was this: "So, John, [sums up what student just said], is that right? So you're saying that what Jane said earlier was wrong. Jane, do you have a response to that?") The essay prompts were, similarly, questions with yes-or-no answers that forced students to pick a side and state a thesis.

I've never quite been able to emulate his "pit them against each other" style of discussion leadership. But I do find myself seriously considering moving away from the books I've been using, ditching my usual reader, and trying to come up with a set of readings I (and, I hope, my students) will find more inspiring.

Time to face the music

2011-08-10T14:22:00.004-04:00

Ugh. It's August, and what's more it's August 16, so I can't even pretend it's "the beginning of August" any more. It's time to prepare classes and get some things accomplished before class starts. I am clearly not the only one feeling this way.

I've gotten remarkably little done this summer. I've worked, desultorily, on a planned article, and it's being a pain to write. There needs to be a certain amount of narrative, as there is no reason whatsoever any potential reader should be familiar with these events... but working in analysis and actual arguments with the narrative is something of a problem.

I'm generating a bunch of ideas for classes and syllabi, and am slowly starting to pull them together into real, coherent class plans.

The rest of the summer to-do list has barely been touched.

So things are; I am trying to avoid the classic academic's spiral of guilt that I have not read enough-written enough-revised enough-anything enough and get on with the business of actually doing something.

Summer to-do list

2011-06-20T10:45:00.003-04:00

I am at home and done with major travel for the summer, after taking some time for conference and social time. There are a couple more trips on the horizon, but only short ones. My cats should be grateful.

So the time has come to figure out what needs to be done this summer. Here's the list I've come up with, in no particular priority order:

Writing Stuff

Look over book manuscript and helpful people's comments

Figure out how to revise / whether to keep it as book or slice into articles

Revise recent conference paper

Work on article idea (pulled together from two different conference papers and recent research stuff)

Correspond with various people regarding another project

Teaching Stuff

Think about tweaking survey classes, especially assignments (fall one a priority)

Think about tweaking upper-level course that's a repeat

Make a plan for upper-level course that's new

Order books for fall classes (should happen real soon now)

That's all leaving aside stuff to be done around the house and yard, of course, as well as anything else I do to stay sane this summer. It seems like more than enough to keep me off the streets and out of trouble.

Summer at last

2011-05-30T11:39:00.002-04:00

Ahhhh... (that was a big sigh of relief)... I am finally done with this academic year. Commencement was last Saturday, and I only finished up with grading yesterday (due partially to IT problems that were not under my control--the less said about those, the better).

Now I need to figure out what to do with myself.

I feel as though I've been running at top speed since about mid-March, and certainly some of the things I need to do now are slow down, catch my breath, and catch up with all the various non-work-related things I have shoved to the side in the last two months.

In the short term, "what to do with myself" is pretty straightforward: I'll be leaving home toward the end of this week and go on a road trip. It is mostly vacation, but will also include a trip to the Berks conference, where I will give a paper that I'm trying to convince myself is not shoddy and slapdash.

After that, then what? There seem to be quite a few things I should be working on this summer, and I need to start just by sorting out what they are. I have thought about joining this writing group, but at the moment I feel very reluctant to commit to a particular one of the several things I could be / should be working on. Plus, I'll be out of town for the first couple weeks of this group. I'll see if I can sort something out in the next few days, I suppose.

More on adjuncting and "inside candidates"

2011-04-19T18:04:00.003-04:00

Wow. It's been so long since I posted here that I'd almost forgotten I had a blog.

But a friend asked me for my opinions on this post, and when I sent an email response, encouraged me to post the response here.

I've already discussed my experience of adjunct teaching here (just about a year ago!). Short version: I spent six years in contingent faculty positions, exactly the same amount of time I spent in graduate school. I've now spent not quite two years on the tenure track.

So one thing I noticed about the responses to Tenured Radical's post was that a lot of people reacted very strongly to the advice about moving. She did say that you should move for a full-time position, and I'd tend to agree. I moved hundreds of miles for my first, one-year visiting appointment, and then hundreds of miles again when that job ended. And you know what? It wasn't that bad. Moving itself was a hassle, but I experienced a different part of the country, I made some new friends, and I got some valuable professional experience. For me, it was also very useful to get out of Grad School City, where I'd gotten fed up with the frustrations of grad school and had gotten into kind of a social rut. I kept in touch with friends through email and phone calls, as I do now.

However, I'd never advise anyone to uproot themselves for a part-time, poorly-paid, "teach one or two courses a semester" kind of job.

The part of the advice I really want to agree with is the part about not assuming that you will be ideally positioned when a tenure-track line opens up in that department. Indeed, don't put much faith in senior colleagues who tell you that, and try not to convince yourself of it, either. It's easy to do. When I got that first visiting job, I knew that they planned to make a t-t hire in my area the next year. I tried so hard to show that I fit in; I tried to act as if I were on a year-long interview process. I worked my tail off teaching my own classes for the first time, going to conferences, and meeting with students. And then they hired somebody else.

So I packed my bags and moved back across the country to the next job, and a few years later I was in the same position, having a temporary job at a department that was hiring in my area. I had good teaching evaluations; I wasn't a research star, but I had some publications; and once again they hired someone else.

I looked in on the job wiki a couple of times at the height of hiring season, and I still see job candidates convinced that the person on the one- or two-year hire has the inside track. In my experience, that's really, really not the case. Things have worked out okay for me in the end; I think the job I have is a better fit for me than either of the ones I didn't get, but it was really difficult for a while there.

Accomplishments of the last few weeks

2011-02-06T17:52:00.002-05:00

I have graded so many papers that I lost count.

I have evaluated and ranked students for various award opportunities.

I recommended that my independent study student read Judith Bennett's History Matters, and was delighted to find that she loved it.

An Interdisciplinary Major

2011-01-22T10:39:00.002-05:00

Although my college is small, it does have a major in medieval and Renaissance studies. As I'm getting settled in here in my second year, students are increasingly coming to ask me about the major, so I've had to get familiar with its requirements.

And its requirements are a little odd. That may have to do with the program's history--it seems to have been somebody's pet program, years and years ago, before being taken over by a committee. One of the oddities is that students have to jump a bunch of hurdles. They can't simply declare the major, but have to write a proposal explaining their course selections and outlining their capstone project, even though as sophomores they're 12 to 18 months away from doing that capstone project.

The major is also explicitly designed to be interdisciplinary. They have to take medieval-ish courses from at least four disciplines, and can't have too many from any one department. The problem is, we're so small that some of those courses aren't taught very often. It is easy for students to get courses in English and history; the courses in religion and music and art history and philosophy are harder to fit into their schedules.

On the one hand, because prospective majors have to go through some hassles and plan carefully, they tend to be good, organized, and highly motivated. Thumbs up! On the other hand, the difficulty of setting up the major certainly discourages some people, and places a burden on even highly motivated students. There's one student who's taken a slew of courses in history and English lit and a couple in art history. However, s/he still needs a course from a fourth discipline, and fitting it into his/her schedule is being harder than it ought to be. Just how interdisciplinary does this major have to be, anyway? Might it be time to think about revising the major requirements?

Curriculum angst

2011-01-09T15:21:00.004-05:00

I started and abandoned several posts in the last month. I hope to post a little more often this year, but we shall see.

I am teaching an advanced topics course next year and have not yet decided the topic. Now I'm down to the wire, to the point where the registrar is calling me at my office to tell me to get them the description. I have gone round and round about this course and overthought it just about every way I could overthink it.

I have had a lot of ideas for courses I could teach. A lot of them, although interesting subjects, are ones that I don't have the clearest idea how I'd teach. That is, I don't have a great sense of what questions or problems I'd organize the course around, and in most cases that would require me to do quite a bit of work to get up to speed on the scholarship in the area before I'd feel confident that I could do a good job teaching the course. If I felt a great and burning passion to teach a particular subject, I'd go for that, but I don't. Since I've already had opportunities to develop and teach advanced topical courses here, I've "used up" the ideas I once felt most intense about.

So in picking a subject, I'm trying to balance my interest in a topic against how much work it would take to prepare. I'm also worried about student interest. My courses have, by and large, drawn a lot of students, but this worry pushes me a bit toward "sexier" sounding courses. Unfortunately, those are often not the ones I feel best prepared to teach.

Finally, thinking about next year's courses forces me to think about my longer-term teaching plans. I teach 6 courses a year; half of those are bread-and-butter survey classes. So I have 3 upper-level courses a year to play around with. I want to have courses I repeat regularly, but I also want to have the freedom to introduce new topics as they interest me, and balancing the two gets tricky very quickly.

After spending weeks toying with one course idea after another, sketching out a five-year plan, feeling disgruntled with the five-year plan, worrying about how to balance my teaching among introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses, I throw up my hands. I think I'll propose a course on monasticism in the Middle Ages. It's... wait for it... actually my area of expertise, unlike 90% of the ideas I've come up with, and I already have a fairly strong idea of what sort of readings I'd assign. I do worry about how to sell it to students--but on the other hand, religious studies courses at my school are pretty well attended, so that might not be as difficult as I fear.

If you actually read through all that, thanks. If you're faculty, how do you decide what courses to teach? How much freedom do you have to make that decision? Have I missed some ways I could have agonized about and overthought this decision?

Recommendation season

2010-12-01T14:31:00.002-05:00

I have had several talks lately with students considering graduate school. All of these students are pretty savvy, and I can tell when I start in with the spiel about the job market, etc., that this is not the first time they've heard of such a thing. Some of them have decided not to apply for next year, after all.

More awkward is the case of a student applying for a program in Not My Field, who nonetheless asked me for a letter. There is no major in Not My Field here at Small College (I doubt there is at very many small colleges, in fact); student has, I think, a double major in history and Field Related to Not My Field. So I've agreed to write the letter, and I can talk about the student's general intellectual qualities and work ethic, but it's definitely harder to talk with confidence about what the student can contribute to NMF, since I don't know it that well. I also worry that the student is operating at a disadvantage without a major in NMF--the student also seems pretty nervous. So I'll just write the best letter I can, and try to consult with student about a plan B if things don't go as hoped.

Observations of the last three weeks

2010-11-13T16:35:00.003-05:00

I am supposed to be grading papers this weekend. But I had my students turn in their papers via an online system, which appears to be down.

Several of my advisees are lovely, poised individuals who have been a breeze to advise. Others have mysteriously vanished and missed key moments of the registration process.

My students have all been sick, and I fear I'm only narrowly avoiding getting sick myself.

Next week my file comes up for reappointment review.

More later.

2010-10-25T19:30:00.002-04:00

I'm back from my research trip, and back at work. It's vaguely surreal to be back in the office and classroom.

Also, I am advising, and some of students have proposed schedules that are sadly delusional. No, you should not sign up for multivariable calculus if you have only taken high school algebra II.

Now here's a bad nun for you

2010-10-15T09:08:00.002-04:00

When I'm transcribing documents I tend to get in kind of a flow, where I am making sure what I'm writing down are actual words, but I'm not really processing the content very closely. The other day I was rolling along typing in this manner, listing off the various accusations against a particular prioress, when it suddenly sank in that the word I was just typing was "interfecit."

I stopped and took a closer look. Yes, indeed, the accusation was that this prioress had killed another nun. The hell? Now, there's not a lot of detail here, so it's not clear whether we're talking premeditated murder or accidental death. Said prioress had also apparently given birth at her nunnery. The bishop's wrath can be imagined. Understandably enough, he had his bailiff lock up the errant prioress. And then things took an interesting turn.

A local miles, evidently a cousin of the imprisoned prioress, rode to her rescue. Not alone, but with a troop of armed followers. The bishop complains that they rode up on horseback shouting and raising a terrible fuss. Though he also complains of their violence, it's not clear whether they actually fought with the bishop's guards, or whether the bailiff turned the prioress over in response to their intimidation (the bishop doesn't seem too happy with the bailiff, either, which inclines me toward the latter conclusion).

There are several letters about the incident, as the bishop excommunicated the prioress and the miles and repeatedly begged various authorities to turn them in. One letter names around twenty individuals also excommunicated, these presumably constituting the armed troop. Some of those men share surnames with the prioress, others with the miles, suggesting that we're looking at an extended family group.

As is so often the case, I have no idea at the moment what the outcome was. Nor do I have any real idea what to do with it, other than post the incident for your entertainment.

Bookworm damage

2010-10-14T15:12:00.000-04:00

is the pits.

The phrase I've been typing most often lately

2010-10-13T14:24:00.002-04:00

(aside from basic opening and dating formulae):

in virtute sancte obediencie, et sub pena excommunis

I wish I could credibly put the same thing on my syllabi:

in virtue of holy obedience, and under penalty of excommunication, we order that you turn in your work on time and do not plagiarize, students!

Notes from the archives

2010-10-06T15:48:00.003-04:00

I'm writing from an undisclosed location in the land of research. And I was just fondly remembering back before I got my (now not-so-new) job, when I actually used to talk about the subjects of my research on this blog. Ahhh.

I've been looking at a register of episcopal letters to see what sorts of letters the bishops sent to nuns. Some observations I found interesting:

--Usually the bishops write in Latin, but when writing to nuns (and some lay men and women) they often use the vernacular instead.

--In the case of one community, when the bishop writes to a particular nun in that house, he writes in Latin, but when writing to the nuns collectively, he writes in the vernacular.

Further, I think the register may actually be the originals of the letters. There are emendations in the text (words crossed out, others added in the margins) which suggests to me that a clean copy was made to send off afterward, rather than the register being a copy of a letter composed separately.

A few letters deal with disciplinary issues, which the bishop says are very scandalous. I find it interesting that those letters have a LOT of emendations. Dare I think this suggests some emotion on the author's part--agitation or anger at the scandalous behavior, perhaps?

The content of the letters is interesting, too, but I need more time to ponder it.

Not all of us were here then

2010-09-22T18:56:00.004-04:00

I have started and abandoned several posts over the last couple of weeks. I would like to talk about some of my new responsibilities as a second-year faculty member, by way of continuing to chronicle my journey from contingent to tenure-track faculty. These things feel difficult to talk about, though. Even pseudonymous, I have a hard time figuring out what conversations with advisees / committees / whatnot should be best kept private, and I have been erring on the side of "private."

There is a discourse on campus, though, that I find vexing as a new faculty member. Our campus is the midst of discussing some large-scale curricular changes. There is a lot of anxiety about whether the current proposed changes will pass, and what the consequences of that will be, both from supporters and critics of the proposal. Although the current proposal was put together just last year, the original movement for curricular change started several years ago, in the days of Legendary Committee. The thing I find vexing is that many faculty who have been here longer speak about the changes as if all of us are familiar with the work of Legendary Committee, and as if the discussion held at that time about the college's curricular goals is now set in stone. "Well, the goals of this proposal came out of the Legendary Committee report," they will explain. "At the time of Legendary Committee, we all agreed on X, so surely we must still agree on X now?" There are a lot of assumptions that everyone remembers the long process that has led up to this moment.

Not so. I was one of several new faculty last year. There were several the year before that, and several more the year before that, and so forth. There are quite a few new faculty this year. All together, that represents a sizable minority of the entire faculty who were not involved in the Legendary Committee discussions, and who may bring different ideas and expectations to the table. The faculty does not actually exist in a fixed, unchanging state, where a consensus established at one moment can be expected to endure forever.

End of the week

2010-08-29T11:28:00.003-04:00

Well, it was less "easing in" than I'd hoped. The processing and welcoming of new students (and bidding farewell to their parents) went off fine, but registering the new students teetered on the brink of disaster all week. Our online registration system is clunky and difficult at the best of times, and this time it kept refusing to recognize new students as first-years, which meant it wouldn't register them for their required first-year courses. Argh. It is not a good thing when your college's registrar has to send emails titled "Don't panic!" in the middle of registration. I had enough to do trying to keep track of my advisees' interests, AP credits, and the like, without also having to fight the software.

On the other hand, the prospect of starting class on Monday does indeed seem like a breeze, in contrast.

Easing in

2010-08-23T12:28:00.003-04:00

Class doesn't start for me until next week, but I'm going to have to be on campus every day this week. Faculty at SLAC are expected to attend opening receptions and new student orientation activities--we all got recruited to either lead a discussion on the campus's common reading or give a mini-lecture that gives them a taste of teaching. As a new advisor, I have an advising workshop to go to, and then I need to meet with my crew of new advisees and get them registered for fall classes.

This is maybe more involvement with new-student stuff than faculty have at larger institutions, no? But this is part of the atmosphere SLAC sells itself on. I'm actually hopeful that it will be a good way to get myself more used to a structured routine. I have been spending the summer sleeping late and having very unstructured time, and I need to get used to getting up earlier and paying attention to what time it is.

Belfry house

2010-08-16T12:17:00.004-04:00

My house does not have a belfry, but it is a big old house, and it does have bats, apparently.

Let me first say that I am a squeamish person, I don't like being around wildlife, and the bats make me panic quite enough as it is. When we first encountered bats in the house, I posted about it on facebook, at which point a good half dozen of my friends started posting panicky comments about rabies! and omg what if they bit you! So if you are squeamish and panicky about bats yourself, please do not read any further; I really don't need my own paranoia fed by yours. I am posting here because I need to vent a little, and my real-life friends mostly don't read here and so won't hassle me about the bats later. OK?

We found two bats in the house back in May. One was dead when we first saw it. The other I found alive, when I was at home alone; I wigged out, shut up the room it was in, and by the time my partner (henceforth, Batcatcher) came home (24 hours later) it was dead. Then we didn't see any for several weeks. In late July we found a couple more dead ones, all intact, lying on the floor. Our best guess is that one of our cats nabbed them (probably during the day, when they were sleepy and slow-moving) and abandoned them when they were no longer moving.

The exciting new wrinkle of the last few days is that we started finding them live. We went up to our TV room, which is in our finished attic, and as soon as we turned the lights on a bat started flying around. We have rigged a catching device out of a pillowcase and a wire coat hanger. Batcatcher nabs them in this improvised net, holds the pillowcase closed, takes them outside, and releases them. Three live bats in the last three nights. (we hope it isn't the same bat over and over again, sigh) It seems like time to call in professionals to see if they can figure out where the bats are getting in and stop them...

On being a hedgehog

2010-08-06T12:09:00.004-04:00

This is written in response to Notorious, PhD's recent series on being a scholarly fox vs. hedgehog, at Notorious's suggestion, in fact. Those posts elicited numerous comments on the joys of fox-ness, and she thought perhaps I might be better placed to offer a defense, or praise, of the hedgehog. On reflection, I'm not sure if this adds up to either defense or praise, but I can talk about what being a hedgehog feels like to me.

My scholarly interests focus on certain key themes. I'm interested in women, religion, and community, and in a particular region, at that. That is, I'm interested in how religious women formed communities; how religious women engaged with the surrounding community; and how community norms shaped women's religious experiences. My research started with a particular cache of documents, all related to a single institution.

From that starting point, my research has pushed outward in different directions. I have looked at institutions of different religious orders and in different cities, and have looked at both vowed nuns and lay women. One paper took me into the heady specialty of liturgiology; I'm now attempting to explore the roles of lay servants at monasteries. In general, interesting sources have led me in these varying directions, and each has required me to get familiar with different scholarship and resources.

I still consider myself a hedgehog, however, because all the various papers and small projects I've pursued stem from the same coherent core of interests. I keep a running list of research questions I'd like to pursue at some point, which currently fills a whole page, single-spaced, and all fit into the same core interests of women, religion, and community (and for the most part, stick to the same region). I don't feel constrained or pressured to stay in my patch, as some of the fox commenters seem to; these are the questions that come to me naturally, and they could occupy me for years to come.

I think my job at a small liberal arts college suits my hedgehogging, in a couple of ways.

1) As I am the only medievalist, I must teach widely (in fact, I teach early modern history as well), so I get opportunities to exercise broader interests in my teaching. I taught a seminar involving persecution and the inquisition, for example, which I love to teach, but have no interest in researching.

2) My college has limited research expectations for tenure. Since our teaching load is intense, I call this sane, although I think some of my fellow young faculty see it as a failure of ambition. Perhaps, but to me it also indicates that I have freedom to work on what I like, without having to publish it in Sufficiently Impressive Venues.

As I said in a comment at Dr. N's, I am still early in my career. My first book is still a work in progress, and there may come a day when I wake up and decided I have nothing more to say about religious women and community. Perhaps on that day I will become a fox.

But I think my final note is that the fox-hedgehog binary, like so many others, is ultimately a matter of perspective. I commented to Notorious that I think of my advisor as a fox (er... in this scholarly-metaphorical sense), while she thinks of him as a hedgehog. I don't want to make too much of this perceived divide, therefore; surely the reality is a spectrum of interests and approaches which varies for each individual.

Wait...

2010-08-06T12:01:00.002-04:00

How did it get to be August? Where did the time go?

My summer goals have met with decidedly mixed success. I've made progress on preparing new courses and preparing for my fall review, but not so much with the writing. I may still be able to get some writing in before class starts...but that's only three weeks off... so we'll see how much I can accomplish.

I am not entirely happy with my lack of productivity this summer, but I think the reality is that I needed a break. To review, in the last year, I bought a house, moved halfway across the country, started a new tenure-track job, gave papers at two conferences, and experienced my father's death. This summer has been, if not productive, a valuable time for rest and renewal.

Summer projects

2010-06-24T16:03:00.003-04:00

So one of my summer projects (one for which the college is actually paying me, hurrah) is to get up to speed on Crusades scholarship for a course I'm teaching in the fall.

There is a lot of Crusades scholarship, folks. Hoo boy. I ordered a huge stack of books which I'm now skimming. Some I'll assign for class, and others I'll order for the library, whose collection in this area is not very current.

When I started this reading, I had only a vague idea of what I wanted to do with this class, and the process of reading has sharpened my ideas considerably. I have rejected several books for class assignments as being, to me, "too magisterial." I want my students to get a handle on what happened, but I don't want them to be too influenced by a single narrative that proclaims This Is What Happened. I am much more drawn to books that explain differing interpretations, that talk explicitly about how they handle sources, and that don't pretend to be the single definitive account of events.

I've winnowed my giant pile into rejects and books I want to take a second, closer look at. I'd also welcome suggestions.

The first year on the tenure track

2010-06-02T11:26:00.002-04:00

So, I have finished my first year on the tenure track. I am taking stock a bit, and figuring out how it feels to have passed this milestone.

Last fall I was struggling a bit to feel differently about this job than the one-year positions I've had for the last few years. (I wrote a bit about that here and here.) At some point, when I wasn't really paying attention, I found that I had successfully transitioned. On some level, I have recognized that I have committed to this place. In fact, I have had to restrain myself from worrying too much about proposed curriculum and policy changes.

In a lot of ways, I am glad to have had experience working at other schools before starting on the tenure track here. In my very first (visiting) job out of grad school, I encountered faculty politics that were contentious and a little dysfunctional. That has given me a better idea of what to look for. I have spent much of the past year observing politics here, as well as the quirks of faculty governance, and I think I'm developing the ability to hear what lies behind apparently innocuous comments made in faculty meetings. My senior colleagues have, I think, been a good guide for me.

My classes generally had good enrollments, except for one which was cancelled. I'm writing that one off as a fluke, as my preregistrations for next year also look good. I think I was more relaxed about fitting in with college norms in the spring, so I hope I'm getting adjusted.

I didn't get a ton of writing done this year, but I did give two conference papers, so I think I'm doing all right on the research front.

Next year will bring a considerable change in my responsibilities, since I'll have advisees and committee work. But I think I feel ready, more or less, for this new work.

Commenced!

2010-05-30T10:28:00.003-04:00

I went to commencement yesterday, the first time I have attended commencement as a faculty member, and the first time I wore my fancy new regalia.

It was a simple, lovely ceremony. Working at SLAC = small graduating class = shorter ceremony. I don't know many of the new graduates very well, so I didn't have to stick around long afterwards for the family meet & greet.

Now my obligations as a faculty member are basically done. I'm getting together with my faculty mentor next week to talk over my first year and next year's review. I'm torn between wanting to take it easy for a week and wanting to start getting the things on my summer list done.

Unfortunately, it already feels like summer. It's been hot, sunny, and humid 'round here. The house a/c unit needs repair, so we're making do with fans. (Unfortunately, my office at work isn't any better.) And the baby tomatoes I planted are wilting in the sun. :( I'm trying to remind myself that the entire garden was an experiment, so it should not be a surprise if not everything flourishes.

Almost summer

2010-05-26T18:06:00.002-04:00

I am not counting time as part of "summer" until after commencement this Saturday.

But I find that I am somehow, amazingly, almost done. Classes are over. Most of the grading is accomplished. I am waiting on a few late assignments before I submit grades.

Here, therefore, some summer goals (just the academic ones, there are others regarding yard, social life, etc.):

1) Earn my summer stipend by ordering and reading materials and making plans for my fall course on the Crusades.
2) Look over my old conference papers and prepare an article to submit by the end of the summer.
3) Look at my book manuscript, figure out what revisions it needs, and begin work on them.
4) Make plans for a research trip in the fall.
5) Make plans for my other new courses next year, plus start putting materials together for my review. (My school does a 2nd-year review and another in the 4th year.)

Kalamazoo

2010-05-19T13:37:00.003-04:00

I have not that much to report, really. I went, I zooed, I returned. I was a little disappointed by the lack of papers and books for sale that might be pertinent to my research. I gave my paper, which went fine. I had many lovely meals and meetings with many lovely people. I made a couple of contacts I hope to follow up with. I dragged my spouse along, and he claims to have had a good time as well.

And now, if you'll pardon me, I have a week of classes left and a stack of papers to grade.

Almost on my way

2010-05-12T15:45:00.003-04:00

Kalamazoo paper is done, and may even not be crap! I also made a handout, and managed to fit it onto front/back of one page. Yee ha! I should be arriving Thursday evening. I'm looking forward to being away for a little while.

So this should be a busy month then

2010-05-06T09:21:00.001-04:00

I've got three full weeks of class left. I'm hoping my senior students can hang in there and avoid the plague of senioritis.

I've also got an extremely short turnaround between the end of class and submitting senior grades.

I worked on my Kalamazoo paper yesterday. I'm kind of concerned that it may be crap at this point, but at least it's 75% done crap.

The weekend after Kalamazoo, my in-laws are coming for a visit.

Contingent Teaching Baggage

2010-04-30T09:34:00.004-04:00

OK, I lied. I didn't get to this post last week. Judging by the absence of response to the previous post, none of you were waiting with bated breath for this post anyway. At any rate, here it is.

So when I left off, I was accepting a visiting position in a distant state while still ABD. I then finished my dissertation very quickly. It had taken me some large number of months of work to turn out two chapters, and I finished the remaining chapters (three or four, I don't want to look up how many right now) in about four months. In retrospect, the diss would have benefited from some more time and thought, I think, but I knew I wouldn't be able to work on it while preparing new courses from scratch.

Thus began my six years of contingent teaching, in which I had five different teaching jobs. Some were actually full-time, others were one course. If there are any graduate students out there reading this to get a sense of what things could be like, I feel that I should stress that I was extremely lucky in at least two respects:
1) I spent a while living in a place where many colleges had phenomenally good adjunct pay. Most schools do not pay more than $1500-2000, and I often did much better than that.
2) I have a spouse whose full-time salary and health plan meant I did not have to go without groceries or medical care.

Since I worked at a number of different colleges in somewhat different capacities, my experiences were fairly varied. At some places, I felt pretty well integrated into the department; at others, my office was isolated in a different part of campus, and I hardly saw anyone else from history. At some, I shared an office; at others, I had space to myself. One of the positive aspects of these experiences is that I had the opportunity to see how different colleges and departments work. A lot of my colleagues at my current institution have never worked anywhere else, and I think I have a broader perspective on how higher education works.

A second positive aspect is that I gained a lot of experience. When I finished graduate school, I was rather raw in some respects. I had never taught my own course and I had no publications. That first year, in particular, was something of a crash course (experiential) in teaching. I also did two conference papers that year and started preparing an article for journal submission. In my various jobs, I got a lot of practice prepping new courses, and a lot of opportunities to observe faculty politics. These things have enabled me to step into my current tenure-track position more easily than I moved into my first post-grad-school job.

Things that sucked:
There were quite a few, but I'm going to highlight just three, I think.

Very little mentoring. New t-t faculty may get formal mentors; new contingent faculty, not so much. I corresponded with my grad school advisors, but couldn't have one-on-one meetings. I had to figure out a lot of things about teaching, publication, etc., more or less on my own. I asked for advice, and did often get it; but I had to form relationships and ask for help on my own initiative.
Double job searches. I spent much of every fall preparing applications for the tenure-track job market. I spent much of the spring making lists of colleges in my area, phoning people, and mailing off copies of my c.v. This was a successful strategy, which did get me hired on several occasions, but it took a lot of time and a heavy emotional toll.
Feeling like my life was on hold. It was hard to make plans more than a few months ahead. I avoided making commitments in the area where I lived, because I thought I might be moving in a few months. I seldom had the right combination of money and available time to do more research (again, I often couldn't plan on a summer research trip, because I might need to relocate...). I often felt socially isolated, and I wish I had been more open to developing relationships while living in places I thought of as temporary.

Graduate school baggage

2010-04-19T11:29:00.004-04:00

When bloggy discussion turns to graduate education, I feel myself to be in an odd position. I am newly come to the tenure track. My institution gives only bachelor's degrees, so I have no role in preparing graduate students. I do, however, need to figure out how best to prepare my students for graduate school, should they choose to go (and whether to encourage or discourage them, etc.). I have opinions on graduate education, based on my graduate school experience. Reading the recent posts here, here, and here have led me to some musing on that baggage, as well as my several years on the gypsy track before starting my current t-t position.

Graduate school difficulties
The things that made my grad school experience difficult fall into two categories. One is that the graduate program in my field was restarting after a bit of a hiatus. This meant that my advisor was figuring out the process at the same time I was going through it; I had no more advanced students in my area to look to and seek advice from; and the seminars while I was in coursework didn't form a very coherent curriculum. Students in other subfields talked about turning their seminar papers into publishable articles, which mystified me as my seminar papers all seemed to me to be very student-type work, not publishable at all, and often not well tied to my core interests. Figuring out what my core interests were posed its own challenges, but I think that's another story for another time.

The other factor making my graduate school experience was the graduate school administration. Not my department; I generally felt that the department, or rather the professors in it, was geuinely committed to my success and intellectual growth. The message I got from the graduate school administration, on the other hand, was that I should teach teach teach and somehow also finish my degree in 5-7 years. For example, I had to meet with an assistant dean to obtain permission, and the needed funding, to go abroad to do my dissertation research in my fourth year. "But we expect you to teach in this year," s/he said. "But if I stay here and teach, I will not be able to make any dissertation progress whatsoever," I said. We went back and forth for quite a while before s/he agreed--and taking the funding then meant I did not get it for my "writing year" later as I was supposed to. I became increasingly concerned in grad school, that the university's method of encouraging advanced students to finish was entirely punitive: grad students in their 5th year or more went to the end of the preference list when teaching positions were assigned; their funding was reduced or cut off entirely after a certain year; they had to pay more for their health insurance; and on and on. The premise seemed to be that a 7th-year or more student was a slacker who needed to be cut out of the feeding trough. This seemed to me to be untrue in most cases: students might have difficult advisors or be working on complicated projects, but the university simply didn't care. It became my belief that once a university admitted a person for graduate study, the university then needed to commit the necessary resources to help that person succeed, not punish him/her when support was most needed.

Things that were not difficulties in graduate school:
My advisor. We have always had a congenial relationship. He had a rather hands-off attitude about a number of things: he allowed me to flail around for a while as I tried to figure out my project, which I think was intellectual work that I needed to do myself. He did point me in the direction of sources and colleagues that proved immensely fruitful. I found that when I asked him directly for advice or something else I needed, he was forthcoming and generous--but I did have to askk. For example, we had met only irregularly for most of my time there, but I asked to meet more often when I was in the later stages of writing (because I needed the incentive of a meeting to produce drafts more quickly). We then met every week or two until I had a complete draft.

My fellow grad students were also helpful. There were few students in my subfield, but those of us who were there were supportive of each other, and have remained friendly. I became tied into a large network of students in other subfields in the department, which helped provide me with psychological support. A small group of us in different fields also formed a dissertation-writing support group for a while; we met each week and critiqued a different person's draft chapter, so that we each had to have a draft to show every 3-4 weeks. Like meeting with my advisor regularly, this provided a very helpful incentive to write, as well as useful feedback.

Summing up:
So, on the whole, my graduate experience was fine. I certainly did not have the kind of toxic advising relationship that has caused problems for other people. But by my 5th and 6th year, I was increasingly frustrated with the university's attitude toward advanced students, which seemed callous. Each new teaching assignment I got was further away from my area of specialty; I was tired of teaching sections of other people's courses; I was tired of feeling like less than a full-fledged adult. So I jumped at the chance to finish up and take a one-year visiting position when one was offered to me.

I think this post is long enough; I'll talk about transitioning from graduate school to contingent scholar later this week.

The Tyranny of Readers

2010-03-30T11:43:00.004-04:00

I am starting to think about next year's courses. I have a number of tweaks to make to assignments, but the more pressing issue is what books to assign (because the bookstore wants me to order them soon).

In my intro classes I assign them a textbook for an overview of the period, and the rest is mostly primary sources. Much of that comes from a reader, or collection of primary sources with short editorial introductions. I find I have a love/hate relationship with most of the ones I am using.

Using the reader is convenient because it saves me the trouble of hunting down such a wide array of primary sources myself. The editors usually provide some handy background information on the document and its author. All the stuff is is one handy book, so students don't have to worry about losing handouts and the like.

The major problem I am having is that I feel like when I am using a reader, the book itself drives the content of the course more than I like. For example, for ages I have used Geary's Readings in Medieval History in my medieval survey. I like a lot of things about this book: I like that it uses long excerpts, or complete sources where possible; I like that it covers a broad range of topics; I like some of the specific sources included. But the last time I was using it, I felt frustrated. It seemed like we kept talking about kingship and institutions of power. It's not that I wanted to ignore these things entirely, but it felt like the book was sending us in that direction because of the materials it included. That is partly my issue, as I don't mind supplementing a reader with other materials, but I like to use as much of the selections in the reader as possible, so students get their money's worth from it.

So, I'm now trying to decide whether to continue using the book, substitute another reader (which might have similar issues), or put together my own slate of sources for the students. I'd welcome comments on what has worked for you.

Days in the Little Archives

2010-03-26T10:12:00.002-04:00

Notorious, Ph.D., is in the process of a lovely series on working in the archives: part 1 and part 2. Go read those first, if you haven't already.

Now, I believe Notorious works primarily at Big Archives in Exotic Research City. I, on the other hand, have done most of my work at various small archives in Quaint Research Town. Here I want to talk about a few of the differences about working in smaller archives. Small archives are well worth exploring, because they often have a lot of stuff that has not been examined before. They're also important if you're interested in rural areas, smaller towns, and local institutions (like monasteries!). So, some points of difference:

Catalogs may or may not be available. Sometimes brief archival guides exist that give you a sense of what to expect in a small archive, sometimes not. I know of one or two that do have an online presence, which is extremely helpful, but it can't be counted upon. Even more than working at Big Archives, I think, working at a small archive can be a fishing expedition.
Local archives can be pretty casual about who works there. They're likely to be less fussy about coats, bags, pens, etc. It's nonetheless incumbent on you, of course, to take good care of the documents they trust you with. Local archives will not have their own researcher cards, most likely, but they may require ID. A letter of introduction from an established scholar may also be helpful. When I did my diss research, I carried about a dozen copies of a letter from my advisor just in case.
Offsite storage. A small archive may not have all its documents on the premises, due to limited space and/or the need to regulate temperature and moisture. So you may need to put in your request one day and come back a day or two later. It may be useful to contact the staff ahead of time, if possible, to let them know that you're coming and put your first request in before your first day there. This, of course, requires some idea of what you want to consult, which may be tricky (see point 1).
Limited staff. Right, and about that staff: there may not be very many of them; they may be part-time only; they may not speak your language well; and they may not have any particular expertise in your area. I have mostly encountered lovely and helpful staffers at small archives, but they weren't necessarily able to provide the level of assistance you might get at a larger archive. In addition, the small archive may only be open 2-3 hours a day, so you'll need to plan your time carefully.
Lack of community. There may not be anyone else working in the small archive while you are there. There may be only a few people doing genealogical research. I know a lot of people who met good friends while working at Big Archives, socializing with them after the archives closed. At a small archive in a small town, there's unlikely to be that same sense of community. There were no other grad student researchers at the places I did most of my work, and I was correspondingly somewhat isolated.

The documents themselves, however, will likely have the same range and difficulties as Notorious describes in her Day 2 post.

Now, I can at least say that I have had generally professional experiences in the small archives, and the documents have generally been in good shape. Scholars of an earlier generation who worked in Exotic Research Country invariably have archival horror stories to tell: the archive that was only open two days a week, whenever the archivist felt like showing up; the archivist who chain-smoked who filing documents; the documents stored in the local pigeon roost; and so forth and so on. These days I think you're more likely to find generally professional operations, even in small places.

Pollyanna

2010-03-13T10:06:00.003-05:00

As you may be able to guess, this past week was not less busy than the preceding one.

Small College where I work is going through a bunch of changes right now. So, although I am not on any committees, I have been going to a number of meetings at which people aired grievances, asked questions of our top administrators, and tried to decide how to proceed on various matters. There's a lot of anxiety about our financial situation. A couple of those meetings have shown a collective sense of demoralization.

Whenever I go to a big meeting, I try to find a colleague afterward to talk about it individually. Not always the same colleague. That is my chance to ask questions about past decisions and try to get a sense of what lies behind the questions and statements in meetings. So this week, I asked a colleague what s/he thought about certain issues, and as we talked I said I hoped that the changes we're going through this year are an opportunity to get some fresh insights and vision, and put the college on a better footing.

"Well, aren't you a Pollyanna," s/he said. Not meanly, and we both laughed. But it made me wonder. I try to keep me eyes open and not ignore the problems the college has to deal with. But I also try to hope for the best. I need to hope for the best, in fact. If I don't, I find it easy to sink into a sort of panicky pessimism in which I'm convinced that everything is going to hell in a handbasket. I hope I'm not naive to think that positive change might emerge from our current situation. I hope that I won't end up burned out and cynical about the prospects for institutional change.

And so a busy week ends

2010-03-06T09:54:00.004-05:00

Thanks for your responses on the subject of independent studies, everyone!

It's tricky--I'm at a SLAC, so close work with professors is something that we sell ourselves on. But yes, doing independent studies is also an unpaid overload.

The two students I've said yes to are both good students; one of them I've had in class before. So I'll keep my fingers crossed for everything working out well.

Last weekend's conference was very pleasant--some good conversations and comments on my paper. I got back on Sunday and right away plunged into what seemed like a billion tasks and problems. Most are unbloggable, suffice it to say that SLAC is dealing with a lot of changes, some of them unexpected, at the moment. Now that it's Saturday I feel like I can catch my breath.

Independent Study

2010-02-26T10:14:00.003-05:00

OK, yesterday's frazzled feeling has been largely resolved. Later today I'll head off to a small conference. I'm hoping it'll be fun.

Students here are registering for next year, and I've already tentatively agreed to two independent studies. In both cases they're good students for whom the IS would fill an important spot in their overall program, so on the one hand I feel good about doing them. On the other hand, my dept. chair advises me not to take on too many, and I don't want to overload myself. I have had independent studies before--some of them turned out great, others were frustrating and took way too much time.

What do you think, readers? What makes me you more or less willing to supervise an independent study? Are there keys to both student and prof having a good experience with one?

2010-02-25T10:32:00.001-05:00

Annoying meeting yesterday ate up a lot of time. Grr. Must finish conference paper that I am giving this weekend, and finish something else that needs to be mailed by next week.

Perils of Interlibrary Loan

2010-02-22T10:14:00.002-05:00

My campus library is small and much of the collection is old. I have ordered new books which seem appropriate and necessary, but the library's budget is also small, so I have tried not to be too demanding on that score. In particular, I have tended to order things that I think will be useful for students, and have generally not ordered things that apply only, or primarily, to my research. This has put me often at the mercy of interlibrary loan services.

The ILL service has been fine in that it gets me the materials I want. The major problem is that I don't get them for very long. In the fall I ambitiously ordered six or eight books at once, then couldn't get to them immediately, and one by one they all went overdue, and my ILL privileges were revoked until I finally returned all the books.

Most recently I ordered just one book, which proved to be so dauntingly large that I put off looking at it for a few days. This was, of course, counterproductive, especially since once I started going through the book, I found it to be not only thick but dense; every chapter is full of ideas and information and requires some thought to grapple with. It has not lent itself well to skimming. The book is now overdue and I'm only a small portion of the way through it... sigh.

Progress report

2010-02-11T12:14:00.002-05:00

Though I have no service responsibilities yet, there's been a substantial increase in meetings in the last month. For one thing, we newbie profs had meetings in which we were introduced to the basics of governance and advising, since those will be new for us next year. Soon we'll have to indicate what committees we're interested in serving on, so I'm trying to figure that out: some of our committees sound like a ton of work, but also fairly interesting; one sounds like a lot of work which I would find immensely tedious; others may have lighter work loads, but also sound a bit dull.

For another, we had two hours of faculty meeting recently in which a seemingly innocuous proposal regarding a major had the potential to have huge repercussions for the college-wide curriculum, which had to be discussed in detail.

Finally, my department is very small and hardly ever has department meetings, but we need to have one soon to figure out how we are implementing some new requirements for majors.

So overall, I am definitely getting introduced to the joys(?) of faculty governance and service.

In spite of that, I have made some progress on this semester's writing goals.

#1: Interesting Opportunity application, is mostly done, awaiting feedback from a couple of colleagues.

#2: Started a draft of first conference paper; need to look over a few things I've read previously to help flesh this out.

#3: Have collected some stuff to read to inform this one.

So far, so good. It's nice to be able to carve out some time for writing.

In which I critique web sites

2010-01-22T11:12:00.004-05:00

The writing goals of the last post are only inching along, but I did finish up the research for the departmental service project and sent a short report around to my colleagues.

There are some bad college & department websites out there, y'all. My goodness. I am no web design guru, but I'd like to suggest some principles:

The dominant color on the website for your women's college should not be pink.
I should be able to find a list of major requirements right on a department's page, not have to locate the college catalog (not linked anywhere on the college home page) to read them.
The college catalog should be easily accessible from the home page.
Lists of faculty should say something about their interests right on the list; you shouldn't have to click through to each individual profile to find out what they do.

Bonus points to sites that make syllabi easily accessible and that lay out requirements for majors (and the reasons for them) clearly and with detail.

Writing goals this semester

2010-01-10T12:51:00.002-05:00

I am hoping this semester will be a bit less crazed than last semester, and I'll be better able to write. I know I can only expect so much during my first year at a new job, but I think on the whole I have reasonable goals:

1) Write up application for Interesting Opportunity

2) Write conference paper #1, due early March

3) Write conference paper #2 for Kalamazoo

4) Work on book manuscript revisions

#4 there is more speculative and I probably won't have time to really dig into it until this summer. The rest really ought to be feasible even around teaching etc.

Onwards

2010-01-07T14:18:00.002-05:00

Thanks for all the sympathies, everyone. I have good days and bad days, but I think overall I'm starting to adjust to the new way of things.

As part of that effort, I've been back on campus sporadically this week. I have a relatively light semester ahead; one of my classes had such a small enrollment that it's been converted to an independent study, leaving me with a lighter teaching load than I'd have otherwise. Neither my chair nor the dean thinks this is anything but a weird anomaly, not a reflection on me as a teacher. Enrollment in my other classes is good, and my teaching evaluations for the fall seem fine.

Per our faculty handbook, I have agreed to take on a department service project in lieu of teaching. We are planning to implement a capstone requirement for majors within the next few years, and my job is to do some research on how other colleges handle such requirements and bring them back to the department for discussion. I'm starting the early stages of that this week, as well as finishing up a book review. I am hoping that I'll be a bit less swamped with teaching this semester and better able to work writing, as well as the service project, into my schedule.

Safe travels to all going to the AHA meeting, and good luck to all the job seekers!

A tribute

2009-12-22T23:11:00.003-05:00

My father died last week.

I have sometimes seen academics sighing about family members who don't understand what they do. My dad always seemed to get it, and not because he was also an academic; he was raised on a farm and spent most of his working life selling agricultural equipment. But he and my mom sacrificed so I could go to the liberal arts college I wanted, and cheered me on throughout grad school. He was one of the few people in the world who have actually read my dissertation. He never expressed disappointment with my various part-time and temporary jobs, only sympathy and support. He was thrilled when I got my tenure-track job offer.

Dad was not always easy to get along with; he could be stubborn and easily angered, and he grew more conservative as he grew older. But I will always be glad of his unstinting support. I'm sorry I never got to show him around my college campus, and I'm sorry he'll never be able to see my book, should I manage to get it published.

This has been a hard few weeks; I'm not planning on further posts until sometime in January.

December already?

2009-12-04T00:04:00.003-05:00

Ugh. That was a longer-than-planned hiatus. I lost much of November to bronchitis.

Two weeks of class are left. Classes are going fine, the only hitch being a class full of shy, introverted first-year students who are afraid to say anything in class. Stimulating discussion, or even getting them to ask basic questions about assignments, is tough.

My college is hiring in an important campus-wide position, and all of the interviews will be in the next two weeks, so I need to fit in going to those presentations / receptions / Q&A sessions to get a sense of the candidates.

I'm also trying to finish up an abstract to submit to a conference within the next week, and finish up with the books I borrowed from interlibrary loan before the librarians come after me with sticks.

Add in getting ready for the holidays, illness and other drama in the family, and it's been a hectic few weeks.

Reorganization

2009-11-16T11:55:00.002-05:00

Today I took some time to reorganize my (computer) files, which were in a terrible state.

Back when I was in graduate school, I dumped all notes, drafts, etc., for a particular course into a folder labeled with that course's name. This system broke down a bit once I got to the dissertation research, when virtually everything got dumped into a folder titled "Diss." Eventually this acquired some subfolders ("Drafts" and "Comments", for example). All the research, writing and note-taking I've done since then have not been organized systematically. Sometimes I made new folders, sometimes I shoved files into pre-existing folders, sometimes I left files in the main "Research" folder.

The result of all this is that it has gotten increasingly difficult to find stuff, and every time I look for some particular notes, I end up searching in half a dozen places on the hard drive to find what I'm looking for.

I hope that I've licked that problem going forward. The Research folder now has subfolders for Writing, Research Materials, and Secondary materials, among others, with appropriate further subdivisions. I sincerely hope that making it easier to find research materials will make the time I have for research more productive, and that clarity in organization reflects clarity in thought. We shall see.

Transition

2009-10-30T11:18:00.003-04:00

I've been wanting to write more about transitioning from contingent faculty to tenure-track faculty. The thing I'm most conscious of, though, is that it's difficult to bring up details about my transition without telling so much that I'm easily identifiable. I already think that a determined reader could figure out who and where I am, and I'm not sure how faculty and administrators at my college would perceive my blog.

So I keep finding that there are things I don't want to talk about: I don't want to vent my occasional frustrations with students; I don't want to talk an ongoing administrative decision; I don't want to talk about some quirks that make my college distinctive.

What, then, can I say about this transition?

On the one hand, it hasn't been that difficult. Having several years of contingent teaching experience is an advantage in planning and preparing courses. I have materials I can use; I have syllabi and lesson plans I can adapt for this new setting. I know what kind of assignments I like to give and how I like to grade them. All of that experience serves me well.

On the other hand, I worry more about how I fit in. As a lecturer, I didn't stress much about such things. Now I worry about things like: is my grading too lenient? am I going to get a reputation as an "easy" or "soft" professor? Should I socialize more with other faculty? How important is it that I attend talks, performances, and other events on campus?

I still struggle, too, with the issues of mindset that I mentioned here. I still need to remind myself, periodically, that administrative issues being discussed really are pertinent to me. As a lecturer, I often thought to myself, "The outcome of that decision won't affect me, and no one here cares what I think anyway." But here, I am new, but not irrelevant. If I comment on an issue, it is likely that the comments will be taken as seriously as anyone else's.

So those are my current thoughts, midway through the fall. I have also actually been thinking about writing, but that's for another post.

Hanging in there

2009-10-11T11:10:00.003-04:00

I'm taking a moment's break from grading jail this weekend for an update.

The student I alluded to back in this post seems to be getting along ok. She stops by my office regularly for clarification on issues that confuse her, but the very questions she asks demonstrates that she does understand the basics.
I have another non-Christian student in my class on the Reformation whose outsider's perspective is really refreshing; he's not afraid to say things that challenge Christian students' ideas of what's normal, and that livens up discussion immensely.
I'm not entirely happy with how I've organized the second half of the Renaissance-Reformation survey course, but we'll see how it goes; I'll teach it again in the spring, so I'll have opportunities to tweak it very soon.

My job requires that I teach every day; this is a very teaching-focused liberal arts college and essentially everyone has an every-day schedule. This is definitely been a shock to the system after the last couple years of part-time adjunct teaching. As tiring as that was, I was usually able to arrange to teach only on two or three, or at most four, days, and had some time during the week to recharge and work on other things. Being in the office and classroom every day is wearing. I need to figure out how to carve out some time mid-week to refresh myself, but I haven't quite managed yet...

Berks 2011 CFP

2009-10-07T12:25:00.002-04:00

The call for proposals for the next Berkshire Conference of Women Historians is up here. Also as seen here and here.

I attended the last Berks conference in 2008, and had a really excellent experience. Good scholarship, good opportunities to meet people, and much less fraught with professional angst and status-seeking than many other conferences. I'd also especially like to encourage medievalists to consider participating. It is easy for large conferences to seem dominated by the modernists, and I think it's important for scholars of the ancient, medieval, and early modern world to be visible participants. There is a lot of time yet to think about submission, as the deadline is March 1.

No prior knowledge assumed?

2009-09-19T15:38:00.003-04:00

This week I was talking to an international student about my 100-level history class. The class is a pretty broad survey of European history between c. 1300 and 1700. In theory, the class requires no prerequisites. But in talking to this student, I realized that isn't quite true.

I do assume, when teaching an introductory class, that my students have had some history in high school. I assume that they've gotten a basic narrative of western history, that they've heard of feudalism, the Renaissance, and Martin Luther. My class is usually designed to take apart paradigms that I believe to be familiar, and to interrogate assumptions about what, for example, "the Renaissance" means.

This student, however, is Asian, and has had very little exposure to European history. It's kind of startling to me to think about how to teach in a way that genuinely did not assume any prior knowledge of the period being taught. How would I teach a whole class full of such students? I would really need to rethink the way I introduce all kinds of topics. With only one student in this situation, I'm less inclined to make major changes, but it's worthwhile to keep the lack of familiarity with the topic in mind. Perhaps I should even make fewer assumptions about what my American students may know.

Complaint

2009-09-12T10:29:00.003-04:00

Why, pray tell, does the latest version of MS Word have separate buttons labelled "Insert Footnote" and "Insert Citation"? Since I (and I suspect, most college professors) use the terms somewhat interchangeably, this is confusing. And I frankly don't understand what the program is doing when it "inserts citation"--it's not actually putting in a footnote.

I've been fielding a lot of student questions about citation lately.

2009-09-11T18:34:00.002-04:00

Is it possible I might one day do research again?

My new job is time-intensive, but yesterday I managed to get a little ahead on class prep, and today I had some time to think. I wrote up an abstract and made some lists:

goals for the year

materials to get from the library

ideas I might want to pursue in the future

I keep most of such notes on the computer, and I have a terrible time keeping track of such stuff. On the list of goals, in fact, is "for the love of God, reorganize the files so I can find things." My system of electronic file-keeping broke down once I moved beyond my dissertation materials, and whenever I try to find an idea or reference I wrote down, I end up searching in five different folders, opening and closing a dozen different files before I find what I'm looking for.

I think I have a pretty manageable agenda for the year, and we'll see how things go.

Now back to paper grading and class prep.

Stuff about my new job

2009-09-09T20:27:00.003-04:00

Surprise, surprise! My every-day teaching schedule consumes a lot of time and energy.
Graded the first batch of student papers, and they were generally pretty good.
I have a nagging fear I'm a way-too-lenient grader. The fact that the college actually circulates our grade distributions contributes to this fear.
I am not convinced that my brand-new rubric saved me any grading time. Don't know if I need to just get used to it, tweak it, or simplify it dramatically.
My fellow first-year faculty are cool and we get along well.
Students here actually come to my office. I think I've had a visit from at least one every day.
Our library doesn't have some books I'd like them to have. I don't know if there's enough room in the budget to pick them all up.
...there was another thing, but I've forgotten it.

Mindsets

2009-09-05T12:26:00.002-04:00

The first week of the tenure track is now behind me.

My college does not assign advising or committee responsibilities to first-year tenure-track profs. I appreciate this policy on a number of levels, but in the last week I have found myself actually wishing I had more responsibilities. All I really have to do right now is teach my classes, and that's not so different from my last few years as a contract lecturer.

As a contract lecturer, I showed up, I taught my classes, I attended the occasional campus social event, and I spent the rest of my time in my office. Sometimes preparing classes and meeting with students, but sometimes working on my job applications, writing, or just killing time. It was easy to focus on my students and otherwise float through my days.

That mindset, of not being fully connected to the college community, is one I need to avoid slipping into. That's why it would be nice to have additional responsibilities, as a reminder that my position on campus needs to be somewhat different. I've tried to decide for myself that, in addition to teaching, my job consists of figuring SLAC out: getting to know people, figuring out how things work, getting a sense of the overall community.

That's the problem with doing no writing since May

2009-08-30T22:58:00.003-04:00

I would kind of like to submit an abstract to Kalamazoo this year. I even have a couple of sessions picked out as possibilities. The problem is that I am fresh out of ideas at the moment. Or at least, fresh out of ideas that I'm confident I can write a paper about by May. And somehow I can't imagine I'll have much time to brainstorm, since I'll be teaching every day starting tomorrow...

Oriented

2009-08-26T22:57:00.002-04:00

I have now been oriented. I have signed a dozen pieces of paper dealing with benefits and taxes and stuff. I got the long tour of campus (as opposed to the short tour I got at my interview). I paraded around in a gown for the new students. I have met several dozen fellow faculty. I even remember the names of some of them. I have stood and waved as my name and academic credentials were read out at multiple faculty gatherings. (So now they all know who I am, even though I don't know them.) I have discussed teaching at a SLAC. I have been served catered luncheons. I have met the entire library staff. I have toured the writing center and the other student support offices. I have hobnobbed with deans.

Next week I will actually get to work.

At least I have two weeks to rethink

2009-08-18T16:38:00.003-04:00

Crodd!

That newer collection of essays I was assigning? Apparently the bookstore can't get enough copies of it. At least not without ordering it (doubtless at outrageous prices) from the UK.

Time to retool a little...

Realizations of mid-August

2009-08-17T14:01:00.003-04:00

I am mostly moved into my office (save the one box of books that turned up in a totally strange place in the house). I have another week until my orientation starts, two weeks until I start teaching.

Oh. Yikes. I start teaching in two weeks. At the moment I have a messy syllabus-shaped object instead of a proper syllabus. It is full of question marks and italics and proposed readings that I haven't quite settled on.

The course that concerns me is on women in the Middle Ages. I've taught it twice before, at a different school each time. It was originally heavily based on a couple of courses I had taken myself, although I have changed things around a bit each time.

This time I kept the two somewhat older collections of essays I've liked to use, but added a more recent one. I'd like to expose the students to newer as well as "classic" scholarship. I also want to do a better job of teaching them how to read scholarly articles. This is an "advanced topics" course for majors, so reading scholarly articles is a more than appropriate goal. Usually I make the mistake of assigning articles and assuming that students can read and get them, and then become frustrated when they have read but not gotten. I'm much better at teaching students to deal with primary sources in useful ways.

In this class one of their papers will be an assignment to analyze and critique a scholarly article. I am thinking it will be one that they choose, not already on the syllabus (partly because there is so much excellent stuff I'm having to leave off), although I will supply them with suggestions as necessary. I think I need to precede that with more exercises involving identifying arguments, homing in on clear or unclear points, and figuring out what evidence an author is using to support her argument. Suggestions for useful exercises are welcome.

Office organization

2009-08-05T18:16:00.002-04:00

Today I moved twelve boxes of books into my new office. Yay new office! As the newest prof, I get the smallest office, but it is more than adequate for my needs: lots of shelves, new desk, new computer, plenty of filing cabinets.

I'm pretty sure these books haven't all been on the shelves at the same time. My last few jobs ranged from "lots of shelf space" to "half a shelf in a shared office," so I've been storing various items for a while. Other books were shelved, piled, or boxed at home. Now I have to figure out how to organize them.

So, gentle readers--assuming you're still out there--what are your favorite methods of office organizing? By period? By author? By color? (Some friends once rearranged my shelves by color as a prank; the result was striking but a little surreal.) Primary sources separated, or mixed in?

Emerging

2009-07-29T11:42:00.002-04:00

Well, I've successfully relocated over 1,000 miles. Stuff seems to have arrived intact, and we've been setting up the house.

Still to be done: moving books into office, sorting out files and papers, final planning for the class that will start in just over a month.

Abstracted

2009-07-11T11:53:00.002-04:00

I've finished the formatting changes on the article, but I need to write the abstract. I hate writing abstracts. The finished article is over 11,000 words exclusive of footnotes. It's kind of difficult to boil that down to 200 words. Bleh. I'm writing a draft version now and I'll let it marinate for a day or two, then rewrite it.

Taking stock

2009-07-07T10:29:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-29T17:15:00.002-04:00

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

2009-06-18T11:28:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-07T10:02:00.004-04:00

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

2009-05-26T14:03:00.003-04:00

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

2009-05-20T14:21:00.004-04:00

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

2009-05-17T20:16:00.005-04:00

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.

Nearly there

2009-05-12T17:34:00.003-04:00

All grades for one class are done. Grades for the other class are done except for the three who need to send me relevant files. This semester is almost officially over for me.

Some of the essays I read today unfortunately managed to hit my pet peeves: Progress, blithe but problematic assertions about periods we haven't covered, wild overgeneralizations. Many of them also made me reflect on the difficulty of teaching the 14th century well. I have some thoughts brewing along those lines, so will try a more substantive post later.

And so the grading begins

2009-05-10T15:24:00.002-04:00

My students are really so, so lovely this semester. Conscientious, hard-working, generally a pleasure to have in the classroom. As of today, for example, they have all turned in their final assignments, except for the two who wrote me for special permission to turn the assignment in tomorrow. (In both cases, they are traveling, and extra time seems reasonable.) Many of them have also sent me pleasant notes telling me how they enjoyed the class.

The assignments themselves have been somewhat disappointing, however; in the ones I've read so far, people are consistently doing a little worse than their assignments from earlier in the semester. I suppose this is mostly the result of their having to do four or more final assignments at once.

13 grades down, 30 to go.

Approaching the finish line?

2009-05-07T11:07:00.003-04:00

My students turn in papers tonight, so grading starts tomorrow. And I'm not going to Kalamazoo, unlike seemingly most of the other medievalist bloggers out there. In the meantime, I can continue plugging away on these revisions.

Today I finally had a bit of a breakthrough: I've substantially reorganized the introduction. I want to make extra-clear that I am not really making a general argument about liturgy, or even about Cistercian liturgy, in this essay, but rather just making an argument about how the liturgy works at this particular community.

I have a few other passages to fix--some additional references to work in. At that point I might be ready to send it back. I'll need to read over the whole thing again (sigh) to be sure.

Rethinking assignments

2009-05-04T11:18:00.002-04:00

As the semester winds down, I tend to take stock of how classes went. Which assignments should I keep, alter, or abandon? What did my class need more or less of?

This semester my two classes went rather differently. One, a medieval history survey, was pretty polished, and I was generally happy with it; there were a few readings I thought I could have prepared to teach better, and I probably could have cut out an assignment or two. The other, a course on medieval religion, was trickier. I'd not taught it before, and I didn't have a lot of time to prepare it before it started. I made a hasty plan, under the assumption that students would inject their own interests into the class to help direct it. I should know by now that one can never plan on that!

I also experimented with assignments a bit. I like the concept of one assignment I used, but I was not totally satisfied with the results. The idea was that, to gain some familiarity with different scholarship in the field, each student would choose a book and give a brief presentation on it. The presentations would kick off a class thematically tied to the book.

The problem I had was that students mostly had trouble conveying the main concepts of their books accurately. Presentations instead tended to be dominated by a series of interesting facts and anecdotes from the book, and then trail off.

I do like the idea of the assignment, but I think it needs to be structured differently. I think I should require them to end by posing discussion questions, for one thing. I am not entirely sure how to teach them how to identify and describe the argument of a monograph, though--probably we will need to start with articles, work with those in class, and hope they can move up to a longer work from there.

Notes from the end of the semester

2009-05-01T08:31:00.003-04:00

I have just one class left in this academic year. I'll be finishing up my contracts at both my current employers really, really soon. This sort of thing always makes me a bit pensive; I've liked my students, and I don't really expect to see most of them again. I've also had to tell them I'm not returning. Their disappointment is flattering, of course: take that, Person Who Got The Tenure-Track Job Here! I'm encouraging them to check out Person's classes, though, and telling them they can get in touch with me if they need anything.

Next week I'll teach that last class, and probably won't go back to that campus again, since it's a longish drive for me. I'll also go in to my other job to clean up my office. I share the office with a person I've never seen (we're there on alternate days). I'm not sure my office-mate actually comes in at all, since the contrast is so freakish. I've posted pictures on the walls; I have piles of library books and papers covering my desk area. He has a computer in his desk area, a pad of paper, a pan, and nothing else. By the end of the next week I'll get all the final assignments in, and within a week or so after that, I'll turn in the grades and be done.

Next fall I can move my books, papers, and other office stuff into my real and permanent office, where they can stay longer than a year; next spring I'll only have to say goodbye to the students who are graduating.

Inching along

2009-04-24T08:57:00.004-04:00

Ah, that last post looks so optimistic. I have made progress on revising the article, though--just in rather small segments. I have a list of things that need to be done to the thing, and I manage to knock off one or two of them each time I sit to work on it (not more than once or twice a week, though). So it is inching along. I am so tired of it that I have to talk myself into working on it, even though I would dearly love to send it back. It was sent back to me last fall, so it feels as though I've been working on the revisions for way too long. Now that I think about it, I did write and submit another paper during that time, plus did a job search and a chunk of editing work. Of course, this journal editor doesn't know that, and what if s/he thinks I'm a slacker? (Such is the paranoia of journal submission.)

Oh well, if they don't take it, I'll just have to submit it elsewhere. So be it.

A little research, at long last

2009-04-10T17:45:00.002-04:00

Between teaching and job market stuff, I haven't had much opportunity to write since January. I have this long-lingering revise-and-resubmit which is turning into something of an albatross, poor thing. I was going to work on it last Friday (my non-teaching day of the week), but my computer chose that day to malfunction, preventing me from accessing the relevant files.

Today I finally took a look at it: first the list of tasks I still need to do to finish the revisions, and second the article itself. Since I've let it sit so long, I really needed to reread it. I made some minor edits as I went along, and noted a couple of other places that need fixing. I think the article now beats around the bush too long before getting to the main idea, and some of the transitional paragraphs are kind of clunky. So, progress, hurray. I hope now that I've looked at the piece I can get back to it quickly.

Teaching and pre-teaching

2009-04-08T15:15:00.005-04:00

I may be getting better, but my second class resumed last week, and teaching both classes seems to distract me thoroughly.

Today I taught the Black Death. Students always get into this topic, sometimes with a level of glee which is slightly disturbing if you think about it. I raised the theory of some scholars that the Black Death was not actually the same disease as modern bubonic plague. This sparked a discussion which was lively, if somewhat ill-informed (none of us being really qualified to deal with some of the medical / biological ramifications of that issue).

I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about next year's courses. in some ways this seems premature, since I won't start teaching them until September. I keep telling myself that it makes some sense, though--there will come a point when my time is thoroughly taken up with logistics related to moving. That's not the case now, and if I have some pre-class preparation done, I won't have to try to do it while packing / moving / unpacking and so forth.

At least I don't have as much grading?

2009-03-26T14:43:00.004-04:00

I am not interested in adjudicating students' requests for extensions. I just have no interest in deciding whether the reason for an extension request is a good or bad one. So instead, the policy in my course is that they can have [x] number of extensions per semester, no questions asked, as long as they inform me in writing that they're taking the extension. Still, I was somewhat startled yesterday to find that, of the 36 students in the class, only 6 actually handed in the essay, and the rest requested extensions. Hm.

In other news, it turns out I don't have pneumonia. In fact, the cold seems to be going away, and the cough seems less frequent, so I may actually be getting...better!

End of spring break

2009-03-23T08:36:00.002-04:00

Back to work today, though as I mentioned only one of my two classes resumes this week. Maybe that means I can ease back into the routine?

Unfortunately, my dr. thinks I might have walking pneumonia. And over the weekend I developed yet another cold. Joy.

Spring break progress report

2009-03-19T12:25:00.003-04:00

More than midway through now--how am I doing?

Writing:
1) Finish revisions on long-suffering article so I can resubmit it: not at all. Bad academic.

Teaching:
2) Write recommendation letter for student mentioned in last post: drafted
3) Grade small stack of papers: not actually due until Mar. 31
4) Write comments I promised to a few students ages ago: mostly done
5) Figure out how to rearrange the rest of my course schedule to make up for our snow days: done
6) Skim/peruse books that I'm considering for next year's courses: only a little

House:
7) Tidy up and dust: made some progress
8) Clean the bathroom and kitchen: partly done
9) Clean up my desk: nope

10) Hang out with the spouse (also on break): Yes! Hurray!
11) Visit nearby exhibit: on tomorrow's docket
12) Whatever else strikes my fancy: have done plenty of whatever!

The article is the major failing here. I'm just having trouble getting back into it, after shelving it to deal with the job search and being sick much of the winter.

Next week I have kind of an odd half-break; of my two teaching jobs, one resumes next Monday, and the other will still be on break next week. That should give me some extra time to finish up the revisions and the grading as needed.

Were medieval nuns "lesbian-like"?

2009-03-17T12:08:00.002-04:00

This post is building on the ongoing conversation about Judith Bennett's History Matters. See part 1, part 2, and part 3. Thanks to Notorious for starting this up--great idea!

First off, I think this is a great book, immensely thought-provoking. I should also clarify that I read the book a year or two ago, and now can't find my copy, so I haven't fully refreshed my memory.

But, as I remarked in the comments to Tenured Radical's post, I have some concerns about the use of "lesbian-like" to describe medieval women, particularly medieval nuns. I can see the attraction to the term: nuns did, after all, live in primarily-female communities, and so often had their closest relationships with other women. Bennett's discussion of the term also reminds me of the need to avoid heteronormativity, which can be easy to slip into.

Nonetheless, I have some qualms. One is that I've encountered a number of people who were already eager to assume that medieval nunneries were hotbeds of women having sex with each other. Many of them were undergraduates, true, but not all; I fear that introducing "lesbian-like" only reinforces some of the more titillating notions about medieval nuns. That alone wouldn't put me off, though.

Second qualm is that women's monasteries in the Middle Ages were, in fact, not always, or even typically, female-exclusive communities. Nuns had male chaplains, confessors, and other priests on hand; some nunneries had attached communities of lay brothers; lay men did construction, farming, or other manual labor around nunneries. So, at many communities, men went in and out quite regularly. Plus, while many nuns, perhaps even most nuns, did have their primary emotional relationships with other women, there must have been many nuns who viewed men as their primary friends and emotional supports. Hildegard of Bingen's male secretary, Volmar, seems to have been a trusted aide and confidant; Elisabeth of Schonau was very close with her brother; numerous later medieval nuns had strong emotional ties to their confessors. So even on the level of emotional, rather than sexual, intimacy, many medieval nuns had important relationships with men.

Even beyond that, nuns were supposed to direct their energies--emotional, sexual, and spiritual--toward God. Much spiritual literature aimed at nuns invoked the image of a nun as Christ's bride. As I've discussed before, this was not just metaphor, but literalized. Many people, including a great many nuns and their spiritual advisors, viewed nuns as the literal brides of Jesus, the heavenly bridegroom. Nuns' relationship with Jesus could be somewhat eroticized as well as emotionally affecting and intimate. (A digression: what would that have been like for a nun whose sexual desires were for women? would she have found the bearded Jesus on the cross alienating rather than fulfilling? might she have fixed on more feminized aspects of Jesus in her personal spiritual journey?) The generally masculine figure of God was, then, theoretically at the center of nuns' existence, which perhaps makes them seem not so lesbian-like after all.

In the area of sexuality, I think a case can be made that, in the Middle Ages, virginity was a sexual identity. Whereas modern secular culture tends to view virginity as a temporary phase of life, to be moved past in one's youth, for medieval people it was a state to aspire toward, to protect vigilantly, to be constantly aware of. The preservation of virginity (or chastity) was a vital part of nuns' identity. How would this affect any sexual orientation on the part of nuns? If a nun had taken vows as a young girl, to what extent was she even aware of her other sexual preferences?

As discussed by Bennett, the term "lesbian-like" does raise some important issues of interpretation and things to think about. But for all the above reasons, I think it's too easy to apply to medieval nuns, and doesn't do enough to reflect the real complexities of nuns' daily lives.

Spring break plans

2009-03-13T13:35:00.002-04:00

My spring break has just begun. Here are some of the things I'd like to get done in the next week:

Writing:
1) Finish revisions on long-suffering article so I can resubmit it

Teaching:
2) Write recommendation letter for student mentioned in last post
3) Grade small stack of papers
4) Write comments I promised to a few students ages ago
5) Figure out how to rearrange the rest of my course schedule to make up for our snow days
6) Skim/peruse books that I'm considering for next year's courses

House:
7) Tidy up and dust
8) Clean the bathroom and kitchen
9) Clean up my desk

Fun:
10) Hang out with the spouse (also on break)
11) Visit nearby exhibit
12) Whatever else strikes my fancy

How to request a recommendation

2009-03-12T14:21:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I got a packet requesting a recommendation from a former student. The packet was astounding and delightful: it was everything I could have wanted to write her a great recommendation and more. Here's what the student did:

--emailed me ahead of time to let me know the stuff was coming, reminding me of which class of mine she was in
--included a detailed letter explaining her current situation and plans, thus why she's requesting the recommendation
--included a current resume
--included the appropriate form, and a pre-addressed stamped envelope
--included a printout from the website of the program she's applying to; this describes the program and its core courses, so I have a good sense of what its demands are
--included a copy of a paper she wrote for my class; this is in fact a photocopy of the version I returned to her, so my marginal comments are on it as well

So I have here everything I need to write her a detailed and useful letter. I was already pleased to recommend the student, and now I'm extra delighted. Now I can and will also mention how extremely organized, thorough, and considerate she is. The recommendation I will write her will glow in the dark.

The job

2009-03-08T13:02:00.003-04:00

Thanks for the good wishes, everyone!

I'm trying to figure out how much I feel comfortable saying about the job in this space. The college I'll be working at has certain quirks that are fairly distinctive, so including the relevant details would make it fairly easy to figure out my real-life identity. Then again, it's not that hard to do that if you're sufficiently motivated, since I've been pretty open about my research interests.

But some details that are less specific:
--I'll be teaching both medieval and early modern history, pretty much half and half. Basically, if something happened in Europe between the years 500 and 1700, it's my bailiwick. I haven't had to teach early modern for a couple of years, so I'll need to brush up. If anyone has suggestions for Renaissance/Reformation/early modern readings for undergrads, I'd welcome them.

--My department is really small. All members seem to get along well, unless they've been pretending for my benefit. Tips on navigating a small department also welcome.

--I won't have any advisees or committee assignments in the first year, so I have more time to figure out those aspects of the job.

--The college has a medieval & Renaissance studies program which apparently needs new life breathed into it. Suggestions on attracting students and/or inspiring an interdisciplinary program are very welcome!

I got the job

2009-03-02T17:02:00.003-05:00

I actually got the job.

It's a great job for me. It fits really well with my priorities, and my (future) colleagues seem really nice. I'm delighted to have accepted the offer.

I was originally going to make some comments on the job market in this post, but they rapidly got more complain-y than I was comfortable publishing. So suffice it to say: I've been on the job market now for many years. It's taken me as long to get a tenure-track offer as it took me to get a Ph.D. in the first place. I've actually been quite lucky, in that I've had very solid and generally enjoyable temporary teaching jobs in the meantime. But I am ecstatic to finally have that tenure-track offer.

Snow Day

2009-03-02T16:23:00.002-05:00

Classes are cancelled...what's a professor to do?

--figure out how to rearrange the schedule to compensate for this missing day
--do the prep for tomorrow morning's class
--try to get ahead by writing up assignments for future weeks
--ponder submitting an abstract for next year's Medieval Academy meeting

I'm finally healthy, or close enough to make very little difference, so I hope to be returning to more regular posting here this month.

Quick update

2009-02-24T09:15:00.003-05:00

Well. My campus interview was last week. I think it went well enough, and I'll leave it at that for now...

I immediately came down with some sort of hell-flu when I got home. I'm really hoping that March is a better month as far as health goes.

Week 2 ramblings

2009-02-05T13:06:00.005-05:00

I am finally getting over being sick. Hurray for antibiotics! I had some kind of sinus infection and for over a week felt really junky, plus I couldn't hear very well.

I find it hard to believe it's just the second week of the semester. I have two teaching jobs currently, so I am teaching a medieval history survey (1000-1500) to about 40 students at one school, and a course on medieval religion to about 10 students at another. Both seem to be going well; both groups of students are with it and engaged. Except that they don't seem to want to post in their online dicussion fora, which is perpetually irritating to me. This should be an easy assignment; just log on to the course website and write some comments about the reading! They do seem to have things to say in class, so I don't think it's a matter of not knowing what to say. This is the first week I've asked them to do these postings, so I'll see how it goes.

I need to pull my job talk together. Work for tomorrow. Although the talk is clearly my top priority, I still regret having to put off the other things I'm working on to focus on it.

Today's agenda

2009-01-30T09:48:00.003-05:00

Well. I opted not to go to this week's job talk. I was persuaded by the several commenters who feared causing discomfort--for the candidate, for the department, or for myself. Take note that this is a small enough institution that my presence would be fairly obvious. There are two more talks next week, so I may revisit that decision.

Frankly, what finally made the decision for me is that I had way too much to do. Being sick last week has left me running to catch up all week, and that hour right before class turned out to be essential prep time.

Today is not a teaching day. Bliss to sleep later than 7 am and to have the day to work on other things. First and foremost, I have to give my own job talk in a few weeks--30-45 minutes, should be accessible to undergraduates (the job is at a small liberal arts college). This requires some planning.

Reader poll!

2009-01-28T08:03:00.002-05:00

I am teaching at a certain college. Said college is hiring someone in my field. I applied for the job, but was not interviewed.

Now the finalists are making their visits to campus.

Do I go to the job talks, or not?

Not how I planned it

2009-01-25T17:47:00.004-05:00

Oh, it has not been a good week. Well, it had good parts--had some friends over on Monday since we had the day off--but right after that I developed a Horrible Plague which has laid me low for days. I am just now emerging from days of lying about miserable and blowing my nose, and tomorrow classes start. Fortunately my first class is in the afternoon, so I can go into the office tomorrow morning to get things ready. But this is so not how I planned to start the semester.

Further research

2009-01-15T11:40:00.002-05:00

To follow up from yesterday's search of liturgical texts in CANTUS, I took a look at Late Medieval Liturgical Offices. LMLO is potentially a great resource compliling complete offices for a wide variety of saints, all from the later part of the Middle Ages. It has some drawbacks, however. One is that it uses a somewhat complex system of ascii codes for the information. The text accompanying the data files argues that this is not hard to learn, but it does constitute something of a barrier to using the materials. Even more problematic, just now, is that it was published in 1994, and its data files come on...3.5" floppy disks. My computer is an aged beast, and still has a floppy drive, but I know most newer computers don't. I'll see if I can actually read the files this afternoon.

At any rate, I was interested to discover from LMLO that the office for Saint C I'm looking at also appears (or at least a very similar one appears) in a single 15th-century manuscript from Barcelona, not so far from the monastery I'm studying. So I would guess I'm looking at some regional office for the saint. My ms. evidence is earlier, though, so I still wonder whether the office originated at this monastery or elsewhere...

Curious

2009-01-14T11:00:00.003-05:00

So I am revising this article on liturgy that I seem to have been working on forever. I am looking at the feasts of several saints to see how they are presented in the liturgy of a particular nunnery. At the suggestion of a reader, I plugged the texts for these saints into the CANTUS database. To camouflage the project a little, I'm going to call these saints A, B, and C.

Saint A was wildly popular in the Middle Ages, and the results show it. Exactly the same texts appear in over a dozen different manuscripts, from totally different parts of Europe. So the monastery I'm studying probably got their office for Saint A from some commonly available materials.

Saint B was also quite popular. The texts I entered only appear in a few manuscripts, though. Both of those manuscripts are from monasteries of the same order, so perhaps this office was one composed at, and circulated among, monasteries of this order.

Saint C was another popular saint. But the texts used at the monastery I am studying don't appear in the database at all. Not a one of them. I checked them all. Admittedly the database is not comprehensive, but it does include a large number of manuscripts, and I did get hits for the other feasts. I am especially intrigued by this, because the celebration of Saint C is unusually prominent at this monastery. Other monasteries of the order did not observe her in the same way. So the fact that the texts are more obscure is extra interesting.

Getting unblocked

2009-01-13T15:24:00.002-05:00

I have so many things to do this month it has been a little paralyzing. I came back from the AHA (via train) last Monday and spent the afternoon totally zoned out. I took a nap, which I almost never do. Then I spent a couple of days catching up on correspondence and finishing my grades and such.

As I puttered away at one thing and another, I realized I was reluctant to get back to my research. I need to finish revisions on an article and resubmit it, and then I need to dig back into the book manuscript. And I felt blocked. I wasn't totally sure how to address the comments of one reader, who seemed most interested in some points I felt were tangential to my major argument. I hadn't worked on it since probably early December, what with all the mess of finals. Prep for the spring semester seemed more pressing. And so on.

But today I may have gotten unblocked. I allotted two hours to work on the article. I sat down and read through it, made notes on things to do, fixed up some footnotes, added some brief explanatory material, explored the sources suggested by the reader. I think things are coming together. It may not even take that much more work. I'd be delighted to send this off by the end of the month.

I also allotted two hours to work on course prep. That was good, too; I made some progress, and the two-hour time period kept the prep from sprawling over into the rest of the day. I hope I can keep this up for the rest of the week.

AHA report 3

2009-01-07T09:00:00.000-05:00

The other session I attended was a really delightful one titled "Women and Community in the Middle Ages." I made a special point of going as it promised discussion of nuns. As it turned out, all three of the papers were very good, and all three posed some worthwhile challenges to common tropes of discussion medieval women.

Fiona Griffiths, in the midst of some interesting work on relations between male and female religious in the twelfth century, argued that we need to pay more attention to money. She suggested that financial issues underlie a number of criticisms of nuns, and that financial considerations contributed to concerns about purity on questions of separating male and female religious. While this was definitely a work-in-progress kind of paper, the general point seems potentially very important.

Anne Lester discussed how, in northern France, women following informal religious lives tended to be organized into Cistercian nunneries rather than Franciscan or Dominican ones. According to her, bishops in this region took an active role in encouraging/requiring such women's communities to adopt Cistercian customs, including lobbying the Cistercian General Chapter for inclusion; such houses, however, continued to be visited by bishops rather than Cistercian abbots, and modified their customs somewhat to allow practices of apostolic poverty. Overall Lester indicates that we shouldn't assume older orders like the Cistercians have nothing to do with the apostolic poverty movements of the twelfth century.

Katherine French finished up, building on her work on medieval English parishes to situate Margery Kempe in her parish. French pointed out that Margery is often discussed as an anomaly, eccentric, utterly unique, and that in fact she was very active in her parish church and shared similar concerns with many other women and men of her parish. This was also a really interesting paper.

The following discussion was good, although most of it blurs together for me; but I found all of the papers to be quite thought-provoking, potentially having ramifications for my own research.

AHA report 2

2009-01-06T09:23:00.002-05:00

As I reported yesterday, I attended just two sessions.

The first session I attended, on Friday afternoon, was on "Old and New Classics." It was a continuation of similarly-themed sessions at previous AHAs. I had attended the one last year, I think it was, which had a huge crowd. By comparison, attendance at this one seemed a little sparse. Still, the conversation was fairly lively. Each member of the panel proposed a classic work of medieval history (admittedly two of them dealt with a classic theme, instead). Daniel Bornstein's classic was Robert Brentano's Two Churches, and he raised the possibility that a classic may forestall rather than inspire imitation. Ruth Mazo Karras discussed classics of medieval women's history, focusing on the essay collection Women in Medieval Society edited by Susan Mosher Stuard. Carol Lansing instead talked about integrating heresy into broader histories, discussing Herbert Grundmann and Lester Little's work, among others; John Van Engen focused on Haskins's Renaissance of the Twelfth Century and how the idea has become a fairly standard part of most medievalists' thinking. Session chair Dan Smail--making a last-minute entrance--said he'd like to see a future session focusing on classic articles rather than monographs, which seems a worthy idea.

The discussion was wide-ranging enough that I won't attempt to convey my sketchy notes: it included specific responses to all of the speakers, as well as a broader conversation about undergraduate and graduate teaching. I hope this series of sessions continues; I think it has sparked some very interesting conversations, especially useful for younger medievalists. Since I work on neither England nor Italy, I wasn't familiar with Brentano's book, for example, but it sounds well worth a look.

AHA report 1

2009-01-05T14:24:00.002-05:00

Fresh year, fresh post.

I am back from AHA. I succeeded in my plan of abandoning the conference for significant periods to see some of the city, with the able assistance of Dr. Notorious and others. I had two job interviews, both of which seemed to go well (at least from my point of view). I had useful conversations with a number of people and was able to catch up with some friends.

I also managed to see some sessions--just two, but both good. More on those later after I've had a little time to process my thoughts.

Throwing in the towel

2008-12-22T12:36:00.004-05:00

For the last several weeks, I keep hoping to have time to read some stuff and post on it, or write some stuff and post on that, and I hereby give up. Between the holidays, the end-of-term grading, and the preparation for two job interviews in January, I just do not have time for research right now. I therefore acknowledge that posting will be light or nonexistent for the next couple of weeks, and will attempt to resume in January.

Just another December...

2008-12-15T16:23:00.002-05:00

Classes are done. All pending assignments are graded. I'll get final papers on Wednesday. I don't write a lot of comments on final papers, since students don't get them back (students can request more detailed feedback from me, which I'll return to them next semester), so I hope I can power through them and get the grading done by Christmas.

Meanwhile I'm trying to alternate between writing and preparing for job interviews. This requires preparing sample syllabi, so my desk is half buried under books: books for research, books I might use in my class next semester, books I might use in some hypothetical class I might teach in the future, books that just looked interesting. The books used to be in neat stacks, but now the stacks have collapsed into a heap.