Blogenspiel

Writing Group, Week 10

2011-08-05T13:01:00.002-04:00

Hi all --

the writing post is HERE!!!! AT MY NEW BLOG!!!

Ok, this just pisses me right off

2011-08-05T08:56:00.001-04:00

So I went to Wordpress to start a new Blogenspiel.

Some [epithets deleted] stole my name.

Seriously.

I very much doubt it was the result of independent thought, and the address is blogenspiel, but the name of the blog is something else. Most annoying? It hasn't been updated in two years.

grrrr.

Nice way to get traffic, though.

thinking about moving

2011-08-04T17:08:00.000-04:00

So hi there, everybody. Because I am not happy with how Google keeps merging my identities, I am going to have to do one of two things, I think. Either I try to get a gmail account as ADM that is separate from my RL ID, or I move the blog to Wordpress (I think WP will let me have two different IDs for the same email, but if not, I'll just have to check two email accounts more regularly).

so if you have advice on importing a blogspot archive, please let me know. I will be pondering this.

What we say counts

2011-08-02T00:54:00.001-04:00

You know, I started writing this post, in part as a response to a couple of my senior male colleagues who have been showing their asses on the internet so much lately that they might as well wear kilts. And you know? I can't be arsed.

It makes no sense to try to prove that there is no Unified Muslim Plan for total Jihad by Migration. It also makes no sense to try to prove that Muslims *don't* want others to convert.

BUT

converting the unbeliever is also part of the Christian mission. Christians are still flocking all over the world to barely industrialized countries and trying to convert the natives. Why is going into a country as missionaries, not planning on settling permanently, and making new Christians NOT jihad, but Muslims who move to new countries, taking their families and settling down and joining a new society MUST be waging jihad?

Jon Dresner offers a possible answer, and it has to do with colonialism and imperialism and how they affect the imperialists

Reboots, sf, and history

2011-07-31T12:24:00.001-04:00

In response to my last post, which was in part on the latest version of Captain America, Bellebonnesage pointed out that Marvel had played a part in the Civil Rights movement, and in fact, The Howling Commandos were always an interracial unit. Even while watching the film, I did think about the Dirty Dozen, which had a less savory plot device for bringing Jim Brown into the film. I think this is specifically where the current reboot lets us down: there is no explanation. In fact, I think this is one of the joys and problems of reboots in general. Reboots are deliberate erasures of story lines and attempts to take a story along a different timeline in the way that sf has played with for years.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I liked the Star Trek reboot, despite having been a fairly serious Trekkie in my much younger days (Yes, there was a time when I could probably have told you the name of an episode based on a couple of hints, but not the episode number!). The reason why the reboot worked for me was that I was able to assume multiple parallel universes in which things play out differently. Also, I think it needs pointing out that, although the original Star Trek is part of my history, it is set in the future. It's not actually history, and very little of it takes place in our historical past. "City on the Edge of Forever" may play with the time paradox and the effects of one slight alteration, but it's always a 'what if' sort of episode. It's also, incidentally, interesting in that it reinforces the idea of Big Events and stuff that doesn't matter. If Kirk and McCoy save Edith Keeler, Hitler wins: see how one intervention in the timeline can have huge ripple effects? But what about the guy who sees Spock's ears? How does that affect him, and his family? Still, the big picture is clear: we shouldn't alter the past.

One might argue that the current Avengers movies are much like the Star Trek reboot. They are fantastic, they are pop culture, and they are clearly not history. This is one of the reasons that casting Idris Elba as Heimdall worked just fine for me -- the Marvel Aesir aren't gods, they're just guys with better technology who got treated like gods. Not that some people could figure that out. But it is because some people can't figure it out that I think Captain America's producers goofed.

Captain America is a superhero. He's sf -- after all, super-strength imparted through an experimental serum and Stark technology? But he's also set in the historical past. Obviously, not entirely historical, because the Hydra is totally Marvel, and even there, this is a reboot of the organization.* But yes, our past, and our historical past. The Second World War is, with the Civil War, one of the few historical events/periods that modern US audiences (and given what I've seen of the UK A-Level exams, UK audiences) can get a grip on, in the sense that they know something about it. But what they know is often wrong. What they know is often misinformed, and leaves out things like Japanese internment camps, or segregation. So when an audience that doesn't know the history of the comic, or the comic's place in history -- and I think most people who see the films won't, because the numbers of people who learn about comic book characters via tv series and films as opposed to actual comic books (and they'd have to go digging backwards to get all of the original story line, which is only available via huge reprint volumes that cost a fortune) -- when they don't know, they are not likely to think about it. A couple of lines of exposition introducing the Howling Commandos could have made a big difference. In leaving out those lines, the reboot cut itself off from an important part of its own history, and rewrote ours.

*Also, despite the coolness of the Hydra logo, it's not a hydra, it's a skull-headed octopus! Hydra, people, NINE heads. If a villain is going to tell us that two heads grow back where you cut off one, then perhaps there should be multiple heads?

Is Captain America Supposed to Make Scared White Men Less Scared?

2011-07-30T11:40:00.000-04:00

[There are small spoilers.]

One of the things I've done since Leeds is catch up a little with friends I haven't seen for a month or more. So the other day, a few of us went to see Captain America. As a superhero film, I have to say, it was one of the better ones I've seen -- at least for a Marvel-based film. It was exciting, the script and acting were really good, the casting was great... and it was surprisingly not jingoistic. I think it escaped it by being mostly set during the Second World War, and by having a villain who was a breakaway from Hitler's special arcane & tech forces unit. I loved the odd sort of nostalgia, and the way that Captain America was clearly part of the war effort, but in a 'real guy embodying an emblem' sort of way.

There were really weird moments, though. Weird because, while the evocations of the period often felt real (inasmuch as comics can evoke historical feelings), there was just stuff that was wrong. Once Cap is in Europe, united with the 107th, he's got a multicultural band of brothers. I realize that there are lots of things in the film that aren't real, duh -- secret powers of the Aesir? References to Raiders of the Lost Ark? But when I saw the African-American GI, my initial thought was, "but aren't you supposed to be in a segregated unit? or a cook?" And when the Asian (presumably Japanese) guy says,"Hey, I'm from Fresno!" How could I not think, "Dude, then you'd be in Manzanar or the 442nd!" Better writers on race in America have already commented on this, and how it helps to erase the Civil Rights Movement, so I'm not going there. Yet?

Then last night, I was watching Luther, a BBC crime drama with the amazing Idris Elba. It's good, gritty, and dark. And one of the episodes I watched concerned a white guy who may or may not have been racially motivated. There was a scene where the killer, a skinny white man who was clearly into RPG stuff, went into a shop run by a South Asian man. He blatantly stuffed his bag from the shelves, watching the shopkeeper watch him and do nothing. And it made me think of all the astoundingly offensive and insane commentary surrounding Breivik, the mass murderer in Norway (short roundup here, because I will not link to assholes at Fox), whose ideas of jihad-by-migration have also been defended (although not linked to Breivik there at all) on an academic listserv I read and in fact more directly on that scholar's own blog. No, I'm not linking there, either. This came at a time where yet again, a bunch of misogynist comments were made, and then dismissed by senior male scholars when women complained about them.

The one thing that comes to mind over and over again is how scared and threatened a very large segment of the population must be. Where does this phenomenon of the scared white guy come from? Because that's what it is, isn't it? Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, and all the people who buy into their fear and hatred, and want to channel it back into attacking women and people of other races (and I don't really believe Islamophobia is as much about religion as it is about race -- Sharia law supports a lot of the sorts of positions Michelle Bachman does, after all...) -- how does that work? How is it that, when we look at who truly has power in Western society, we can see that it's mostly plutocratic power, and those who hold it are primarily white and primarily male. Actually, that should be reversed. Male and white. Male is still the biggest conveyer of privilege. In the West, white and straight and Christian are also up there. And yes, there are going to be trade-offs, and within certain communities, the balance will be different. A senior colleague and friend pointed out to me that one of the people who irritates me most on the list serv because he seems so entirely unable to recognize his male privilege, or even his academic privilege, probably can't see it that way because his self-perception is based on being a Jew and being held back by those with white privilege.

But back to the fear: why is it that we live in a world where there is a perception that power is a zero-sum game, and if it is shared, i.e., if we actually live in a world where people of color, people of other religions, people with other sexualities -- and, by the way, women -- share in the running of that world, it means something bad for white guys who think of themselves as Christian? And why is it that the people who fear (because I think we need to include the partners and families of these scared white men -- there are lots of women in the Tea Party, after all) cannot see that they have far more in common with the rest of us folks who live from paycheck to paycheck in multicultural land than they do with the people running things and asking us to pay the bills?

I expect in some ways it all comes down to entitlement, and not the good sort provided by the NHS, or Social Security. If you're used to privilege, and that privilege seems threatened, then all you have to fall back on is a feeling of entitlement. And if power is not a zero-sum game, then privilege kind of is. At least, once privilege -- something that is grounded only by means of historically having power without thinking about where it comes from -- is challenged, then people have to compete for the same jobs, places at university, etc. In fact, a level playing field doesn't feel all that level when it means you don't have the up-hill advantage. When you've never had to share, even giving away a small portion can feel like a huge loss. Being accustomed to privilege, especially the unrecognized kind, leads to feelings of entitlement that don't hold water for me. And I guess entitlement means not having to be scared, or think about one's own responsibilities to others. So a world in which a token African-American or Nisei soldier helps to show that, hey, we've always got along together just fine is a world that says, "see? you don't have to think about reality or question your privilege." It's a world where you don't have to be scared white men.

Of course, lots of us already live in a world where you don't have to be scared white men. It's full of interesting people with different ideas about life and nature and how the world works, and conversations that include bits of different languages, and really, a lot better food. And you know? the doors aren't always wide open, because sometimes assholes with guns show up. But if you are willing to live here with the rest of us, it's a pretty nice place.

This year, I remembered my bloggiversary: Blogenspiel is NINE!

2011-07-28T11:12:00.000-04:00

Yep, it's nine years old.

Ok, really it's a little less, since I didn't start blogging in earnest for a couple of months, but still, NINE!

A lot has changed, a lot has stayed the same. I have gone from being a married person who had stopped working in academia and trying to get back in to a divorced person with a fairly secure (I think) academic position on the other side of the country and a house of my own. I met someone and fell in love, and that didn't work out so well, and the breakup (even though it turns out neither of us have completely moved on, but there is no possible 'back together', either) just about broke me. Didn't blog much about that one, though. Went through another year I didn't blog much about, last year, because once I'd recovered from the personal crisis, I landed in a professional one that is still trying to break me. I am torn between 80% of being in a job in a place I love, where I want to be, and 20% of Giant Black Hole of Dread when I think about actually going in to work, because they don't give you a kevlar vest with quasi-tenure. This year's goal is to reduce the 20% and, more importantly, not to allow it to ruin the 80% or the steps forward I've been making in writing and teaching cool new stuff.

That, and I need to get in better shape and pay off some bills :-)

Other things that have changed:

I've kept a lot of my old blogfriends, and they have become RL friends as well. But some, like New Kid, have changed careers. I've made new friends through blogging, and those friends have been as instrumental as the old ones in helping me see myself as a competent person who actually has a place at the academic table. The only disadvantage is that, as I manage to be a better scholar, I seem to have less time to read blogs, and feel I've lost touch with some of you, and that makes me sad. With any luck, the getting in better shape will also mean more energy to arrange my days better and to faff a bit less. I know that I want to write more on the blog in the coming year, because it really does keep me in practice.

Things that have not changed:

I am still horrified by some of my colleagues and their attitudes towards academia, their inability to recognize their privilege, and sometimes their completely insane hate-mongering.

I am still horrified by the governments of the US and UK, and their attitudes towards higher ed, the thrall in which corporate interests hold them, and the new ways they find to sell us out every day.

I still detest everything Murdoch and, although I do not wish it, I would not weep if I heard that Palin, Bachman, Cantor, Beck, Limbaugh, Buchanan, and others of that ilk were killed by buses, polar bears, or (and this would be a sort of justice) a failure of the infrastructure they have worked so hard to destroy.

I also have no great love for the centrists of the supposed left, and in some ways think they are worse.

I will still be blogging about academic life things, even if talking about my own is too difficult at the moment -- and this is also because of a change that has occurred, i.e., I'm far more pseudonymous than anonymous these days, and I don't want people trying to figure out which RL people I may or may not be talking about.

So... in the next few days, I hope to be posting about strategies for keeping up with scholarly stuff while dealing with a heavy teaching and service load; William Pannapacker's latest iteration of what's wrong with higher ed; a long overdue review of a slightly erotic novella written by a colleague and other medievalist; faculty buy-in... and some stuff I can't remember because it's hot here in Dabbaville, and I can't sleep in the hot.

In the meantime, here is a picture from my summer:

Writing group Check-in week 8

2011-07-22T02:18:00.000-04:00

Well, I did get my paper done, and then took a few days off to visit with an old friend who lives on the other side of the Pennines from Leeds. Then home yesterday to a pile of admin stuff. So OBE has hit again -- that and not counting on things like travel and forgetting that I owed my dean a pile of work. So that needs doing Saturday, and the paper will have to get sent on Saturday. Then I will be taking stock of what needs doing before classes start again. The long-term goal for me has stayed relatively the same: I've finished two conference papers, and am trying to get drafts sent to a journal and a volume editor by the end of August. But in the meantime, there is definitely some shuffling going on, and I will absolutely need to take a few days off somewhere, just to sleep.

In the meantime, I'll be adding some more thoughts on recalibrating in ways that don't mean dropping things entirely. That and why I set goals that don't include any time to spare or time to spend resting. In the meantime, I am wondering -- What are people's teaching loads, and how much time do you spend on research during the academic year? I ask because I think I overload myself because of the fear that I only have the summer to get things done, and that's probably why I don't plan any holiday time. Ever.

This week's goals:

ABDMama [Draft of an article MS]: begin cutting, 1,000 words this week
ADM [conference paper for Leeds; revision of paper after]: Get paper submitted to MFF
Cly [revise article for publication & draft chapter for book]: Finish revisions
Dame Eleanor [Revising a conference paper into article MS]: Keep expanding; including actual words on the page (NPhD: got a word count in mind?)
Digger [drafts of two book chapters]: Finish Mash chapter – for real!
Dr. Koshary [work on book MS]: Excused absence: moving this week
Eileen [First draft of a dissertation chapter]: finish current section & map out final section
Erika [Review-ready draft of an article MS]: edit 1 page/ day, write 500 words on conf. paper or freewrite 500 words on second article
Firstmute [chapter draft; send out article]: get back to chapter draft, with a daily writing goal of 3 hours a day
Frog Princess [rewrite Chapter 3; get another draft of the introduction]: make a plan for the remainder of the summer; start dealing with chapter 3, and go through the papers of a subject held at the university library for relevant information
Gillian [an article that needs writing]: planned incommunicado for another week
Godiva [First draft of diss. chap.]: write 500 words/day & basic outline of whole chapter
Jeff [Review-ready draft of completed dissertation]: Get a version of ch. 2 ready to send to committee
Kit: [Write the first draft of a dissertation chapter]: ((specific goal for this week??))
NWGirl [Revising a conference paper into an article MS]: draft section 3 and conclusion
Sapience [Prepare presentation of full dissertation for department]: Keep working on the presentation/ introduction, especially in terms of organization; shift to revisions of the main work if feedback comes in.
Scatterwriter [Complete expansion/revision of an article MS]: write up final point suggested by reviewers, then make last passes through the manuscript as a whole
Scholastic Mama [Revising a conference paper into an article MS]: excused absence for faculty seminar, but will use the time to do some reading
Susan [Revise & polish two chapters of a book MS]: either continue on the current (interrupted) chapter, or go spend a few days on the introduction
Tigs [Completed diss draft]: finish edits on chs. 3-6; complete draft of ch. 7 (NPhD: wow – that seems like a lot for a single week…)
Travelia [prepare book MS for review]: take stock of book ms and create a master to-do list of necessary and desired revisions, making detailed notes on the strengths and weaknesses of each chapter
Zabeel [Complete draft of an article]: one-week holiday planned

Awaiting report:

Audie [working on transitioning a dissertation chapter to an article]*
J. Otto Pohl [Complete draft of 2/3-finished book MS]*
Jen [Revising conference paper into article MS]*
Matilda [Draft of a publishable paper]*
Mel [Finish dissertation!]*
Zcat abroad [write an article]*

Leeds Reaction 2

2011-07-19T12:39:00.000-04:00

Went to lunch today with a friend who needs to come to Leeds more so he can talk about Viking-y things (and grace the disco with his presence), and Friend Who Needs a New Pseudonym (so, currently, FWNNP), and told them about it, at their request. It was sort of nice, because it reminded me of some of the highlights and less-than-highlights, so that I can start writing them up. Still unable to say how my own paper went, although FWNNP liked the one report he'd seen. But then, he liked the paper, too, which he read in a less-polished draft.

But other than that, I was able to tell them about the Really Not Fun experience of giving the time signal, then giving it again, and then again, and having the speaker tell me he was finishing -- only to go into another section. Good thing the original moderator was not there, is all I can say. But, since you all know how I feel about this, let me just say it again: DO NOT DO THIS. EVER. Not if you are famous, not if you are a post-grad, not if you are in the middle. You are taking time from other people. Also, you really aren't doing yourself any favors. If you go over by more than about 2 minutes, people stop paying attention, because they are counting. that's right. You lose your audience. You especially lose the audience if what you are saying is already on a slide in front of them. And, if you are trying to impress, there's a chance you won't, because people will remember the behavior more than they will a brilliant (or even weak, I think) paper.

And I told them about the paper that was pretty much all about how one historian had got it wrong, over and over again. That one was really pretty fun. And the clothing papers, which I will say something about. And the really good one in the session before mine, which was well-delivered by someone speaking in a third language, well-constructed, and really just plain interesting.

I got to tell them about the disco, which suffered from poorer musical choices this year than in the past (really? American Pie when people are still sober? or, actually, ever?), and the very nice people who were there and who they would have liked to have seen. And then we had an extended conversation about "Scandinavian" burials in Ireland. Very extended. Is "Scandinavian" indicative of location? or of ethnicity? both? neither? When immigrants do things that commemorate their cultural traditions (but may not actually be those traditions, but things that are sort of blown up beyond recognition), how do we treat that?

And then we talked more about archaeology. Or rather, they did, and I interjected on occasion, because as I told them, I managed to survive a grad seminar where we talked about onion-topped fibulae for over a week, I think, and can vaguely tell the difference between the best-known fibulae (or brooch, if you'd rather) types. I can even read archaeological reports and understand them pretty well. But really? Not so much my thing. On the other hand, it's nice to have been updated on the whole NO! it's not that! it's an SBT! thing, even if it reminds me that I need to read a bit more on the 5th C.

And now, I'm off home tomorrow. Sad to leave the UK, happy to be going home to cats and friends, sad to not be working in the BL, happy that the Nice Librarian has offered to let me work in a nice space over there, so that I don't have to spend any more time in my department than is necessary. Yes, I think that this year, I will be playing the role of the absentee Department Chair: on campus, available to students and administrators, but not actually in my office unless there are plenty of people around.

Leeds Reaction #1

2011-07-15T18:55:00.001-04:00

First off, my Leeds was a bit odd. I never felt I hit my stride till maybe the last day. Normally, I ask questions -- in fact, I have been accused of asking awkward questions. This time, I felt very disconnected, and had a horrible time processing information. I think part of it was that many of the session moderators paused for questions after each paper, and so I didn't have the time to ruminate as I usually do. Anyway, it was a far more difficult Leeds than I expected. The best part was that I got to talk to some really nice and intelligent people, and even though I felt more imposter-like than usual, there were moments that inspired me. One was Guy Halsall's paper, which confronted outright the issue of historians whose work seemed, willingly or unwittingly, to lend fuel to (especially) right-wing political agendas, particularly those that connected immigration to barbarian/Roman relations.

It was especially interesting to me because it bears on an internal conflict I regularly confront. I absolutely agree with him -- yet I am also very aware of the fact that I try very hard not to engage with the current political atmosphere when I teach. Except that I do, in some ways -- it's probably not a coincidence that I frame my surveys around issues like the relationship of the subject/citizen to lord/state, and on ways in which different cultures saw legal status, for example.

It also made me think about what it was that made me uncomfortable about my own paper. I was, and am, very certain that we need to re-think certain basic assumptions about the history of women. But I also do believe Judith Bennett is right about the patriarchal equilibrium. So I honestly worry that, by challenging people to stop simply assuming the oppression of women and the absence of female agency as a starting point, I might also be giving the false impression that I don't think they could be true. Ok -- I'm not entirely sure that "oppressed" is a helpful or good word for the early MA, because it seems to me to be a word best employed when there is a clear understanding of rights being restricted against one's will.

When I argue that we need to understand the situation of women differently, it doesn't mean that I think women's situations were better, or worse. I just mean that we should think about imposing our own values on the past in ways that might not have made sense to the people living there. But Guy's post hits at the underlying problem, and it is one I deal with regularly: to a non-specialist reader, or student, I can see how my approach could reinforce the opinions of people inclined towards anti-feminism and perhaps even give them excuses for dismissing the inequalities of the early MA. And that's not what I want. I don't want them to say, "oh, but look -- women DID have these legal rights we thought they didn't, so obviously we can dismiss any silly feminist arguments." I want people to ask questions so they can see that sometimes things look like one thing, but have a different meaning in a different context. And I think that that should make people more aware of feminist issues (in this case, but really, pick an issue and you can make the argument). But the sessions helped me to put a name to the nagging worry that people will think I am asking them to throw the proverbial baby out with the proverbial bathwater, or even that they will try to find evidence to support a right-wing view that feminism is somehow a bad thing, or a lie.

hmmm.

Done!

2011-07-14T12:34:00.000-04:00

More on Leeds later, but rumor has it that things went reasonably well. I was at least able to walk into my session with the knowledge that one colleague had reviewed the draft and liked it. More on the very interesting papers I heard later, and again, I've still got a little bit of the high I always get from talking to really smart people with beer added.

But now, a nap. Apparently I am being taken somewhere by a friend in an hour or so.

At Leeds IMC

2011-07-11T03:49:00.000-04:00

And not bloody ready AT ALL.

If you are a RL friend, you have permission to bug me. If you don't really know me yet, please forgive the fact that I may be a bit rude to anybody who wants to talk until I can talk without worrying that my paper -- which is now something like a paper -- needs finishing.

Writing Group Check-In

2011-07-08T03:04:00.000-04:00

Hi all --

Well, I am still being somewhat Overtaken By Events, some of which are academic, and some of which are down to a lot of odd things happening in my personal life that I will not go into here. One of the academic event is something I will come back to as soon as the paper is actually finished. I am heading off to the BL as soon as I post this.

But here is one of the things I've realized: when all the time you have for research is the summer, it's possibly not the best idea to use all of that time for a paper you might have been able to get done at home with Interlibrary loan... Also, in my case, I have to remember that reading for a paper is not the same as reading to actually read and learn. I can't read everything I want in its entirety. I wish I could. I should. But there is only so much time, and I always forget that serious reading takes practice -- and I'm out of practice most summers, because I spend most of the academic year reading for classes that are out of my strongest areas of expertise, or completely new (pirates. not doing that again...)

So expect me to write something I hope will be useful about not making the same summer (or for some people, research leave) mistakes over and over. In the meantime, maybe you could also share some ideas on that?

Thanks, and here are your last week's goals, compiled by Notorious, whose super-organized Type A personality is a godsend at the moment!

Writing group week 6 goals:

ABDMama [Draft of an article MS]: Pull sections from diss chapter to help fill out the article; work at least an hour each day.
ADM [conference paper for Leeds; revision of paper after]: finish Leeds paper…or else!
Audie [working on transitioning a dissertation chapter to an article]: reread all secondary sources and current chapter draft; map out/outline article
Dame Eleanor [Revising a conference paper into article MS]: No specific goal posted.
Digger [drafts of two book chapters]: continue working on book chapter; flesh out conference paper outline and start getting image permissions for book
Dr. Koshary [work on book MS]: finish a rough draft of chapter 4
Eileen [First draft of a dissertation chapter]: finish previous goal of 4K words on theory/quantitative data
Erika [Review-ready draft of an article MS]: 500 new words a day, plus clean up one old page per day
Firstmute [chapter draft; send out article]: Finish article draft & send to advisor.
Frog Princess [Review-ready draft of completed dissertation]: Finsh introduction & compile everything
Gillian [an article that needs writing]: Detour for final revision of Leeds paper
Godiva [First draft of diss. chap.]: Write 500 words/day
J. Otto Pohl [Complete draft of 2/3-finished book MS]: completely finish the deportation section
Jen [Revising conference paper into article MS]: finish the current section, writing 400 words each morning.
Kit: [Write the first draft of a dissertation chapter]: write 500 words a day
Matilda [Draft of a publishable paper]: small parts of three separate tasks, with deadlines for each in mind
Mel [Finish dissertation!]: Finish discussion section of chapter 4
NWGirl [Revising a conference paper into an article MS]: Finish section 1 of article & draft section 2
Sapience [diss chapter (done! ahead of schedule!) Prepare presentation of full dissertation for department]: start outlining presentation
Scatterwriter [Complete expansion/revision of an article MS]: start last passes through complete book to make sure argument is complete; begin drafting cover letter to editor
Scholastic Mama [Revising a conference paper into an article MS]: complete week 5 of WJA book
Susan [Revise & polish two chapters of a book MS]: On vacation for two weeks
Tigs [Completed diss draft]: finish the legal section of ch. 2, do a first round of edit on the culture section, and break down what else needs to be done to finish off the chapter
Travelia [Write two conference papers]: give a talk on topic at one conference; looking ahead to the following week to prepare book MS for review [NPhD: Travelia, do you want to add this MS to your overall goals?]
What Now [Polished book proposal]: trying to figure out what to do when a project is scooped
Zabeel [Draft first two sections of new article]: read three books and one article; continue daily writing goals of 3 hrs/day
Zcat abroad [write an article]: Plan out structure of article, and re-read base text for notes

Awaiting report:

Bardiac [Review-ready article MS]*
Caleb Woodbridge [MA thesis]**
Cly [revise article for publication & draft chapter for book]**
Jason [First draft of a dissertation chapter]**
Jeff [Review-ready draft of completed dissertation]*
Ms McD: Revising a conference paper into an article MS***
My Museology: redraft three dissertation chapters***
Ro [MS revision (NPhD: article?)]*

following GH

2011-07-07T10:10:00.000-04:00

So I suppose I am both happy and semi-annoyed to find what has become an impetus for this paper laid out so clearly on p. 321 ff of Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian Gaul.

I'm in very good company, at least.

The real question is, what are we going to do about it?

Blogger meet-up at Leeds

2011-07-07T07:01:00.000-04:00

Hello, all --

For those going to the International Medieval Congress at Leeds next week, Jonathan Jarrett and Magistra et Mater are organising a bloggers'meetup. This will be 6-8 pm, Stables Pub at the Weetwood site on Tuesday 12th July. For anyone who has not met any of us before, Magistra will be the tall middle-aged woman with short brown hair, glasses and a faintly bemused look. Jon has long black hair and will be talking enthusiastically. I am the medium-sized (I suppose -- not particularly tall, nor short, nor thin, but not actually plump), middle-aged (because I am certainly older than Magistra and Jon), and blonde with a sort of bob-pageboy haircut, likely in something brown-and-white or black-and-white and skirt-ish.

An example of why I am writing this paper

2011-07-04T10:07:00.001-04:00

"Allegations that widows took fraudulent vows in order to remain free to lead a life of sexual abandon leave no doubt that the cloistering of widows represented an integral part of the church's effort to enforce monogamy. As this program met with success and the conjugal family emerged as the basic unit of society, the function of sheltering unmarried ladies, formerly assumed by extended families, was taken over by the convents. As in other spheres of life, her too the royal family led the way. Louis the Pious not only sent his notorious sisters to nunneries but also installed his widowed mother-in-law as abbess at Chelles." SF Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, 105

Granted, Wemple is sort of old news these days. But the ghost of this sort of scholarship is alive and well, I think. There's plenty out there that contradicts this interpretation, which rests in part on a feminist reading of the role of the church in the Early Middle Ages and indeed, on a function of monogamy that may or may not have been entirely true at the time. Most importantly, I think, is a more recent idea that we see in, for example, essays in de Jong's Topographies of Power, LeJan's Femmes, pouvoir et societé, and even in Goldberg's biography of Louis the German and Althoff's work on the Ottonians. That those all assume a degree of agency that Wemple doesn't is very important. That only one of them is in English is one of the reasons that I'm writing this stupid paper: despite the fact that more and more Anglophones seem to be reading German these days, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of synthesizing going on, or at least not on a level that is reaching more 'general' audiences. We have reached a point, I think, where we are no longer explicitly arguing against older assumptions (and I am not sure that we ever really did, because that would mean -- shock! horror! -- engaging in women's or even feminist history, which might undermine our standing as real historians who work with charters and stuff). Rather, we are arguing for a much more interesting and nuanced picture of women's roles in early medieval society that is still haunted by unresolved scholarly approaches.

Or maybe not. Stay tuned.

Writing Group Check-In up at Notorious, PhD's

2011-07-01T05:45:00.000-04:00

Hey all -- this week's check-in is up here. My week has been good in some ways (talked to people about the paper, got totally freaked out, looked at abstract again and realized that the paper I keep thinking I'm "settling" for is the one I said I was going to write -- I just now think it's a lame paper.

But I'm going to write the damned thing.

Writing Group Check-In

2011-06-24T05:56:00.004-04:00

Hello, WG!

Member Susan has just walked over to remind me to post so that she can update! The illustrious Notorious, PhD has kindly sent on the list of participants and their goals from last week (below), so that I can check things off as they come in. Please, everyone, don't forget to also post your goals for next week, as well as any changes to your longer-term goals.

WHAT? Changes? Well, yes. And, in fact, that's what I want to talk about this week. Well, that and how to juggle projects. The thing is, projects and priorities sometimes get shifted, either by necessity or from opportunity. So, for example, when I came back from Berks, I had been given A Job To Do, i.e., to submit my paper to a journal by today. That's something I really hadn't counted on, especially with the admin work I meant to finish when at home, that I still need to get to Superdean. So now I have three immediate projects: a paper submission; assessment reports; and my Leeds paper. Also, I'm in the UK, and need to make those things happen while juggling being a decent houseguest (rather than just someone who crashes at a friend's place), visiting family, dealing with a rather extensive commute (I'm staying somewhere between West Drayton and Uxbridge, i.e., about 75 minutes from the BL, and actually making the best use of my time in the BL.

I'm fairly sure you all have similar things happening. Some of those things are just life. I'm not going to talk about them. Instead, I am going to say a little something about juggling the writing projects in the time set aside for work. First? I'm not so good at it. I haven't got my paper ready to submit, because I really felt it was important to get a bit of a grasp on the Leeds paper first, and get myself into some sort of work routine this week. No work on Monday, because it was a flying day. But I've been trying to do reading that will benefit both projects. I think this is one of the things that many of us forget: sometimes, we can work on two things at once, if only because things are related. So on Wednesday, I opened up my Leeds paper project on Scrivener, and started a project file for the article. As I've read, I've found some things I needed to add to one, some that help for the other, some that apply to both. The general citations, notes, and tagging have gone into Zotero, and then I've added about four hundred words to the Berks paper and written about 1100 words for Leeds (although about 2/3 of that is rambly notes that won't make it into the final paper).

So yeah, trying to work on two things at once is one way of doing things. Another thing I've been doing is taking a few minutes at the end of the afternoon to take stock of what I've done, make notes for things I want to do in particular (books to order, etc.) and what I haven't got done. Then, I try to look at that list again in the morning. It's helping, I think, although not as much as I'd like. This coming week, I want to start adding to that notes on setting aside time to do certain things, so that I can make sure that projects aren't dropping off the radar.

What is both helpful and difficult here is that I have three deadlines. Today (missed, but I will be in the library tomorrow and hope to finish the draft then); next week (or my dean will kill me); and something like the 10th (because that's when I get on the train for Leeds). Keeping those in mind is also very important. So -- deadlines that can be re-scheduled sometimes; taking stock and making sure to make and log progress on each project; constant re-evaluation of each project. Let's see how it goes next week.

In the meantime, how are the rest of you doing? (I'll put a strike through last week where applicable and list what you did, and your goal for next week)

ABDMama [Draft of an article MS]: complete going through the primary and secondary sources identified this week

ADM General goal: [conference paper for Leeds; revision of paper after]; Last week's goal: ~~work on Leeds paper~~ added c. 400 words to Berks paper, wrote about 1100 words for Leeds, read several books on property and land transactions; Next week: [submit Berks paper w/ revisions; get a better handle on Leeds paper with detailed outline -- I'm traveling for 2-3 days, but part will be spent conferring with Magistra et Mater, who knows things about my topic, so hope to have about the same amount of writing, but much more polished and usable]

Bardiac: [Review-ready article MS*] [out of town, but wrote up a work plan] [this week: follow work plan?] NB from ADM -- a little more detail might be helpful!

Caleb Woodbridge [MA thesis]: No goal submitted for next week [NPhD: these are important to keep you accountable and moving forward]

Cly [revise article for publication & draft chapter for book]: Incorporate article changes and have skeleton of book chapter

Dame Eleanor [Revising a conference paper into article MS]: need to finish the conference paper this week, but put in 20-30 minutes a day taking notes or outlining the main project.

Digger: [drafts of two book chapters] [This week: edit chapter, incl. tables; 1 abstract written and submitted for a conference in Jan; an outline for 2nd conference paper]

Dr. Koshary [Review-ready article MS]: "slap together" narrow draft

Eileen [First draft of a dissertation chapter]: another 4k words integrating data theory, complete with clean citations

Erika: Review-ready draft of an article MS* [This week -- finish reading primary sources, add 1-2 pp of writing to draft]

Firstmute [draft of the final dissertation chapter]: (small shift in priorities) [This week -- have the article in shape to send to my advisor by Friday. I'll have a secondary goal of putting in 1 hr a day on the chapter]

Frog Princess [Review-ready draft of completed dissertation]: produce review-ready revision of current chapter, and to write a workable first draft of the introduction… thus resulting in the first complete draft of the whole dissertation [NPhD: Woot!! Go, Frogprincess!!!]

Gillian [an article that needs writing]: detour to finish Leeds paper

Godiva [First draft of diss. chap.]: Read one long narrative source

J. Otto Pohl [Complete draft of 2/3-finished book MS]:[make up for lost writing time] [NPhD suggestion: a more concrete weekly goal to help keep you on track; ADM thinks this is very necessary -- a word count meter is good, but you can have one of those without a writing group!]

Jason [First draft of a dissertation chapter]: Traveling, so will commit to squeezing in 3 writing sessions during the week, plus 90 minutes of reading each travel day; also create a daily work schedule for New Summer Place. [NPhD: hooray for having a summer writing retreat! Can we all come?]

Jeff [Review-ready draft of completed dissertation]: at workshop, but trying to revise Nth chapter

Jen [Revising conference paper into article MS]: Traveling for wedding, so goal is just to write a little every day.

Kit: [Need LT goal -- can't find it] [500 words a day]

Matilda [Draft of a publishable paper]: work through week 5 section of WYJA; working hard on the draft I was asked, which needs quite a bit of reading, and its deadline is coming. While doing these tasks, I am working continuously on my own article. I will. (Note from ADM: try to come up with concrete objectives, rather than "working hard" -- it's something that really does help when juggling projects]

NWGirl [Revising a conference paper into an article MS]: "Write first" [NPhD: sing it, sister!], with a goal of completing at least one section of the paper.

Ro [MS revision (NPhD: article?)]: Traveling, but continue readings in primary sources, writing up notes of insights gained and significant detail seen so far

Sapience [diss chapter]: work on article abstract for a book CFP and job market materials while waiting for feedback from advisor

Sara [Revision of research exam]: Read two articles & incorporate them into draft

Scatterwriter [Complete expansion/revision of an article MS]: identify more concepts to focus on and to write up at least one of them (if not more)

Scholastic Mama [Revising a conference paper into an article MS]: Read a couple of things by Abelard to fill in a gap in the evidence.

Susan [Revise & polish two chapters of a book MS]: [Last week: ~~Complete draft of the current chapter and sketch out what needs doing on the next~~] [this week -- two amorphous but essential summaries of brosder bodies of information]

Tigs [Completed diss draft]: Rewrite legal section of ch. 2, and finish initial round of edits on pop culture section

Travelia [Write two conference papers]: finished most of one paper, finishing up and conferencing this week.

What Now [Polished book proposal]: idea stepped on; taking a week to regroup/rethink

Zabeel [Draft first two sections of new article]: Again, my focus is on working consistently. It's going to be a reading week -- Mon and Tues in the BL, then some close work on primary sources again working toward getting a more complete draft er... drafted.

Zcat abroad [write two articles]: Traveling [NPhd: Okay, but next week, give us a concrete goal, yes?]

Awaiting report:

Anastasia: a book chapter to write for an edited volume**

Audie: working on transitioning a dissertation chapter to an article**

Avery: Draft of an article MS***

Historydoll: Convert dissertation chapter into an article*

Mel*

Ms McD: Revising a conference paper into an article MS*

My Museology: redraft three dissertation chapters*

theswain: editing & rewriting; produce new reviews/summaries for New Year's work**

UPDATE: Hi all -- still updating goals, but have some inputted now!

Chasing the ghost of von Ranke

2011-06-22T12:53:00.000-04:00

So I'm writing a Leeds paper about a ghost. It's the ghost of "everybody says" or "people used to say" or "common knowledge." It's a paper that came out of a few conversations, conversations where people said, "But X couldn't do Y," or,"But that wasn't supposed to happen," or, "but you can't trust this source because it: isn't what you think it is; is possibly (or is) a forgery; is not the original, but a 12th C recreation; probably didn't have that witness list (which by the way might not really be a witness list) attached to the original, etc."

So I thought, "let's try to figure out what it is we know, and what it is we don't, and who told us this stuff that is common knowledge." I thought I needed to know this because not to know it, and more importantly, not to discuss the historiography and the arguments scholars have had before sticking in my own oar, seemed shoddy work.

Then I talked to a colleague who said, "if it's old and obviously wrong, I just ignore it! Why document that someone else argued against what you are now going to demonstrate?" Well, that's a good question. I think that we need to trace the arguments a bit, if only because people like me, who are to some extent self-taught, would like a bit of help.

But the more I look at things, including articles by a single scholar that say one thing 20 years ago, then suddenly don't, and perhaps mention the reason for their change of heart in a very small footnote, the more I wonder if I have to worry quite as much.

So my paper will be methodological, and will likely focus on the evidence for what seems to have been true.

And the conclusion? History is complicated. Carolingian history is packed with people who say one thing and do another. Theory is fine, but practice often diverges from it. Basically, if you are a historian who does the job at all well, you'll use the evidence honestly, draw your conclusions, and point out where we have to use the sources with big chunks of salt, and why.

It's not going to be wie es eigentlich gewesen. But I think (or at least this is how I am justifying it to myself) that sometimes, the best we can do is present the evidence, explain why we think it means what it does and how it fits in, and admit there are big holes that other people may interpret differently. Sometimes, it's not about knowing the answers, I think. Sometimes, good history is about pointing out where and why there are questions we might not be able to answer. Or so I hope.

In the BL

2011-06-22T05:21:00.000-04:00

Working. Glancing around the room, I see a colleague from St Andrews and someone else Historian on the Edge has mentioned a few times. And regular reader Susan should be here later.

In the meantime, reading a little Warren Brown and a lot of Wendy Davies, et al.

Must organize time, though. The problem with being here is that I just want to gorge on books that I can't normally access, and really, I need to focus on particular projects. Speaking of which, I need to look at the Leeds programme and see if I'm talking for 20 minutes or 15!

Going down to Cambridge next week to see Magistra...

Later, gang.

Let the panic begin

2011-06-17T01:14:00.000-04:00

Well, I leave for London in two days. I have promised to finish my admin stuff Real Soon Now -- and that really means by the end of next week. I also promised a group of fairly intimidating women scholars that I would submit my paper from Berks to an Actual Journal by the end of next week. In the meanwhile, I am beginning to panic about my Leeds paper and why the hell I thought it would be a good idea. Just kill me now.

At least I will be in the place of peace that is the BL by Tuesday...

In the meantime, I am trying to get together my life, my house, and denying it all by watching Season One of Being Human.

Final Berks Post (what I love about the Berks)

2011-06-12T18:51:00.001-04:00

All right... so despite my grumpiness at feeling marginalized because of my scholarly interests, which grumpiness increased when I overheard the following comments:

"I need one of those handouts -- the one with the funny writing" (for two incredibly normal-to-ANY-pre-modernist documents)

"...at least you can ignore all that irrelevant medieval stuff" ('irrelevant' definitely modified medieval rather than stuff)

Despite that, I enjoyed the Berks as I have before. There were tons of cool people, and the medievalists (and some other pre-modernists) who were there at least had the chance to see each other and hang out together a bit more than we would have at the Zoo. There was an antiquity paper, two (TWO!) Carolingian papers, a couple of charter papers, and some later stuff. The nice thing about being a medievalist (especially if you're one like me who started in the 19th C, then moved to Tudor, then to Classics, then forward to Anglo-Norman before settling in the EMA) is that there's a pretty broad range of stuff that is familiar. The panels I went to were all really good, and almost every paper was solid, interesting, and well worth hearing. There were a couple that were less good, but none were poor. I heard a gorgeous paper on Late Antique cosmetics and pharmacology, a really interesting one on the ways Chinggis Khan used marriage networks, another on Baldwin of Flanders' marriages... The quality of papers is a real tribute to the program committee(s). I went to a workshop today, and can't say I loved the format, but that might in part be because the one I went to was sort of cobbled together from a solid panel and some papers that needed homes, I think.

Besides that, though, Berks did offer one of the things it does really well -- the opportunity to meet other scholars, make connections, mentor and be mentored, and in my case, get my butt kicked about my inability to move papers to publications. I'm not sure why, but Berks does tend to attract a group of women scholars who just don't have time for bullshit. It results in a different sort of dynamics -- maybe because women in groups, or maybe those women? are really good at being blunt without hurting feelings or egos. So if you are thinking of Berks, then keep an eye out for the CFP. The only way to get more pre-modern on the program is to get involved. And the benefits generally outweigh the costs (which can be semi-pricey, depending on where it is -- UMass was expensive, but Minnesota was really cheap). Besides, if you're anything like me, you teach enough non-medieval stuff that you can still still ask questions at panels :-)

A small note on panels and timekeeping

2011-06-12T11:02:00.001-04:00

Please do this. Try to keep to time. This is really important. It's being considerate to your colleagues on the panel, and also to the people who would like to hear papers on two panels. Your paper is probably interesting. It might be the most interesting paper in the world. Everybody might want to hear more, but you know? that's what question time is for. If it is the most interesting paper in the world, the questions will reflect that.

I have been at conferences where senior scholars have gone over -- a lot (one went over 40 minutes, and made it necessary to carry the questions over to the next morning, so that the two senior scholars who had stuck to time -- and incidentally given much more interesting and solid papers -- could answer questions). It's really unforgivable. But if you are a senior scholar, especially one who is well-known, you can get away with it once in a while. If you are a well-loved senior scholar, you might be able to get away with it more often, but if you make a habit of it, you won't be as well-loved.

If you are a junior scholar, it depends on how good you are. If you're scary good, then you can probably get away with it in the manner of senior scholars. But if you aren't? Best to be extra-polite.

If you are a grad student? We all get how involved you are with your subject. We were there once, too. But there's a good case that you aren't as plugged in to the community at the conference yet. You might want to consider that people on your panel and in the audience are folks who can be useful to you, or whom you want to impress, but you ave no idea what they look like. And this can be true on a larger level. When, for example, someone who appears meek and polite (not me, btw) makes a comment and asks a question, think carefully before correcting them abruptly. That person could be someone whose research and teaching have included your topic since before you started grad school, and the question might be going somewhere that would help you. They might be making a different point that you weren't expecting. And sometimes, that person is also a person who organizes conferences in your field, or edits a journal you want to submit to, or will recognize your paper when it comes across her desk for peer review.

I happen to be a person who teeters between absolute fear at conferences (yes, I spend hours asking patient friends if my paper was ok, or if my question was dumb!) and trying to be really polite, and then stepping into things and being perhaps too blunt (and in fact, I just jumped in and argued with a colleague over something). There are many people who are better at conference behavior than I am. But I do think that considering all the dynamics of what could be happening around you, and that every person you don't know (or do), might be worth at least trying to be polite to, is probably something to aim for.

Berks, round two

2011-06-11T23:48:00.000-04:00

So, it's been an marvelous Berks! Despite a lack of pre-modern stuff, there are lots of cool pre-modernists here. My paper went well, I think, and Janice gave a great paper, as did pretty much every person I know! I've seen a bunch of papers so far, including one on Chinggis Khan, one on medieval Islamic law, one on Medici women...

I've met up with lots of old friends, had dinner with Impressive Medievalists, including Extremely Cool Colleague, and some new ones. Met Knitting Clio, Cliotropic, and saw Belle, Tanya, Clio's Disciple, Clio Bluestocking, and Tenured Radical. Really missed Historiann, but am happy Madeleine is ok.

So, yay for another great Berks (more pre-modern, please!!) and tomorrow? home and more work. Apparently, I am submitting two papers to journals by the end of the summer. Eep!

Dear Berks Organizers

2011-06-10T10:24:00.001-04:00

For next time, could you please try to get more pre-modern -- and especially pre-16th C -- papers? The program is really embarrassingly imbalanced towards the modern and the American. I like the conference, and it's pretty awesome. But honestly? All you have to do is read Judith Bennett's History Matters to get an idea of the contributions of medievalists to women's history. We've been doing it a long time.

This is something that seriously pisses me off, because it shouldn't happen. Medievalists were doing postmodernist work before modernists got the clue and gave what we'd been doing a cool name. Medievalists and Classicists have been doing interdisciplinary work since long before it became cool and necessary. Um, duh. Medievalists have been looking at women for kind of a long time, and there is an awful lot of good work on women in the MA that might even -- dare I say it? inform some of what our modernist colleagues are only just discovering.

And yet, a conference that grew from the marginalization of women historians and women's history makes me feel very marginalized in the very same way I feel in my department and on my campus. It's a good reminder that privilege comes in many forms.

I can go to pretty much any panel here and feel comfortable with the topic and be able to ask questions. I teach World Civ. I am a woman of a certain age and a feminist. I have a good grip on modern stuff because I live in the modern era. These things are part of my everyday life. They are also, to some extent, current events to me, and almost political science rather than history. If it happened after I started school, I have a hard time seeing it as "history."

But here, as in my department, on my campus, and at AHA, I feel like I have to apologize because what I do is not necessarily as accessible. I feel like I have to apologize for reading and using Latin and German (and no, I'm not doing handouts of the texts as I would at a medieval conference; I'm just doing quick translations in the text). I feel like I have to convince my colleagues here -- if they even ask -- that working on kinship and family and remarriage in the MA is relevant.

The last Berks wasn't so much like that, I think in part because one of the organizers was the amazing Ruth Mazo Karras. There were enough pre-modern, and even medievalist, papers that I had to make choices. This year? not so much. It's more about digging to find something that I can use in teaching. The best panel is a roundtable on Sunday -- and I will have to miss part of it because the conference is in BFE in terms of transport. I really hope that the organizers think about these things a bit more next time. /grumpy rant.

Writing group, Week Two

2011-06-10T09:11:00.001-04:00

Hi all -- welcome to week two! I've used executive privilege to add two new people, Cly and theswain, and added the names of a couple of people who asked to be in before the first week. However, the group is now closed till next session, unless Notorious overrules me! Last week, I asked Notorious to post this:

Lots of people started out making less progress than perhaps they had planned, for all sorts of good reasons. But we all know that those good reasons still eat into our time, and can often mean a sense of failure that affects getting the writing done. For next week, let's not only post our goals, but also think about one or two small things that, even if life starts getting in the way, we can get done to move the project forward. It could be reviewing a couple of articles, or drafting an outline, or even just freewriting 500 words you think you'll have to dump -- but it should be something you can point to and say, "I did this thing."

So, what are/were your small goals (or baby steps) for this last week? What did you get done? For those of you who are juggling many things, was it helpful to log even the small things?

My week was incredibly busy. I was away scoring AP exams from 8-5 every day. But I managed to write another 750 words on my paper for Berks (which I am now cutting down and practicing for tomorrow!), and did some reading and note-taking (a good article by Rachel Stone: "Bound from Either Side’: The Limits of Power in Carolingian Marriage Disputes, 840--870") for the Leeds paper. Next week, I am planning to review the research I've already done on the paper and draw up plan for what I need to do and order books to be waiting for me at the BL when I get there on the 21st.

In the meantime, I have to say that I used Scrivener for my Berks paper, and LOVED it. It allows one to write in little chunks, which sometimes suits my schedule. I'm also still playing with Sente, and it's wonderful in its way, although sadly, it has some things that zotero doesn't, but zotero allows one to tag individual notes, which I think makes it better. Next thing this coming week is to see if I can get the standalone zotero to work on my macbook. I'm looking for something I can integrate with an iPad, and so far Sente is the only thing that does. BUT ... if I could use Sente and export to zotero, I could get all the functionality I want.

(also, ~~I will be adding links to everyone's profile as I get the chance~~ don't forget you can click on people's names in comments to link to profiles/blogs!)

Sapience: a first draft and a revised draft of the current dissertation chapter
Dame Eleanor: Revising a conference paper into an article MS
NWGirl: Same thing.
ADM: a conference paper for Leeds
ABDMama: Draft of an article MS
Dr. Koshary: Review-ready article MS
Sara: Revision of her research exam
What Now: Polished book proposal
Avery: Draft of an article MS
Jason: First draft of a dissertation chapter
J. Otto Pohl: Complete a draft of a two-thirds finished book MS
Jeff: Review-ready draft of his completed dissertation
Frog Princess: Same thing
Erika: Review-ready draft of an article MS (taken from the dissertation)
Godiva: First draft of a dissertation chapter
Kit: Same thing
Eileen: Same thing, too!
Bardiac: Review-ready article MS (revision of a draft paper)
Scholastic Mama: Revising a conference paper into an article MS
Jen: same thing
Tigs: Completed dissertation draft
Digger: drafts of two book chapters (one already underway)
Zcat abroad: write two articles [??] [is this from scratch, or two revisions? Seems like a lot for 12 weeks; just sayin']
Caleb Woodbridge: MA thesis
Matilda: Draft of one paper [for a conference? or for publication?]
Zabeel: Draft of the first two (of four) sections of a from-scratch article.
Ro: first draft of an essay for an collected volume (mid-summer)
Firstmute: draft of the final [ed. note: YAY!!!] dissertation chapter
Scatterwriter: Complete expansion/revision of an article MS.
Susan: Revise & polish two chapters of a book MS
Travelia: Write two conference papers (possibly more later in the summer)
Ms McD: Revising a conference paper into an article MS
Gillian: an article that needs writing.
Audie: working on transitioning a dissertation chapter to an article!
Anastasia: a book chapter to write for an edited volume.
My Museology: redraft three dissertation chapters.
Cly: redraft three of my dissertation chapters.
theswain: lots of editing and rewriting of what I've already written. New stuff -- trying to produce reviews/summaries for Year's Work in OE Studies.

Today's Cool resource

2011-06-03T00:37:00.000-04:00

If you hadn't yet seen Regnum Francorum Online

look! another thought about charters!

2011-05-29T23:15:00.000-04:00

hmmm. So you have a charter. Actually, you have lots of charters. And the editor of the charters has given them titles according to the names of the people who make the donation (or whatever). This makes sense... except that a lot of the donations appear to be made by trustees, who are merely passing along someone else's donation, as it were. So legally, they are the donors. Functionally, though, they sort of aren't, in the sense that monastic donations are normally made in the hopes that someone's sins will be remediated (although I came across one today that actually uses pro absolutione peccatorum). The trustee is just a middle man whose job is to fulfill someone else's wishes (or to grant permission, depending on the sort of trustee it is).

Add to that the fact that there are two different sorts of trusteeship, as far as I can tell (and is manu potestativa really a livery of seisin in the C9th and C10th?) and it makes for interesting reading. Except that I can't recall having read anything in particular that splits out donors of origin from donors who are trustees (and especially donors who are trustees whose relationships to the donors of origin are unclear, except when noted or when they are counts or other officials).

I have actually read my way through Bresslau, and Beumann, and Ewig, and any number of other godsawful German paperweights designed to tell us about such things, and I don't remember seeing much discussion of this -- but then there is a soporific quality to such reading...

So, hivemind, can you think offhand of anything that clearly articulates what we mean by 'donor' and if it takes into account donations made by trustees? More specifically, can you think of anything that talks about such things pre-11th (or even 10th) century and Frankish?

Writing Group: Call for Participants

2011-05-28T22:32:00.003-04:00

As previously announced, Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar (from whom I shamelessly borrowed this text) and I are launching the pilot term of our online writing group. We're going to be starting up next Friday. For now, we'll be doing this as sort of an open-thread Friday, where you check in once a week to report on your progress. Occasionally, we may offer suggestions of things to contemplate and comment on in a given week. But mostly, it's going to be about us being a group of people who hold each other accountable for producing a finished piece of writing in a 12-week period. June 3 will be week one, the first week that you report progress. August 19th will be week twelve – the week you have your project finished.

Who can participate? Anyone who is writing something. Given that Notorious and I are both academics, and both in the Humanities, our posts will likely be geared toward that audience. But all are welcome to participate.

Lest you think this is all loosey-goosey, however, we're going to require one thing from anyone who wants to participate: A firm commitment. So that's the theme of this thread: What will you commit to writing in this twelve-week period? A conference paper? An article? A chapter of your dissertation? Will it be a complete first draft or a revision? It can be anything you want, so long as you can commit to working on it and reporting your progress weekly, and – most importantly – finishing it by August 19th. So figure out what you can reasonably accomplish, and tell us about it.

Notorious and I will alternate weeks to host. She'll take the first week, Friday June 3rd, when we'll talk about your first week's progress, but also the importance of daily writing, and your writing environment. But that's for next week. For now, let's just get to know each other, and share our project goals for the next twelve weeks.

Hope to see you there!

From Notorious: There are many wonderful writing guides out there, but one that I'd love to recommend to this group in particular is "Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks." It's geared towards advanced grad students and early- to mid-career academics, and focuses on taking something you've already got a bit of a draft of (seminar paper? conference paper?) and expanding, revising, and shaping it into a polished piece. Week-by-week instructions and everything. It's not an "assignment" for the group, but I've used it with great success.

From me: I love to track word counts, and find that posting a word count meter is useful. You can find a really nice little version here.

You have to update it at the site when you add words, and then replace the code, but it's not much of a problem. I've added one for my current project at the top left of the sidebar.

Amusing charter thing

2011-05-28T16:07:00.000-04:00

Supradictus Williprahtus malo conatu ipsam supradictam rem auferre studuit sed dep volente atque iustitia dictante coram prefectis nuntiisque imperatoris Werine et Unfride per vim cogatur tradidit quod debuit et isti sunt testes de illa traditione. +Willipraht qui traditionem fecit [...][!]

Diplomatics, the PhD, and Imposter syndrome

2011-05-28T11:52:00.000-04:00

First, thanks to Historian on the Edge for answering my last question patiently, because it was not the smartest question ever. Still wondering about the historiography, though, and hoping that's not an obvious thing, too.

Well, I suppose it is, because I can always read the footnotes, but who keeps copies of Bresslau, et al., around the house? They aren't in my uni's library, either.

Anyway, I was thinking this morning a bit more about this whole diplomatics thing. Before I met my good friend at A Corner of Tenth Century Europe, I don't think I actually knew there was such a thing and that it had a name. I'd written a doctoral thesis for a committee that included someone who uses charters and all sorts of other legal documents, a Fellow of the MAA, and known for his work on disputes and land tenure (a bit), and I'd never heard of Diplomatics as a field. In fact, I don't think I knew that there was such a thing as a 'charter person' vel sim. I just happened to be using a single set of charters and a couple of sets of annals to talk about what they could tell us about Carolingian administration. On the way, I found that I couldn't do what I wanted to do without some understandings of onomastics (a word I didn't know, because in my head it was Namenkunde, whether Personen- or Orts-), so I read about leading names, and name-elements, and other such things. And of course, this led me to various prosopographical works (thank goodness I had already worked a bit with the PIR on a couple of papers in grad school, so the idea was not foreign to me), which I also read, used, and disagreed with at times. No really, there are bits of my thesis where I argue against both Borgolte and Mitterauer, for example.

Um.

Where am I going with this? Leeds. In the short term. I love going to Leeds. If I had to choose only one conference, that would be it. It is the conference with the highest concentration of cool and smart people who do what I want to do, and they do it really well. Leeds allows me to pretend that I'm good enough at what I do to fit in, and I love that my brain has to work really, really hard. It's the mental equivalent of a really good long bike ride or run through the woods. It makes me think I might even be able to survive a sabbatical semester amongst my UK colleagues, who are amongst the most generous people I know.

In the long term, though, Leeds scares the hell out of me. Every day is a day where I realize that there are things I have simply missed out on. Some of these things are easy to explain, I think. There are a lot of medievalists in the UK, and it's a small enough place that scholars regularly meet and present their work to each other at seminars. There are such things in the US, but we're pretty spread out. When I was an undergrad at Beachy U, there were regular visits by scholars who gave papers, and I know that such things happen in the US in places where there are enough medievalists to have regular seminars -- places like LA, and the Bay Area, and places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. But my grad school wasn't so advantageously located. I also think I wasn't really acculturated in a way that I understood that this was what people did -- I went to such seminars and talks as were available because someone told undergraduate me I was supposed to -- but not that they served a function other than being interesting, yet somewhat passive, activities.

I know, right?

I am not sure how much of this was me being obtuse. As a postgraduate student, I largely saw research and writing as evils necessary to getting a teaching position. I think maybe this is because I never really saw my professors as scholars. They didn't really talk about it much, in the sense of process, or why they loved it, and they were all fantastic teachers. My PhD program required that we undergo teacher training, and that we teach lecture courses of our own. It was great training, and definitely played a huge part in my being employed, but it also helped to create a situation where the immediate needs of students took precedence over my research for the very beginning. I was good at teaching, and the rewards were immediate. Research, not so much.

Why not? Well, because I had no idea what I was doing. My thesis advisor is mostly an archaeologist. People still raise their eyebrows when I tell them who I worked with, because Late Antiquity is not necessarily Early Medieval, and the sorts of things that Doktorvater does are really nothing like what I do. But he and I bonded when I went to Grad U, and because of a set of freak occurrences, there was no one else to work with at the time I began to work on my thesis. We hired Fellow of MAA shortly thereafter, but I was always intimidated by him, and never had a conversation with him where I didn't feel like a complete idiot. Many years later, I realized he doesn't make eye contact with anyone, and just approaches things very different to how I do. But at the time, I couldn't see working with him. So I put together a prospectus, defended it, got a DAAD, and went off to Germany, where the only person I knew was another Late Antiquarian. He introduced me to medievalists on the faculty, but mostly, I hid and worked by myself.

I wrote my PhD in a vacuum, more or less. At first I was connected to the university, but I didn't really make friends, and felt pretty much isolated. None of the people I knew worked on anything related to what I was doing. Then I started dating X, and somehow my ties to people at the university were replaced by his friends. There was my advisor, but no connection really to "here are things happening in our field that you should know about." The more physically isolated I was, the worse my Imposter Syndrome got -- and the grounds for it seemed to be more and more realistic. The PhD finally was finished, signed off, complete -- not that it mattered, because I'd left academia at that point.

Except, of course, it turns out I didn't. I just spent a few years adding to the huge gaps in my knowledge and picking up bits of what I missed like a magpie attracted to the shiny. I expect I'm not the only person out there who has had experiences like mine, but for me, it's been really disconcerting to talk about what I do and have other people understand it and be able to give me advice. It's probably not a bad thing to have approached things as I have -- no preconceived notions, after all! And I think if I'd thought of myself as a charter person, or a diplomatics person, I'd have turned out very differently. Even now, I think of myself as a social and political historian who uses charters a lot, although the amount I think about methodology might indicate a diplomatists lurking in the shadows.

It's lurking there along with the Imposter Syndrome. Even though I am again, or still, working in relative isolation, it's at least no longer a vacuum. Now it's a balancing act: engagement, even over the internet, allows a feeling of membership in the community; membership in a community where everybody else knows so damned much* might let the imposter out of the shadows.

*and yes, I do realize that spending my time having to keep up with teaching all the non-US history my department offers (i.e., the whole world from Harappan culture till now) gives me breadth that takes away from the depth my impressive colleagues have. Doesn't make me feel less dumb, though :-)

Diplomatics, whether or not I want 'em

2011-05-26T17:23:00.000-04:00

So I found some cool stuff on Google books today. Unfortunately, it's all 19th C German legal scholarship, which means I have no idea how useful it really is. On the one hand, it offers very clear interpretations of some of the stuff I've wondered about for a long time. On the other, I have no idea if it's correct or not (in terms of what we now understand). But there was a nice explanation of per manum clauses (once I figured out what some of the German words were), and now I just have to figure out if these were things that the early diplomatics people would have looked at.

Speaking of which, did you know that Breßlau worked with Heinrich von Trotschke for a while? I think this in part reaffirms my belief that we really can't trust ANY early German diplomatics scholarship entirely -- there's just always the lingering spectre of circular nationalistic reasoning. For example, there's the understanding of "national" law codes as being real exemplars of the values of particular people that obviously may be partially true, but is also now understood within the context of Carolingian ~~meddling~~ policy, I think? Or am I imagining that?

But really, what I meant to say was this:

how separable are praecarium and usufruct? That is, I understand how one could grant the latter without the former, and that sort of makes sense. I understand how one could grant the former without the latter, but it seems to me to be pointless. More importantly, I wonder how easy it was to keep such things straight among all the players.

Yes, I do...

2011-05-25T08:26:00.002-04:00

Have a towel, and know where it is.

Have a hard-boiled egg.

Am not wearing lilacs, 'cos I wasn't there.

(I think I've got it covered...)

So it's not just me and Historian on the Edge, then...

2011-05-24T16:58:00.000-04:00

Apparently, Mark Lind at Salon.com thinks even less of Ferguson than I do.

Just for starters, Lind asks, "What accounts for the attention lavished by the American media on a huckster as vulgar and shallow as Niall Ferguson?"

Later, he tells us a little of what he really thinks: "...Niall Ferguson has the moral imagination of a teenage boy addicted to gruesome video games."

I think he's wrong about Fritz the Cat, though. Unless Ferguson really said that. But I'm giving Ferguson some credit here, and will assume the cat in question ia Felix.

A bleg about tools and toys and software

2011-05-23T10:19:00.000-04:00

Hello, all --

So, like many people, I'm thinking about eventually getting an iPad. I have been at a couple of conferences lately and just think it would be so much easier not to lug a full-sized computer around when I travel. I'd really like it to be usable even for extended trips -- for example, is it enough computer to take to the UK for six weeks? Or would I need to take my macbook, but still only carry the iPad to the BL to work? (and of course I now need to check and find out if the stories of abused iPad manufacturing workers in China are true...

No, I can't really afford one, but we can use our research allotment towards it, which I think would be better than trying to justify one on my taxes. Far easier to explain why I need professional memberships and journals.

Anyway, so the first questions are:

Is it really a good tool?
How much memory is the minimum I need?
How much can it replace my heavier computer?

But also... and these are more important questions:

Can I use it to duplicate my current workflow?

Can I use it to re-create the workflow I want?

Because here is the thing -- I like to take notes by hand, but I like the organization of programs like zotero. Zotero only runs with Firefox, which I can use on a mac, but not on an iPad. Sente seems to do much of the same, so that's a possibility on the organizational end.

But what I would love to do, and what would absolutely sell me on an iPad, is to be able to take notes on the iPad with a stylus (no problems with bringing pens into the BL!!) and then drag them into the note management software. It's clear that scrivener will not be available, but Apple has at least made a version of Pages for the iPad, so writing can be done -- but the research still has to be somewhere.

So people, what do you think? Is it possible to do what I want? What software do you recommend?

Online Writing Group: Watch this Space

2011-05-21T12:43:00.000-04:00

Stolen shamelessly from Notorious, PhD...

Online Writing Group: WATCH THIS SPACE!
Notorious and I are closing in on starting the writing group. We were supposed to have an announcement, CFP up this morning, but as I said in my reply to her e-mail (entitled "itotallyfuckingforgot"): "eyeballs, alligators, etc."

Like Strunk & White, I am (apparently) a fan of brevity.

So, we're batting a real opening announcement back and forth over the course of the day, and it will be cross-posted later tonight or perhaps tomorrow (or even tomorrow's tomorrow), at which point you can see if it will work for your needs right now, and sign up. First "Term" will begin next Friday. If it doesn't work for you right now, don't worry: another one will be along in the fall.

Watch this space!

St Gall Plan Project Job

2011-05-20T14:33:00.000-04:00

Please repost as appropriate.

Manuscripts Specialist (Staff Research Associate III)

Under the direction of the project's Principal Investigator Professor Patrick Geary and the Project Manager Dr. Julian Hendrix, the Research Associate will be responsible for directing and performing archival and library research, and for identifying and analyzing the linguistic, orthographic, paleographic and textual features of some 168 medieval manuscripts for the research project "Creation of Virtual Libraries of the Carolingian Monasteries of St. Gall and Reichenau." Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this project will make accessible online digital images, descriptions, and contextual data of ninth-century manuscripts from libraries at St. Gall and Reichenau. The Research Associate will assist the Project Manager with the development of XML templates and user interfaces for the project's manuscript website. The Research Associate will also assist the Project Manager in creating descriptions and indices of the manuscripts' contents as well as be responsible for writing thematic essays highlighting significant elements of the manuscript collection for publication on the project website.

Candidates must have a PhD in some area of medieval studies and strong Latin and German, as well as extensive knowledge of Carolingian paleography and codicology, and experience working with early medieval manuscripts. Experience working with XML markup and web design is strongly preferred.

This is an eleven month (08/01/11 - 06/30/12), grant-funded position. In addition to completing the online application at hr.mycareer.ucla.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=15980 (you can not be considered for the position without applying on-line), please send a copy of your letter of application (cover letter) and CV to the project PI, Professor Patrick Geary, by email to geary@ucla.edu AND Project Manager Dr. Julian Hendrix, email jhendrix AT ucla DOT edu. Review of applications will begin immediately.

Training for the Dark Side?

2011-05-19T00:10:00.000-04:00

From Kalamazoo to a workshop where I am supposed to be learning to be an administrator, my life takes me such wonderful places. Exciting! One day between, spent mostly marking with colleagues. More on that later, but let's just say that it helped to demonstrate why some colleagues are so adamant that double-marking is a bad thing.

In between, I've been becoming ever more conscious of what it means to be an introvert. For example, it's pretty late, and I am finally winding down enough to sleep -- and I have to be up early to lead a discussion. So tired. But can't wind down.

But enough of that.

I'm learning the ways of the Dark Side. Mostly, I'm learning about my colleagues and myself, and how we take different things away. For example, a colleague in another department went to a similar workshop and came back with a new and enlarged chip on hir shoulder. What zie learned was that other low-level administrators all had it better than their colleagues at SLAC, and that SLAC sucks. It doesn't, as it happens.

What I have learned so far is that SLAC is pretty weak in procedures and a few other things. Also, I've been able to listen to other people and it's helped to re-set my reality scale. It's been nice to hear so many non-SLAC stories, most of which are not about dysfunctional departments and divisions. Some are, and I think it's not all sunshine and roses out there: too many heads nod when someone tells a story that sounds painfully familiar. I've also learned a lot of things about data, how universities function, and how, even though department and division chairs at SLAC have very little power, we are given so much more information than many of our colleagues. That information is something that, if you can make sense of it, can itself be somewhat empowering. Or maybe it's just me -- when I understand things, I feel much more secure! There have been frightening moments, though. I am far better at understanding the big picture than I like. I don't think departmentally; I think institutionally much more often.

Midway through a session today I was reminded of how many medievalists I know who are really very good at administration. And since it was well into day two, and my mind was wondering, I started thinking about the pedagogy panel at the Zoo, and how a colleague there reminded the rest of us that, where our modernist and Americanist colleagues' specialties are generally no broader than 50-75 years in one place, medievalists are expected to specialize in a thousand years, and at east 2-3 geographical areas. On top of that, we have the killer arsenal of mad skills. Sure, we tend to focus our research a bit more, but when we teach, we teach a LOT of content, comparatively speaking. Moreover, the content we teach is not just "history" -- we include literature and art and material culture -- lots of stuff. I wonder if there is a connection between our interdisciplinary training and an ability to look beyond our very narrow fields/departments/divisions. Or not. Just a thought. Anyway, it was interesting to hear the stories of colleagues and also to hear the occasional shock at some of the suggestions made in some discussions: one colleague seemed to say that hir program generally wrote job ads so that hir school's graduates would be the best candidates for those jobs. There were gasps, too, when I suggested that perhaps a way to deal with grade appeals was to ask someone else to take a copy of the rubric and the exam or paper and have them regrade. Threats to autonomy, dontcha know...

Wonder what I'll learn tomorrow..

Kalamazoo, day the last

2011-05-15T16:43:00.001-04:00

Will blog about the middle later, but here are the highlights:

Hanging out with colleagues from my state, who are now discussing a regular video-seminar
Hearing about the 'horses in mud' paper
Celebrating with my colleague from SLAC and my friends from other places
Wonderful time talking to people at the dance last night
Finding out that someone I thought hated me probably doesn't
Learning how to teach about early Christianity from Walter Goffart
Finding out that Goths don't always have moustaches and Romans often do
Bees! Hymns to bees! Bees are monks, because they are virgins
Did you know that Venetians were using surnames comparatively early?
We need to rethink masculinity and take masculine studies away from the feminist paradigm; and think about the somatic rather than the discourse

eta: Also, loved the announcement that a rather well-known early medievalist was not chairing his session because he was in a boxing bout.

The Zoo, day One

2011-05-11T23:45:00.000-04:00

Arrived to find presents waiting for me! Also, had good trip, fun with the Director, my colleague and roommate. Split up for separate dinners. On way back to hotel, found that our confirmed double was a king. Bastards. No other rooms. Nasty letter sent to Discovery Kalamazoo re WTF?

grrr

Also, corrigenda shows that Thursday evening session cancelled. Yay! Friend's paper now across from other friend's paper. Boo.

Also, kind of had to tell a colleague I like no to dinner because I had plans. Normally, I like to invite more people, but this is someone I only see in person once a year, and we like to talk about real-friend stuff that we can't talk about in front of colleagues. Boo. But yay for dinner with friend I love.

Tomorrow morning? Bernhard at 10:00 for Paul Kershaw's paper.

With luck, maybe a better room on the morrow?

Alternate Kalamazoo Thursday Dinner

2011-05-09T11:41:00.002-04:00

Well, it looks like there is a Thursday p.m. talk I want to go to -- a couple of papers on things Fulda-ish, including Albrecht Diem talking about Lul (I think). So I think I will likely ditch the EM dinner. Anybody want to join me?

UPDATE: I may not be able to cancel the EM dinner plan after all, unless someone is willing to take my seat. I don't really want to pay for a meal I don't eat, and I'm not willing to stick the organizer with my costs.

Fingers crossed there are more people who want to go but haven't arranged.

Anecdotal History

2011-05-08T12:17:00.001-04:00

I'm working on a paper that is likely to be a few days late in getting to the respondent (REALLY, REALLY sorry about that!). It's ostensibly on what we can see in some charters about step- relations. This has been made more difficult by the fact that I can't find the notebook that had my notes that I used for the abstract. Go me. Anyway, some things occurred to me today that I need to jot down, and here seemed as good a place as any. As I've been working, I've been worrying about whether or not the abstract and the paper will match up at all. Fortunately, whatever I write will still fit within the parameters of the session, so that panic is off.

So anyway, I might not find as much as I'd like on stepmother-stepdaughter relationships. I can stretch that to talk about stepmother-stepson relationships, and in fact I think I need to talk about those if only because most of the high-profile stepmother stories from the Carolingian period are royal and stepmother-stepson. This morning, though, I realized that I can't recall all that many mother-daughter (or mother-son) relationships in my documents. I should mention here that I am using relationships in two ways: the first is the obvious one, evidence of any familial connection; the second is the one that we infer from donations made on behalf of others. It has long been posited, and I think that this is largely correct, that donating property on the behalf of another is to some extent evidence of affection. I think that duty is perhaps also a reason, but really that is unlikely if the person for whom the donation is made is dead. I am also now wondering, though, if donating for a third party is also a way of mediating disputes or securing an uncontested release of property, i.e., "I know that my relatives really want to get their hands on this, and they are going to fight about it when I'm gone. Even though I have made provisions for this in the charter, in that they can pay a whopping sum to the monastery to get the land back, they're a bunch of greedy bastards and I don't really want that to happen. So I'm also going to put their names on it. This will put them in a position where they will really look bad if they try to regain that property."

Maybe. I'm not entirely sure I haven't read bits of that before, but will need to look that up. At any rate, I think that there needs to be some comparison to the charters in which people make donations for their mothers as well.

But anyway, it seems to me that the paper will be better if I contrast the mother vs stepmother cases. Which is probably obvious to most of you, but I tend to forget such things. In fact (and this is something that I have really got to get over) I'm like a magpie when it comes to research, going for the shiny and not thinking about framing it nearly as well as I should. Part of this is that I tend to do research only when I can concentrate on it, which is in the summer. This is really not ideal, and I must figure out how to change that, even if it only means keeping up with reading through the academic year. In years like this one, where I teach nothing medieval at all, it's especially important to make time to do this. If it weren't for blogs, I'd be absolutely lost, and most of you know I've been crap at keeping up this year. Another part may be that I am, apparently, a mental magpie, or Doug, the dog in Up, whose attention is completely taken over by the random appearance of a squirrel. Don't know if I mentioned it, but apparently, I have ADHD (inattentive). Knowing this does make me more conscious of looking for solutions and coping mechanisms, rather than beating myself up over being a magpie, at least.

What does this have to do with anecdotal history? Well, it also occurred to me this morning that I seem to be stuck in a pattern of finding cool anecdotes to write about. They are the sorts of things that fit in well with my teaching and service load, as well as my tendency to follow the shiny. I don't think they lack value, either. In fact, I think that anecdotes are what make what we do accessible to non-historians and help to demonstrate one of the real values of studying history: historians look at people, and try to understand people and why they did what they did -- and to me, this sort of inquiry is immediately valuable and transferable to how we approach our own world.

Having said that, I also want to make a concerted effort to make my anecdotes more meaningful to other historians, to add more to the larger conversation. In the meantime, I suppose I can continue honing my skills at asking awkward questions. :-)

What possessed me...?

2011-05-07T19:17:00.000-04:00

... to work with stuff like this? Seriously, 8th C land transactions? What the HELL was I thinking? Every summer, I start to read these, and every summer, I think, "it's bad enough you decided to be a medievalist. It's bad enough you decided to be an Early Medievalist. It's bad enough that you decided to be a dime-a-dozen Carolingianist. But really, did you have to choose to read stuff like this and then get a job where you don't get a chance to practice your Latin during the year???"

This is why:

In Christi nomine ego itaque ultimus exiguusque dei servorum famulus Matto sed et ego nuncius fidelis Othelm diligenter devotus in elimosinam Iulianae dei famulae et abbatissae pro remedio animae suae ipsa mihi manu potestativa ex iure proprietatis suae in Uuangheimero marcu tradiderat. similiter et ego Matto in supra dicto loco ubi supra dicta Iuliana soror mea totum et integrum s. Bonafacio per manum Othelmes tradiderat ita et ego in villa eadem portione et ex illa quantitate quantum mihi ibidem adjacet proprietatis sicut aliis testibus perpluribus cognitum est ita et ego Matto supra dicto loco in elimosinam meam et fratris mei Megingoz et eorum quibus debitor sum sicut et illa supra dicta Iuliana soror mea per manum supra dicti Othelmes sic trado quicquid ad meam pertinet proprietatem totum et integum sic et ille Othelm nos simul trademus sicut supra dictum est in Wangheimero marcu id est illam ecclesiam et monasteriolum constructum cum illis sanctorum reliquiis et cum omni proprietate id est tam terris silvis campis pratis pascuis aquis aquarumque decursibus aedificiis domibus arialis coloniis qualiter et quomodo heredatum a parentibus et a nobis elaboratum aut exquisitum sit peculiari utriusque sexu [I think] mobilibus et immobilibus quicquid dici aut nominari queat et haec mancipia quorum haec sunt [big-ass list of mancipia]

You know, I have enough trouble making sense of this sort of stuff in current legal English. Now Latin is making me feel dumb.

*headdesk*

Zoo Meetup reminder

2011-05-02T08:09:00.000-04:00

Hello, all --

Here is a reminder that the post about the Kalamazoo Blogger meet-up is here.

Also -- early medievalist types: I have tentatively responded "yes" to the Thursday night dinner. But I have to go to the SMFS dinner on Saturday, too. That means only Wednesday and Friday night dinners free. If anybody is interested in a breakaway dinner on Thursday somewhere more convenient and less pricey (because face it, it's going to be a minimum of $50 after drinks), please say so!

It's May!

2011-05-01T09:42:00.004-04:00

It's May! And I have not written my paper for Berks yet! Plus, I am giving two finals tomorrow! Argh!

But it's MAY! so here are things to ring in that particularly lovely month...

or, if you prefer the very disturbing original, it's here -- no embedding allowed

And of course, this vision of Walpurgisnacht:

On the other hand, this might be more to your tastes:

And of course, this:

Or, if you prefer something entirely sappy...

Bleg for book recs

2011-04-05T07:18:00.000-04:00

I'm teaching what used to be our Historiography class next fall. It's in the process of being turned into a research methods class, with historiography. So I can't see that ordering Tosh's Pursuit of History is necessarily appropriate (although I'm up for being convinced otherwise). With or without Tosh (and I'm toying with substituting Bennett's History Matters there, too), is there any book out there that you think is great for teaching How to Do Research and Write a Paper?

Cool teaching tools!

2011-04-03T10:57:00.000-04:00

Hi all --

So at present I am buried under a pile of really poor essays. Really poor. So poor that I will have to write a post about why differential teaching and learning is good, but that it's very hard to draw some lines: where, for example, is the tipping point between making the good students better and making the failing students passable?

In the meantime, I am occasionally thinking about resources for a re-vamped historical research course. In some ways, I fear for this course. The intention is supposedly to teach students to write a research paper, so that we don't have to teach that as part of the upper-division courses where research papers are now mandatory. There are some who want to teach historiography proper, and something called 'an appreciation for the art of history' in there. If that means teaching big questions in the field and the arguments historians present, I can't see it. After all, I could teach such things, but they would make no sense to students who have never taken a medieval content class. I could teach the history of history-writing, but you know? I just don't think it's as important as actually learning by doing. At some point, we need to know that there is a tradition of historical writing out there, and that ideas of history change from Thucydides to Ranke to Bloch (and I don't have any idea about Americanist historiography). But I'd much rather teach that as part of my content classes than as part of a methods class: "here is a big question for medieval historians -- 'is there such a thing as feudalism/the feudal system?' and here are the major arguments and the people who are making them." In a lower-division methods class, if I'm teaching a paper with an annotated bibliography and/or lit review, then I can set the stage with the idea that historians don't agree and that approaches change over time. How this will all work out when it's a rotating course is going to be interesting.

Anyway, here are some fantastic tools that I think I will be using for teaching methods and in my survey classes, especially:

First, Sharon Howard has posted a tutorial for integrating zotero at the Old Bailey online. How cool is that? the tutorial goes beyond using that site, too! I've been trying to get students to use something like zotero, because they are crap at keeping their bibliographies up to date...

Then there is Wall Wisher, which I found through one of the links on the Old Bailey page. I'm thinking of using that for having students prep class discussions. That, and maybe have them use it for structuring essays and studying together.

There are other cool things linked, too -- I especially like the group assignments in zotero.

Because it's related to things medieval, in the most obtuse way

2011-03-29T11:14:00.000-04:00

And because I'm having that sort of day:

Outcomes and Assessments: Point of Order

2011-03-29T10:55:00.001-04:00

Some of you may remember that I am not antipathetic towards the outcomes and assessment movement. In fact, I'm rather a fan of the idea of faculty sitting down together and seeing how the students are doing and coming up with ways to make sure students graduate with a degree that means something. I like the idea of giving a common exam to all students on a course and having double-blind readings of the scripts. I like the idea of outside examiners. To me, those things are signals that there is some sort of conversation across a field about what is important, and it would certainly encourage me to work harder on content and on making sure I was better organized. I don't find such things threatening to my autonomy, as do many of my colleagues at SLAC and in other places. They are just reminders that I have to cover a certain body of knowledge, and not all students will answer all questions anyway.

I feel similarly about the sort of outcomes my department has, which are largely skills-based. Here I'm on very shaky ground and likely to really piss people off. Different historians have different sorts of skills expertise. We can't all be experts in all of them. I have a colleague who uses local archives all the time - I've never done local history, nor used an archive; at the same time, some of my colleagues have very different ideas of what it means to write a primary source analysis than I do. I think a student can write a perfectly good, and more importantly, rigorous, 5000-7000 word research essay that asks a question of a single source, perhaps a saga, or Orderic Vitalis' Ecclesiastical History; or perhaps of a few dispute charters or traditiones. Close reading is integral to what I do (so much so that sometimes I skimp on the literature more than I should). But if there is a single course that all students have to take to teach the skills we say we assess, it seems to me that faculty need to work together to define the skills and they need to give up some autonomy to make sure that, whoever teaches the course, the students can go on to all other classes in the department and be fairly successful without any one faculty member having to teach from scratch the stuff that students in their classes need.

In a way, outcomes and assessments done well and meaningfully are sort of a reflection of Rousseau's Social Contract. We all give up being able to teach only what we want,* or just our way of doing things, in order to make sure our students will be successful in other departmental courses, or if they transfer elsewhere. They have to have faculty buy-in and contribution at all levels, and faculty, even those who are willing, need to see the bigger picture.**

Lots of things can gum up the works. Lack of faculty buy-in, administrators who take far too dictatorial an approach (other than saying, "I don't care how you do it, but it needs to be done by X or we lose funding and accreditation."), Accreditation agencies and governments who are far too hung up on "accountability" when they have no bloody idea of what is important in a field (and everybody think they know what is important in history -- dog forbid that it requires anything like training to be an expert!).

But this week, I realized what the number one problem with having valid outcomes and assessments is. You could have the most cooperative faculty in the world and the most supportive administrators. It doesn't mean a damned thing if the students aren't prepared for university level work. If they can't manage, or won't do, the readings; if they don't come to class sessions, especially seminars and discussions, prepared; if they are ignorant of geography, how can we teach towards the outcomes we've set? How can our assessments and measurements of those outcomes be valid?

They can't.

If we teach at the university level, we have to have outcomes that reflect that level. But such outcomes are based on the idea that our students can work up to that level over the period they are at the university. How do we measure when we have to (and yes, this is true not just at my SLAC, but at colleges and universities all over the US) spend time on how to study, how to write an essay, how to read effectively,*** take notes, write an essay exam, become familiar with the most basic world maps of the present (let alone the past)...? Those things are just plain inappropriate as university level outcomes. Some of them belong in elementary school, for goodness' sake!

And how do we measure that the reasons students cannot achieve the outcomes we set, outcomes that should match up to those at other institutions like ours, are not necessarily because of our teaching, or even of student learning, are because the underlying assumptions of what it means to be ready to study for a university degree have not been met? Technically, it's not all that difficult to document, I suppose. We can ask students to self-report average time spent studying on a course (the are surprisingly honest!). We can scan and save student writing samples to demonstrate that students are not prepared, or that they have learnt something, but it may not be what they were supposed to learn for the course (mine usually write better at the end -- at least "write a well-argued analytical essay that answers a historical question, supported with specific detail," is one of our outcomes!

But I ask you -- how can assessment be meaningful if we spend as much time teaching students to be students as we do our subject? and how can the teaching in our subject not suffer if we are taking so much time away from it to give students the skills they need to succeed (to a point -- if students really are clueless and hopeless, I will ask them to drop). I have colleagues who simply fail such students, but there has to be a better resolution.

What do you all do, if you have to deal with such things? How will you, when you do?(which you might not if you are in the UK, since the Big Society mavens seem to be very happy with the idea of limiting uni education to the elite -- although they seem to have bugger all in the way of ideas as to what's going to happen to everybody else).

Update: Dave at The Long Eighteenth Century has pointed me to his very useful post on exactly this sort of thing! Thanks, Dave!

*Yeah, I know: most of us don't teach just what we want, but you'd be surprised at how many people think that academic freedom means complete control over the curriculum. There are things I don't teach, but it's not because I don't want to -- it's generally because I can't get to them because the most specialized class I teach is Ren-Ref!

**I will smack the first one of you that says this is a dean-ish comment. Just because I can think like an administrator doesn't mean I want to be one!

***this week I have had the fun of discovering that a student thought an incredibly common expression meaning "people were so focused on this thing that it became the driving force behind government and social policies," instead meant, "people discarded this thing and got as far away from it as possible." There was also the joy of having students tell me the only way they could learn was to bring their books to class and read along while we were discussing the information. No joke.

meet-up reminder

2011-03-28T15:28:00.001-04:00

Just a quick reminder that info on the Zoo meet-up is here. Please circulate!

Sometimes you just need a little music

2011-03-16T15:19:00.002-04:00

Today, I find I need The Clash and Billy Bragg.

A few thoughts on Niall Ferguson

2011-03-15T00:07:00.002-04:00

First, I sorta wish I could show his new series to my World Civ classes -- except that I would worry they'd just accept what he says over anything I say.

Second, I would like to see a bunch of post that point out that he is, like Laurence Stone, apparently, a big tool.

Third, I do not love his Eurocentrism

New Space, no thanks to Blogger

2011-03-13T12:22:00.001-04:00

Ok, I'm back up and running, having spent way too much time trying to recreate my blogroll, because stupid Blogger lost it when my template mysteriously disappeared.

AAARGH.

Please do let me know if you like or hate the new look -- and please pass the word about the Kalamazoo Meet-up (information HERE)

Also, speaking of the Zoo, is anybody going to the Early Medievalists' Dinner?

What the hell???

2011-03-12T21:36:00.004-05:00

What happened to my blog, dammit?

ETA: OK, site construction now happening. Going to have to re-design. Bugger.

Update: New look for now -- anybody know how to get the picture to go across the top of the page?

ALSO: here is the post about the Kalamazoo meet-up

Blogger meet-up at the Zoo

2011-02-28T17:46:00.002-05:00

Blogger meet-up at the Zoo??

Hello, all --

has anybody else started this conversation yet?

I suggest we go for the usual Friday meetup at Mug Shots at opening time...

Look! It's time to beat that horse again!

2011-02-01T17:26:00.005-05:00

Look! It's time to beat that horse again!

Yeah, I know, I haven't been blogging much. Sue me. Actually, you should complain, and I should apologize. I need to blog more, if only because it really does keep me writing. And I need to write. I have two essays in the works at the moment, and in a way, the reason they aren't up yet has something to do with my response to this post at Dr Crazy's, from which I also stole the title.

Really, you should just go click the links in her post to get the background, especially the ones to Historiann here and here, Undine's response, and this post by Katrina Gulliver at Tenured Radical, which has pissed a lot of people off. There are plenty of other links, too, many worth reading. I'm adding my own $.02, as I get mentions! and I've been around the blogosphere a while, so it's my dead horse, too, in a way. I've been doing this since, what? 2002. 2002, people. That means this blog is in its ninth year. Dude, ADM is a brand name by now. Or something.

Seriously, it is my horse, and I am going to keep arguing my point (although Dr Crazy makes it far better than I do) as long as I need to. Which, given the attitudes of some people, may be forever. And now, a warning: if you are one of those people who thinks that pseudonyms are BAD!EVil!WAYS TO BE DISHONEST AND NASTY ON THE INTARWEBS! and nothing more,* there is nothing for you here. Honestly, if you can't look to a rich tradition of pseudonymous writing for purposes that are at least morally neutral and often clearly benign, then I am sorry your education has been so poor. If you are looking to re-state that point of view, this is not the blog you are looking for (this is not the blog we are looking for). Move along.

Now that that is out of the way, perhaps I should drag some old history into the brightness of the blogosphere: way back in 2002, almost all of the blogs I read were written by people using pseudonyms. A few weren't: Tim Burke's Easily Distracted was one, Crooked Timber was another. Cliopatria was a third. What did these blogs have in common? First, they were written primarily by established scholars and/or scholars whose blogs were public fora for the bloggers' own fields. The fields were also ones that were not all that far removed from the public sphere; blogging about economics, public policy, sociology, etc., was not all that different from having opinion columns on newspaper sites. So in many cases, the subjects were ones that have traditionally attracted public intellectuals and public discourse. Perhaps not coincidentally, the bloggers, like most public intellectuals then and now, were men. Some of the scholars were not too far along in their careers, but given that there was at least a clear indication that men with solid academic reputations could blog thoughtfully without threatening their careers too much, it's not too big a leap to see where junior (male) scholars might have felt a bit more confident in linking their blogging activities to their professional selves. I think it also says something about the way men and women see their work, and the type of blogging being done. These were, and are, largely blogs that focus on the scholar's field, and not on the scholar's life. The one might be seen as an extension of work, while the other merely a waste of time. Commenting on life, after all, even academic life, or even teaching, is analogous to spending time worrying about improving assignments and focusing on whether the students are learning: we're told it's important, but really, we all know the real measure of the professional academic is not how many lives we touch, how many students will go out and apply what we've taught them to their lives... it's how much we publish.** You may, if you like, insert here the cautionary tale of one Dan Drezner, whose blogging seems to have created difficulties for him when he went up for tenure, but whose celebrity may also have been connected to getting a better job where he did get tenure. I think both sides of the pseudonymity argument need to call that one a wash.

You might have gathered that I'm not a man (although early on, before ADM was better known, people frequently assumed I was a man, largely to my writing style and my willingness to argue with, like, logic! and facts!). I also wasn't writing about medieval history. I was writing about being a medieval historian who had just re-joined the profession after a hiatus, who was working as an adjunct, and who wanted to connect to other people and talk about the system, education, and generally what it was like to be in my position, but in a somewhat objective manner. I didn't want the blog to be the first thing people found when they googled my CV. I didn't want my students, colleagues, or family to read it and think of me first (or at all). I wanted to engage with other junior scholars in a way that didn't interfere with my daily life or put any of my colleagues in an uncomfortable position. And honestly, I wanted a job. Blogging under a pseudonym seemed a perfectly sensible way for me to join in and (although I didn't realize it at the time, I will now admit it might be true) help create a community of colleagues where I really didn't have any. Yes, once I had my first full-time, visiting assistant prof job, I did have colleagues -- but I was teaching at a community college where few people really bothered or needed to publish, and NONE of them were damned medievalists. I needed that community of scholars more or less in my field, and in the sort of positions I aspired to, to mentor me.

I also needed pseudonymity for reasons that I think Historiann mentions in her article, but that haven't come up much in any of the conversations lately. To myself at the time, I had tossed my life away. I didn't really want any of my friends from grad school, my advisor, my friends from when I was an undergrad... the people who had written me recs, kept me funded, got me extensions, and even worse, not berated me or told me I'd let them down when I put family first and taken a fairly well-paying job that was not only not at an R1, but not even academic. (Ok, I had gained a husband and kid and a great family and had demonstrated I could actually earn a living outside academia, but if you went to grad school, you know the feeling I mean, because you've ever felt it or you've looked at someone else in my position and heard/thought/said the same things -- and worse when looking at a woman, because of the whole perpetration of the 'why bother with women because they just drop everything for family' thing). ADM was me, but it was also a me trying to re-establish my own voice as a member of a community I wasn't sure would have me anymore.

The funny thing is, pseudonymity didn't give me just a new voice; it helped me find my own, old voice, too. People didn't know me, except through my words and the story I told them. It was a true story, as objective as possible, and one that I tried to make as honest as I could without revealing details that would have embarrassed the people in my life. It wasn't the whole story, but that's because of the format, subject matter, and audience. There are things I'm willing to share because they are things many people in my position might be going through. And frankly, I don't want to share everything with potentially tens (ok, actually, hundreds) of people I don't know. People got to know ADM, and they got to know me, and they got to know that both are me, and both are true. What's more, I got to know a bunch of people who are also pseudonymous. When I'm with them in real life, I think of them as their real-life selves. But when we are working in the context of the professional relationships we have built online, I still often think of them as the constructs that their pseudonymity helped to create. It's not that weird, if you think of it. We all have our professional selves and our private selves. Sometimes we never socialize with our colleagues, and they have much more to them than we might know. So how is this different?

It's different because, as far as I can tell, the internet is a different sort of place. Perfectly reasonable people who know about the rather honorable tradition of pseudonymity seem to see this as different. Why? maybe because people can comment anonymously OR pseudonymously. Frankly, anonymous commenters piss me off, too. I think it's chickenshit to comment without a name, because either they are committing drive-by insults or they frequently give the appearance of being the blogger's own sock puppet. But bloggers can prevent anonymous commenting, and sometimes the would-by anonym takes on a pseudonym, pseudonymity ends up being lumped in with anonymity, with cowardice, with throwing words like bricks through windows.

Having said all that, it still never ceases to amaze me that otherwise discerning people get their knickers in a twist over something that is pretty easy to figure out. There are bloggers who write pseudonymously, and choose to continue to do so, even after people know who we are. It allows us the freedom to write in ways that we might not otherwise. We are, to some extent, our pseudonyms, and if people can't recognize that the personae we have constructed are, in every way that matters for public communication,as real as we are, then perhaps they should stick to only reading the eponymous blogs of people they know in real life. I'm sure that they are entirely honest and uncensored. After all, people put their own names on them.

*and here I am looking at at least one blogger who has taken upon himself to try to out me at public meetings after being specifically asked not to, not to mention Kathryn Cramer, who has in the past outed anonymous/pseudonymous fan bloggers while deliberately ignoring the relative power and privilege her position in the sff community gives her...

**I will refrain from going off on a tangent about people who say this, shirk teaching and service duties, and still don't publish as much as some of the great teachers I know, and even then only manage to publish fairly workmanlike stuff..

A few thoughts on Tenure

2011-01-05T12:00:00.002-05:00

A Few Thoughts on Tenure

Most of you readers know that I am a strong supporter of tenure and the tenure system. Most of you also know that I believe strongly in post-tenure review. Recent events have made me think of tenure in slightly different ways, so I thought I'd puzzle a few of them out here, rather than working on Syllabi.

Tenure is a Good Thing. It protects, or should protect, one's academic freedom. I think the guidelines of the AAUP are sound, although I am not as clear on their position on post-tenure review. In general, I think tenure is not supposed to protect people who are not doing their job well.

But this means a possible conflict. There's tenure, and there are our annual contracts. Institutions change. We all know people who were tenured when publication requirements were lower, or when accreditation agencies had less power, or even under other administrations whose rules were different. Tenure doesn't mean we faculty are not also employees. When institutions change, it seems to me that, whatever the rules were, whatever the contractual obligations were, when a person was granted tenure, the terms of employment change. This is true in any job. Companies are re-organized, industries and government agencies require new standards or new sorts of reporting, etc. I am not sure how tenure protects one from having to follow new versions of the Faculty Handbook, new requirements for reporting attendance for financial aid, adhering to FERPA, or any other such thing. And yet I know people, some at my own SLAC, who insist that the contract that was in effect when they were granted tenure supersedes any later contracts -- even when those new contracts have different wording that clearly includes new or slightly different obligations (as well as new amounts of money!). This seems to me to be a very problematic situation. I certainly wouldn't want our senior and tenured colleagues to have to go back and produce monographs to keep tenure, or anything like that. But I do expect that tenure not be a protection against increased work loads, service, or any other time-suck imposed on us by external agencies (or even against learning to use new equipment, software like Blackboard, or sim).

Discuss.

New Carnivalesque!

2011-01-03T13:37:00.002-05:00

New Carnivalesque!

Hi all! The latest Carnivalesque is up at Kaye Jones' blog. It's filed with lots of stuff you might have missed over the last couple of months, so go and check it out!

And if your tastes run more to the Early Modern, the next edition will be held at Airs, Waters, Places on January 24th. Please send suggestions for inclusion to airs waters places at gmail dot com (no spaces, obvs).

Carnivalesque is certainly not just for academics. We welcome perspectives from a variety of fields, especially history, literary studies, archaeology, art history, philosophy - in fact, from anyone who enjoys writing about anything to do with the not-so-recent past. You can nominate your own writing and/or that of other bloggers, but please try not to nominate more than one or two posts by any author for any single edition of Carnivalesque, and limit nominations to recent posts.

Would you like to host an edition?

Potential hosts should be regular bloggers with some knowledge of and interest in pre-modern history (though, again, not necessarily academics). If you are interested in hosting an edition of Carnivalesque, please send us an email (see further down page for details), noting whether you are particularly interested in early modern or ancient/medieval, and telling us a little about your background and historical interests.

Let us know at misrule atsign carnivalesque dot org

The end of the year already?

2010-12-29T16:05:00.002-05:00

The end of the year already?

Wow, it was so easy to blog during November, and then I fell off the wagon again. Right now, I'm in a cafe, unable to settle on work, so am going to say some stuff. I would tell you about my year, but it sucked. Actually, many good things happened this year, but the bad things were the sort of things that were in ways devastating. Not as devastating as my last breakup (and that's a whole nother thing, as they say). No, these things were devastating because they hit me at the core of my professional identity and involved going through something we probably all go through once we settle into a place, or maybe when we get tenure and become senior faculty. All of a sudden, we see more of the politics, and are on different committees (actually, not true in my case, but I know it is for some), and when we have the freedom to follow our own agendas a bit more. Or maybe it's just that academic politics can be very much like the schoolyard all over again, with cliques and hurt feelings and all sorts of things that shouldn't actually happen between reasonable adults.

Hm. I am having trouble writing about these things, at least in a dispassionate way.

Let's just say that I kinda love my job. I like the students I teach, even though I wish they were more driven. I work for great people who I really believe would like to pay their faculty more and who have been very supportive of me and my work, and of my colleagues, too. They have foibles, but I wouldn't trade them. I generally like my colleagues, although I am truly disturbed by some of the things I see, particularly those that seem to be the result of giving junior faculty too much responsibility too soon, with too little mentoring and oversight. And frankly, those same things might also be a result of not having a good feel for institutional wisdom and its importance. I love the town I live in, and enjoy much about small-town life. I have a house, and cats, and good friends. I feel loved and appreciated.

And yet

It would be nice if this year hadn't seemed to be a mash-up of Mean Girls, Lear, Middlemarch, and Gaslight.

Hey, it's still the bleak midwinter where I am. Look for productive posts in the New Year.

Today's word

2010-12-01T21:58:00.002-05:00

Today's Word

So I'm not signing up for the Reverb 10 thing seen here, at BrightStar's and here, at Dr. Crazy's, but I thought it might be fun to play along for a bit. So...

Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?

Wow... lots to choose from, but I think the word is really stress. I started the year taking over as department chair rather unexpectedly. I taught as many or more students than all my colleagues combined, plus doing admin stuff, trying (and often failing) to work on my own stuff, and watching everybody else get ahead on research to the point that I began to resent teaching -- the reason I was hired and what I do best. And of course, I beat myself up for it. I beat myself up for a lot of things, apparently. Who knew? Anyway, by mid-summer, I was waking up with clenched fists and feet and had managed to clench my jaws at night even while wearing a bite guard. So... lots of tired. Lots of inefficient use of time and lack of concentration. Lots more beating myself up. Or, to put it bluntly, more stress. And falling behind meant cutting out the gym to catch up ... I assume you're getting the vicious cycle here? Plus weight gain... on-again, off-again relationship, jugglers' balls bouncing everywhere and breaking things... plus a couple of fairly major work-related crises i will not be blogging about. Oh, and that whole buying a house thing.

I cannot wait for this year to be done.

Next year's word: together. Together is what I want to be. Having a grip on my life again, focusing on the right things, getting my head together, my health together, my finances together. And maybe even being together in the relationship sense, if that ends up being an option. Together in the work sense, too, both for me, and in a collegial sense. Together is good, because it's alone without needing others, and also not alone.

NaBloPoMo 25 -- dinner and big cats

2010-11-25T22:47:00.003-05:00

NaBloPoMo 25 -- dinner and big cats

So I am at a friend's/adopted sister's for Thanksgiving. Me, her, and her husband. And the cats. One is rather large .. 27 lbs and about 3 feet long, not including his tail. The other is also not small, but only in a normal not-small-cat kind of way. He's also very orange. We've been talking about life, and teaching, and departmental politics. One of the nice things is that both of them are modernists who sometimes do American history. So they can offer sensible opinions of what normal methodology is for people in their fields. This has been really helpful, both in validating my feelings that all of the people in my department don't mean the same thing when we use the same words (for example, in my world, document analysis almost always requires a close reading of the text, as well as demonstrating an understanding of the context; in theirs, it's far more about context, and close readings are optional at best). It's also been very helpful for my understanding where some of my Americanist colleagues are coming from. Apparently, when Americanists go to conferences, they don't really quiz each other on the use of evidence the way medievalists often do. For me, this is a little weird. I mean, if I went to a panel on Merovingian bishops, I'd expect to hear references to Gregory or maybe Venantius, or... you get the idea. There's a general sort of corpus of narrative history that most of us are at least vaguely familiar with, and we examine the use of those sources as much as anything else, I think. But apparently, this isn't true in all subfields. This explains a lot to me about some of my department's dynamics. It also means I need to re-think some of the ways I teach the methods course, so that the students working with the Americanists will have a better idea of what they need to do on their theses...

ETA: It's interesting that my friend described my approach to what I think of as documents or sources as more akin to a literary approach to texts: very old-fashioned; something that might have been acceptable 40 years ago, but would never be published today. In fact, she intimated, it was like the approach of lit people, where everything is reduced to a text, and context occasionally is missed out. For my part, I said I thought that the other approach was clearly good for synthesis and focusing on context, but the actual primary source evidence seemed to be getting short shrift. In some ways, it seems to me that it's the difference between starting with the primary sources and working outward and starting with a question and the scholarship in working inward. There should be a conversation between the two, obviously, and I doubt I will ever be convinced that the old-fashioned approach is therefore less worthy (in part because I will still always have the attitude of someone who is expected to have more tools in her toolbox to start with, but is also big enough to allow for more tools). But it is probably good to get the perspective of someone else, because this really plays into ideas of academic rigor and assessment.

NaBloPoMo 23 -- Grading Jail

2010-11-23T22:28:00.002-05:00

NaBloPoMo 23 -- Grading Jail

That's where I am. Forever. With a cranky cat. And a pleasant and sleepy cat. Guess which one is lurking over my grading! The weekend will be too short. Aargh!

NaBloPoMo 21 -- back home

2010-11-21T21:42:00.002-05:00

NaBloPoMo 21 -- Home again

Hey all, I'm forgiving myself for the lack of blogging because I was at a conference. I was at the SEMA conference, enjoying myself with people I like. There were some great people there, and some good papers -- especially those I heard on Saturday morning, which included a very nicely put-together one on Hildemar of Corbie and the construction of monastic space and my favorite (and not because it was given by The Cranky Professor): one on Agobard of Lyons and the Magonians. It wasn't really about space aliens, which made it all the better because we got to talk about them anyway.

Given the subject of the conference, it wasn't surprising that there were lots of papers that referred to revenants, ghosts, and other such things. Nor was it a big shock that many discussions included references to the impending Zombie Apocalypse. I was polite, and did not correct the person who used I Am Legend as an example of a zombie story. People. Read the book before seeing the movie. There were also some papers that had some iffy bits, I think. I'm not convinced we should consider John Donne to be a Tudor writer. Really, I think he is much more representative of the unpleasant James Stuart and his religion than any of the Tudors... In fact, there were a couple of lit papers I heard that could have been much stronger had the authors been better versed in the history they used to attempt to contextualize their arguments.

It's a funny thing: most of my friends who are lit people are really pretty damned good with the history. Most of the historians I know who use literature are pretty good at using it, too -- although I will admit that most of us tend to rely on the safer historical interpretations. Because of that, I tend to think of all medievalists and classicists to be interdisciplinary types as a rule. This experience reminds me that interdisciplinarity is not merely about using each other's sources, but having a rather firmer understanding of and rooting in each other's disciplines. It also reminded me that honestly? periodization across the disciplines can be sort of difficult.

Anyway, it was a very great time, and my esteemed colleague from VA Tech and Modern Medieval put on a really good conference. There were blogger meetups without planning them, and I got to report some fun stuff back to a person who probably needs a new nickname, so that was nice.

Otherwise, my weekend also included some interesting prospects on the personal front...maybe. And I have now officially started to worry about my writing commitments.

NaBloPoMo 14 --bzuh?

2010-11-16T23:43:00.001-05:00

NaBloPoMo 14 --bzuh?

The world has conspired against me today. Back tomorrow.

NaBloPoMo 15 -- halfway done

2010-11-15T23:45:00.002-05:00

NaBloPoMo 15 -- halfway done

You know, I haven't posted about X in a while. But you know, he is the best proof in the world that sometimes recognizing a bad marriage, or bad compatibility for marriage, is a good thing. We are so much better as friends than we were as spouses. I appreciate him far more as a friend, and he seems to notice far more about my moods than he did as a husband. I'm sorry it didn't work out, but very glad and very thankful that we still have a relationship that is well worth having. I'm also glad that he has a very cool fiance who likes me :-)

Sometimes, life can work out for the best.

All of this is to say that it is good when we are reminded of the things that *are* good in life.

I had two of those moments today, which was a completely depressing and infuriating day in several other ways. I left class disheartened because my students Just. Did. Not. Get. It. In a way that I could not have anticipated.

I mentioned this to a sort-of colleague I met on the staircase (sort-of, because he's another academic, a Political Scientist, but he doesn't teach at SLAC. He's the President's husband who sometimes works on campus). Anyway, I mentioned the thing -- the students really did not get that the Pact of Umar was not something everybody agreed to so that people of different religions could live together in respect and peace, even though they knew it was imposed on Christians after a conquest!.

And he said something that helped to crystallize the issue for me: "They don't understand power."

And so much fell into place for me. I really need to change some of my teaching, especially in those classes where I can because the outcomes are things like "gain multiple perspectives and demonstrate global awareness." It may just be a good idea to start off the class with a set of theoretical propositions and explanations. What happens in pre-20th C wars? What is slavery, really? How do different cultures define race and ethnicity?

hmmmm

NaBloPoMo 14 -- teaching reading

2010-11-14T21:16:00.003-05:00

NaBloPoMo 14 -- teaching reading

(note: flashy auras happening, so spelling/typing likely to be affected)

Hmm. I'm teaching methodology and historiography next fall. Not my turn. Grrr. On the other hand, I'm looking forward to undoing some less-than-effective teaching. Some of that is down to me. I don't think it's that I've been doing things badly, but I haven't really seen what wasn't working as clearly or as soon as I'd like.

But I need to make some changes even sooner than fall. Next term, I'm going to have to start changing my assignments for reading and analyzing primary sources. I'd been focusing on getting students to talk about what sorts of evidence a text could provide, and put the text in context. Mostly, I can get them to talk about authorship and purpose, but more and more, the students aren't connecting those things to the text. There's no overall understanding. So starting next semester, the exercises will focus on context and really giving detailed discussions of how the document fits into the time period -- as well as some discussion of what's going on in them. And I will probably also have to get them to write out vocabulary lists, to be honest. I won't quiz them, but my students are not so good with words.

In the methods class -- and in my future upper-division classes -- I will be working more and more on getting them to read secondary works critically. I was trying to figure out when I learned to read articles, and I never was taught. But as an undergrad, we were assigned a lot of what were then DC Heath Readers (called Problems in European History). For those unfamiliar, the readers focused on a time period and/or series of major questions, and were made up of seminal and/or famous works (abridged) that addressed those things. We were never asked to compare the view of X versus Y, but we were asked to reiterate and discuss the various arguments. So I guess there was some sort of absorption of the ideas of argument and historiography without explication. Me, I'm going to be more explicit and those things are going to be integrated into every class I can manage, and if I can't get pre-assembled ones, I'll just choose articles myself. I'm also going to have to push the vocab skills and the "look up what you don't know/understand" skills. Most of my students simply don't look things up -- they just keep reading. I'm gong to have to tell them (many times) that I still run into references and allusions I don't get, and *i* look things up. And I will have to teach them to recognize the signposts of academic writing: fore example, when do quotes indicate a quote, and when do they (also) indicate an allusion to a larger idea? And what are hermeneutics?

However.... before doing that, I think I will ask you all to help me. Do you know of any similar collections or titles? Do you have ideas of controversies or subjects on which there are clearly very different interpretations that are also likely to be interested to undergrads? Leave recs in the comments, and I will put together one big "sources for teaching" post!

NaBloPoMo 13 sleepy

2010-11-13T23:14:00.000-05:00

Nablopomo 13 -- sleepy

Dinner. Movie. Wine. No date. Just hanging with a friend. Sleep now.

Hey -- I'm posting...

NaBloPoMo 2010 -12 -- migraines

2010-11-12T08:09:00.000-05:00

NaBloPoMo 2010 -12 -- migraines

This is not my typical post. It's not about teaching or history or anything else like that. It is instead all about me. I'm blogging it because honestly, when you only have your own body to compare with, it's hard to know what is normal. So I suppose I might be some freak of nature and you will all run screaming the next time you see me. But probably not.

This odd thing happened to me at the therapist's the other day. She suggested that my brain sounded like it had some form of ADHD, but then retracted that when I pointed out that I can totally concentrate, sometimes almost obsessively, on one thing for literally hours on end, once I'm stuck in. This is so true that I can actually forget to drink or eat. But most of the time, my brain is spinning. I can feel myself trying to shove things aside till I'm in something like 'the zone.' I am not so much able to live in the moment, because there is always so much happening. My students have been known to tease me because I can be writing on the board and talking and, mid-sentence, tell a student to stop texting or sim, and then go back to the same idea. Or I can be mid-sentence and have an image flashing through my mind that takes me horribly off course, and sometime after a digression into why they should all see Casablanca or read the Bible, wend my way back to the topic we were discussing. It's less like being a butterfly than having a magpie in control... "Ooh! Shiny!" or like the dog in Up: "Squirrel!"

What does this have to do with migraines?

Well, I have them. They come in many flavors: the kind with kalleidoscopic vision and bright colors; the kind that feels like someone took a rubber mallet and hit the side of my head; the kind that feels like my head's in a vise... any or all of these can be accompanied by extreme pain and nausea, although fortunately as I get older, it's more nausea and nagging pain that drugs can dull to where it's bearable.

But there's another thing to my migraines. When I get them, I become incredibly sensitive. I've noticed it before, obviously -- these things have been plaguing me for 20 years. But this morning, as I lay in bed, not able to work because I couldn't see and sort of wanted to throw up, I realized that my migraines are like exaggerated versions of what my brain is always doing. Migraine brain is freaky, because so many things are going on, and it's like I can see them close up. My eyes are closed, but there are still the flashy lights of the aura. There are so many things happening -- there's the garbage truck coming down the street, and the signal at the next block has changed because someone is grinding his gears moving from first to second, the little cat is purring, and the big cat's fur is rustling on the pillowcase next to my head while he purrs in a different key. I can feel not only the sheets against my skin, but evey place that my skin touches my skin feels like it's almost burning, or electrified. Meanwhile, I'm noticing and trying to focus, but that only serves to make one thing louder -- everything else is going on. And of course I'm thinking thinky things, about writing this blog post and what I need to do at the office and whether I'll make it to my gym class and how loud everything is. At the same time, I feel entirely disconnected. That may be the sumatriptan, though :-)

I have no idea what migraines are like for anybody else, but for me, they are all about sensory overload. The pain and the nausea are in some ways merely secondary discomforts. I monitor the pain because they tell migraine sufferers to do so, just in case this time it's an aneurysm or stroke. The hard part is the being so conscious of everything -- and then the exhaustion later, both from the pain and, as I realized today, all of that processing.

And I think I know why I feel like I needed to write this down. I wonder if whatever it is that makes my brain susceptible to migraines is related to why I often feel assaulted by noise that other people might not notice, or why I sometimes have a hard time compartmentalizing and focusing. hmmmm. Anybody else out there have migraines and recognize any of this?

Remember

2010-11-11T09:08:00.003-05:00

Remember

*

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

*photo courtesy of http://www.rafaelgomez.com/

NaBloPoMo 10-- More teaching stuff

2010-11-10T22:54:00.003-05:00

NaBloPoMo 10 -- More teaching stuff

Well, I just read one of the worst papers ever -- a primary source interpretation exercise. This is one of the things I have trouble dealing with. The paper was not simply bad because it lacked a thesis, or because the lack of thesis was not supported well, with, like, actual evidence. It was a bad paper because there was no evidence that the student had got past the lower stages of Bloom's taxonomy. By that I mean that the student had barely got past "identify". There was some attempt at paraphrasing the texts themselves, but no attempt (despite the instructions and the fact that, when we discuss texts in class, the first questions I ask are always the ones that establish a bit of context) to do anything more, and no attempt to establish context. Moreover, it's not clear that the student actually understood the context -- or the texts.

Now, apart from the fact that I really shouldn't have to deal with students who cannot do college-level work, it's clear that this is part of a bigger issue. It's not a new issue -- it's one that Sam Wineberg has written about many times -- reading like a historian is natural for some of us, but for most people, it's a learned skill. More to the point, I think it's a skill that requires a person to unlearn a lot before she learns it. It would help if I knew how students learned to read anything!

I've looked around for help on this, and honestly, although there are tons of books and aids to help students learn to write in the field, all of them expect a particular level of reading skills. Some of those skills are really not as clear as we might like them to be. So how do we teach our students to read primary sources? Do you have any ideas?

NaBloPoMo 2010 -9

2010-11-09T22:35:00.003-05:00

NaBloPoMo 2010 -9 Thinking about what works

Lots going on today, mostly catching up and marking. Lots more to come. One of the very few benefits of being so behind on things this semester is that I'm starting to see some things that the students just don't get -- and also how I am and am not teaching those things. So, for example, I'm trying to get them to do primary source interpretations. For years, I've focused more and more on getting the students to show how a historian could use the information in a given document. Sometimes, this is pretty easy -- If I give the students a set of laws, then they can usually reach the conclusion that society X considered Y an important issue, and give examples of why. This year, I got some really good essays on Ancient Near Eastern societies, based on a couple of law codes, in which a coupe of students said that private property was one of the most important values of those societies -- and they used examples dealing with land, slaves, and women to demonstrate this.

But sometimes, they don't get it. Tonight, I realized that this might be because I'm choosing difficult documents, and perhaps also because what I haven't been teaching well is to contextualize the documents. So next semester, i'm going to change one of the written assignments to have the students place the document(s) in context and discuss authorship. Maybe that will make their final written assignment stronger.

In the meantime, as I mentioned the other day, my students aren't doing a great job with secondary literature. And I honestly don't think any of us are really teaching it. Academic writing is a big step up from textbook writing, even when the textbook is much more a monograph, like Innes' Introduction to Early Medieval Europe or James's Europe's Barbarians, both of which I have used. The students are reading for content, not argument. So I need to work on teaching that, too.

But for now, I need to go to bed.

NaBloPoMo-8 -- Monday Monday

2010-11-08T23:38:00.002-05:00

NaBloPoMo-8 -- Monday Monday

Mondays are tough -- four classes, and usually a meeting on top of that. So I'm barely blogging. But tomorrow, I have marking and a bunch of random refreshing on the feudal Revolution/mutation/whatever this week.

NaBloPoMo 2010 -7

2010-11-07T21:30:00.003-05:00

NaBloPoMo 2010 -7 -- where did my weekend go?

Well, I did do one thing I meant to do this weekend. Two things, really. I raked a lot of leaves. And that was just the front. Seriously, what possessed me to buy a house with so many maple trees around? And I proofread a chapter for a friend. That was fun -- it gave me an excuse to read history, for a change. Meanwhile, the evil little cat is trying to ruin my new sofa. AAARGH.

Also, I went for a nice long walk with a friend today, along with dogs. Dogs are fun, but I'm glad that I don't have one. Too much work. Somehow, the weekend got away from me and I got little done in the way of catching up.

Somehow, I think more happened, but I can't seem to remember. Still, words on blog is the point of all this. This week, maybe even words on paper!

NaBloPoMo 2010 -6

2010-11-06T23:11:00.002-04:00

NaBloPoMo 2010 -6 Movie day

Despite having much to do, today was a good day for yard work and a matinee. saw RED, which was fun and funny. Lightweight entertainment provided by heavyweight actors. Tonight, an extra hour of sleep (or really, just the ability to get up at 8 and have it be back to being 7.

Hey -- it's a post, at least.

NaBloPoMo 2010 -- 5

2010-11-06T10:36:00.002-04:00

NaBloPoMo 2010 -- 5 -- A little late

I wrote this in my head last night, and then never posted it. I think because I was trying to pay attention to the news. Or maybe a mystery on TV. Yesterday was fun -- unpacking feminist theory with my upper-division students. I saw in most of their faces the same looks I probably had at their ages -- "why do we have to know this? who cares? can't we just READ THE HISTORY??"

Except that the grown-up scholar me understands why. I still don't love theory much. I'm not a huge fan of historiography for its own sake. But, as one of my students said at the end of our hour together, "Some of that article makes more sense now."

Weirdly, from Scalzi a couple of weeks ago, to Barbara McManus and Jo Stanley yesterday, my teaching and scholarship -- and my life -- are moving more and more to questioning, critiquing, and challenging the dominant paradigms.

Thank you to my colleagues in the blogosphere and at Leeds (mostly, although some of you I see more at the zoo) and to the Tea Party for this. I think.

NaNoBloMo 2010 - 4 what is work?

2010-11-04T22:38:00.003-04:00

NaNoBloMo 4 -- What is work?

Today, I went in to the office, and advised a student. For an hour. And then another one. And then I had lunch, quickly. And then I advised a couple more students. In between, I tidied my desk, marked a few quizzes, caught up on my email (sort of, I have 1003 emails in my box that I haven't even read but right now an organization for which I am an officer is having elections, and I have to keep up with the listserv), tried to ring LDW, read three newspaper articles, I took a couple ten-minute breaks (I've got leechblock set) and liked a few things on facebook, checked requirements for a couple of minors for tomorrow's advising, updated Blackboard with revisions for assignments (which required actually reading through some stuff) for the survey courses for the rest of semester. And then my day was over.

I know lots of us have days like this. The thing is, these days always make me feel as though I haven't got anything done. And yet, almost all of that is part of my job. That is, I am paid actual money (albeit not much) to do these things. Nevertheless, admin days and advising days never really feel like productive days. I think this is in part just me, but more, it's our training. Even though we know when we are students that our professors are working when they are talking to us, and that they write, and that they go to meetings -- and teach, obviously -- I'm not sure it ever sinks in properly how much time is sucked away by those things. The messages we get in grad school are to avoid meetings and anything that keeps us from researching and writing. Teaching, when we do it, is the price we pay to be in grad school. For some of us, teaching is in fact why we went to grad school. We wanted to teach. In some ways, that's probably a very good thing. But in others, at least in my case, it meant that i cultivated early a habit of placing my teaching and my students ahead of my research. Research was the price I paid to be allowed to teach.

It's taken me a long time to get to where I not only appreciate, but also enjoy, research. But like most faculty in the US, the primary focus of my position is teaching. This is a wonderful thing, and suits me. In fact, it's the job I would have wanted more than anything in grad school -- a position with minimal publication requirements, a (relatively) heavy teaching load, and (on paper) not too many service demands. And yet on days that I teach four classes (usually two lectures, two seminars, all different levels, usually 3 preps), I come home feeling as if I haven't accomplished much -- except on the really interesting and weird days where the students and I go unexpected places with fun and stimulating results. I can spend two hours in a meeting putting together a policy that will affect the next several student cohorts, or the way we spend money on technology, or facilitating a workshop for my colleagues, and at the end of the day, all I can see is the work, especially the scholarship, that I haven't got 'round to.

I'm sure some of it is conditioned. My professional journals tell me I should carve out time for my own work in the same way the rest of the media tell me I should be thinner. And maybe that's it. It's our work. It serves us, and us alone. We're paid to do it, but for those of us not in serious research-oriented institutions, it's something that is supposed to be fit into our schedules on top of the teaching and service, even when it makes up a significant part of the evaluation process. For me, no matter how many times I read that it's perfectly normal to get little research done during the year, I still feel like an underachiever, especially on days like today. One of the things that sometimes enhances the stress and the guilt is also a gendered issue. At SLACs like mine, I think female faculty are also expected to be more nurturing than the male faculty are. The guys I work with are by and large much better at putting their own work first and saying no to things than are my female colleagues. Either that or they just don't talk about it much. I know in my own case, there is a lot of baggage that comes with me putting my own work first. In fact, I'm working on a homework assignment for my therapist* -- I have to do three nice things for myself this week, things that make me feel like I am being taken care of. And there is a little voice in the back of my head that says that probably, she doesn't mean sitting and reading a journal or writing a review, although those are the things I plan on doing. And maybe buying a Sunday paper and letting myself read through all of it while drinking coffee. Why? I have too much work to to do, even though it's work that will feel like I got nothing done when it's finished!

Anyway, I have no great wisdom on this. In fact, I'd really just like to ask you all how pervasive this feeling is, and what you do to combat it.

*yeah. Work-related stress.

NaNoBloMo 2010 -3

2010-11-04T00:15:00.001-04:00

NaNoBloMo 3 -- I taught what today?

Today's classes included explanations of the following:

Arianism
Trinitarianism
orthodoxy
heresy
Hagia Sophia ➔ hagiography ➔ philo-sophy ➔philanthropy ➔Anglo-philia➔ bibliophilia

Carnivalesque and Bakhtin explained in part via Disney's Hunchback and how it worked with Hill's 'the world turned upside down' in reference to the idea of a pirate Utopia.

The last one kind of astounds me, given that I have no idea where I picked up anything about Bakhtin in the first place, let alone how to explain it to college undergraduates. But it was there in the article (well, the term 'carnivalesque' was, and I'm trying to get them to understand that they have to recognize allusions to scholarly arguments and theory in secondary sources, rather than simply reading at face value. But we unpacked phrases like "subverting the dominant structure," and I tried to explain things.

And the crickets chirped.

But this time, I asked if I needed to go over things a different way, and one of the students said, "I get it. I'm just thinking. This is ... deep. I didn't know that there was so much more to understanding something like this. " And heads nodded around the table.

So I took it further and said that it wasn't all that different from when I told them that they should all have a working knowledge of the Bible. And someone reminded me I'd also said they should be familiar with Shakespeare's major works. And then someone touched on Milton, and I pointed out that the Biblical allusions in Milton were pretty pervasive -- and that really, Pullman's His Dark Materials is far more interesting to people familiar with both Milton and the Bible (not to mention the history of the Reformation)...

I sometimes wonder what the hell it is I think I'm doing. But it's fun, whatever it is.

NaBloPoMo 2010 -2

2010-11-02T22:33:00.003-04:00

NaNoBloMo 2010 -2

Day two of the whole "let's blog every day" thingy. I was going to write something in response to Notorious, PhD's really interesting post on teaching and sabbatical, but it's been a really busy day, and dammit, there are election returns coming in.

Too many bastards are winning. There are far too many people in office (I'm looking at YOU, Minority Whip Cantor, and YOU, WI MN Rep Michelle Bachman, and a bunch of others) who make me ill. This is not so much because of their politics, but because of the glee with which they refuse to answer questions and/or blatantly lie. I don't really trust most politicians, but today I realized that I am getting increasingly offended by unseemly behavior.

Otherwise, the day was eaten up by student advising, a medical-ish appointment that is part of my way of dealing with crap at work, and VOTING!

I don't really understand what is going on in this country. I understand the anger. In understand feeling betrayed. I don't understand how people can say that these things are down to the Democrats, or to liberals in general. Neither party has covered itself in glory in the past many years, but these bizarre beliefs that we are supposed to be a Christian nation, or that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire as planned will somehow mean raising taxes for people who make far less than $250k a year, or that corporations are people... that, I can't really understand.

UPDATE: Is anybody watching this crap with Boehner crying about his American dream?

NaNoBloMo 2010 -1

2010-11-01T23:26:00.003-04:00

NaNoBloMo 2010 -1

So it's November, and I'm trying to get a bunch of things in order, so what better way to do it than to vow to blog daily for a month. Today's post will be somewhat random, and therefore bulleted...

I'm planning to respond to a lot of interesting blog posts this month...
Jason Isaacs is terribly attractive,even when playing the dreadfully unpleasant Lucius Malfoy. Gary Oldman is also strangely compelling. But did you ever think that just perhaps we might want to take Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix a little bit more in the way of an object lesson? Because really, every single death in the story is pretty much down to Harry and his amazing lack of self-reflection.
Guy Halsall's blog is starting to annoy me, because he's writing really interesting stuff I don't have time to read
You may also hear about my going to the gym. This is because I've been terrible about taking care of myself for the last year or so. And that is largely because there has been a lot of crap going on in my life, primarily professionally. That you won't be hearing about.
Speaking of which, spinning classes are hard, but not as hard as yard work. I'd forgotten all about that aspect of home-owning
again, or still, I'm amazed by how some faculty react when they hear the word "assessment" -- It's as if the word means, "we don't trust you to do your jobs and are going to scrutinize every little thing you do, and if it's not perfect, there will be Consequences!", when really, it mostly just means, "what is it that you want your students to learn, how can you tell if they are learning it, and what do you do if they aren't?" Instead of getting that it's perfectly ok to fail, and then fail better (as long as you document it), they instead talk about "gaming the system" -- even though the system is generally up to faculty to define. I mean really, it boggles the mind.
Meanwhile, I'm going to be trying to post boring updates about my research projects, just to keep me honest.

and that is my first post of the month. Sorry it's a bit dull.

Look! Carnivalesque 67!

2010-10-25T17:55:00.004-04:00

Look! Carnivalesque! 67

In other words, oops! I totally forgot that I said I'd take care of this. Blame my impending transition into what is now, undeniably, middle age. So, in Ancient and Medieval news or, as I like to think of this one, stuff by and about some people I probably know. Because I may be middle-aged (and honestly, I am -- in two days I will be half as old as my oldest grandparent was when he died, and if I take after my shortest-lived grandparent, I've only got 26 years left), but this blog is kinda old by blog standards! So here we are. Welcome to my own little corner of the blogosphere.

How the hell did I miss that Guy Halsall hath a blog?! Sorry, it just came to a shock to me. Anyway, I just found it, and saw that he posted his Leeds paper from last year. I'm really glad about this, as it came late in the conference and I took notes, but still was absorbing parts of it after the session broke. Nice to have a chance to read through it and think about it again, although I might find myself asking him annoying questions or, as that nice Dr. Jarrett calls them, awkward ones. In the meantime, I notice that Eileen Joy has engaged with Guy's paper over at In the Middle.

Speaking of Dr Jarrett, I hope you all noticed that he has a job in Oxford, or maybe at Oxford. But that hasn't stopped him from blogging the really important stuff, like Christopher Lee's new effort.

This is not the only move around. Vellum, of Vaulting and Vellum, has begun a PhD program at Gothic Revival U. I am pretty sure I know where that is. And there is a fellowship involved, which is always a good reason to be in grad school. In much shorter-term moves, I am now of the opinion that our friend Jeffrey Jerome Cohen should now be called "the peripatetic Jeffrey Jerome Cohen," seeing as how in the last couple of months he has been to Berlin, Buffalo, Bethany Beach and Barcelona. Oh, and next month, I'm off to this conference, where I'll meet up with Matthew Gabriele of Modern Medieval, the The Cranky Professor, and I think some other ~~super-fun folks~~ stodgy medievalists. That's a lot of moving around!

Meanwhile, some people aren't moving around that much, because they are busy researching and writing. Some of the stuff they are writing is cool, too -- even if it isn't part of their project. For example, Dr Virago talks about relics, medieval and modern. Check out the picture of Jeremy Bentham. I sort of think it's freakier than the one of St Catherine, who reminds me of a something between Miss Havisham and Tim Burton's Ghost Bride. And speaking of weird, Carl Pyrdum over at Got Medieval had a contest for the weirdest medieval fact on Wikipedia. Guess what won? Hint -- it's not the papal scrotal-inspection seat!. Geoffrey Chaucer hops on the Zombie Apocalypse Mashup train -- as of today! people, how considerate is it that he gave me something to add? And, to round out the odd facts section, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Scott Noakes' totally cheesy post on acceptable sexual positions in Albertus Magnus, cleverly hidden behind the fact that being fat might have allowed some exemptions. Sounds like combining lust and gluttony to me!

Gluttony leads us into another mention of Dr. Jarrett, this time in the guise of Magistra's post on Edible Numismatics. Speaking of which, you really should read Magistra's blog. It's really, really good. Speaking of coins, it looks like Swedish metal detectorists might be able to start reaping the same benefits as like-minded folk in the UK, according to Aardvarchaeology. And dammit, what ancient-medieval carnival would be complete without a not to the Staffordshire Hoard.

And lots of us have been talking about research and teaching, too. Clio's Disciple tells us about a really bad nun. Karl Steel has a story about feral child, just like Mowgli, except in the wilds of Hesse where, if you read your Annales Fuldensis and the correspondence of that old crank St Boniface, and I have, all kinds of odd things can happen. Did I ever tell you that I was once in Fulda, and saw that, Boniface and the pope aside, people were still eating horseflesh!? Moving forward in time a bit, Cranky Professor is blogging Dante in great detail.

But now, in the almost immediate future, I need to go to bed. As always, putting together a carnival has reminded me of how much great stuff is out there. I'll leave you with two things: First, some very fun public medievalisms from The Society for the Public Understanding of the Middle Ages, and; second... a rather sad farewell from Jennifer at Per Omnia Sæcula. We'll miss you!

Next edition: 21 November 2010 (early modern): to be hosted by Nick at Mercurius Politicus

would you like to host a Carnivalesque?

Potential hosts should be regular bloggers with some knowledge of and interest in pre-modern history (though, again, not necessarily academics). If you are interested in hosting an edition of Carnivalesque, please send us an email (see the sidebar to the right of the page for details), noting whether you are particularly interested in early modern or ancient/medieval, and telling us a little about your background and historical interest

Today, I taught John Scalzi

2010-10-18T21:10:00.003-04:00

Today, I taught John Scalzi

No, I didn't actually teach the man himself. Really, it was more that he taught my class. Or maybe he just made it possible for me to teach. No, I don't teach science fiction, but this wasn't science fiction. It wasn't history either, as it happens. Instead, it was my Freshman Seminar on an incredibly cool topic. But one of the outcomes for the course is that students develop multiple perspectives and global awareness. We were supposed to be discussing an article on a 17th pseudo-Utopian community, but instead, we started with Scalzi's post of this morning, "Things I Don't Have to Think About Today."

I didn't have a lot of time to think about it. I saw it and just decided it was worth talking about. So I walked in, and asked how many definitions of the word 'privilege' they knew. A couple had heard of race and/or gender privilege, or class privilege, but no one really knew what it meant. So I said I had something we could read that might help to explain it. The makeup of this class is interesting in that it is majority white and male. Most of my classes are a bit more heterogenous, or at least more gender-balanced. But whatever. So we went around the room, each one reading a line aloud. Sometimes the lines were especially sad, because the student reading them probably *had* had to think about the ones they read. Next time, I will probably give them all a list and ask them to check off the ones they have or haven't had to think about. Anyway, after each one, we took a minute to discuss what they meant, some more than others. So, for example, more than half the students didn't understand why someone would have trouble hailing a cab after midnight. But enough did that they could explain. Some didn't understand why a prescription might be difficult to get. We talked about that, too.

Fortunately, it happened that the reading for class also had some interesting race stuff. So we were able to relate the two readings and to talk about different ways of excluding people or othering them. And this is where I start to worry about fail. Because this is ADM talking, and ADM is pretty white. Yeah, there are lots of sorts of privilege I don't have, but white privilege is something I've got. And so I feel a bit weird talking to students of color, or gay students, or anybody else who really knows about what it's like to have to think about all of the things that Scalzi and his commenters mention, because I'm also the person in the classroom with the most power and privilege in this situation. The dynamic are interesting. Today was a bit more interesting than usual, because I started my day with Dr Crazy's post on feminism in the classroom and was hoping that I create such a space when I teach. I think I probably do, but sometimes it's a clumsy space. Because I'm me. And sometimes I show my ass. But that's the risk you have to take, I think, because this shit is important to talk about. Still, I do hope I'm not screwing it up.

Because I never post anything cool anymore

2010-10-18T11:15:00.002-04:00

because I never post anything cool anymore

Apropos of a Pink Floyd-BeeGees mashup I saw via Twitter, I give you this very cool mashup that makes me want to listen to all three of these women:

Also, because I love this video, and I'm not sure we'd have the one above without her:

Happy Monday, people!

The problem with Assessment...

2010-10-14T21:20:00.002-04:00

The Problem with Assessment

I've been thinking a lot about assessment lately. This is partly because it is on my institution's radar screen in a big way, and partly because it seems to be one of the real stumbling blocks for faculty relations all over. That is, it seems to me that there are often faculty who are very much on board with the idea of having clearly articulated assessment programs and others who aren't. It doesn't seem to me to be a generational thing, although there is certainly something to that -- at SlACs like mine, older faculty are often used to doing things their own way, whereas younger and often junior faculty are a bit more open to working on such programs. You all probably know that I'm sort of an assessment fan. I don't want anybody in lock-step with me, and I don't want to be in lock-step with anyone else, but I see the value in all the people in a department or an institution having the same sort of standards.

This seems to me to be a particularly American thing in some ways, too. My colleagues in the UK are used to a system of double marking and outside evaluators. I think that's a good thing. I know people who see it as a threat. In fact, I think that, in general, the people who want to stay as far away from any coherent assessment program are those who are the most frightened of being found out. It's impostor syndrome, but in a way I've never thought of before. I worry all the time about being found out, about my colleagues finding out I'm not really one of them. This is entirely centered on my worth as a scholar. It never occurs to me to feel like a fraud in the classroom, but then it always occurs to me that there are better ways to teach something, and I talk to people about teaching all the time. there are plenty of ways my teaching is flawed, but I do also know that I'm not a bad teacher. Weirdly, it never really occurred to me that there might be people whose impostor syndrome worked in the reverse.

Assessment, good assessment, means looking carefully at oneself and the way that one teaches. When we talk about assessment and "quantifying the unquantifiable" as one of my colleagues puts it (which is total bullshit, as far as I'm concerned), it looks like we're tracking our students. To some extent we are, but more importantly, we are assessing ourselves. If our students aren't doing well, then we have to ask why. And why it might be that we aren't doing as good a job as we ought to be doing. We might have to change and re-think things. To me, this is a given. But I can see that, to others, this might also be an indicator that we were wrong, that we weren't doing our jobs well. What if our students aren't lazy or stupid? What if it's us??

I think the truth is that we do have some lazy students and some students who are kind of boneheaded. But we also just have students who are smart, but aren't ready, or unprepared. And we do need to learn to teach them, and perhaps to change the way we teach in order to serve them and yes, to teach them in ways they can learn. Because if we don't assess, and self-assess, then the problem *is* us.

Big Berks

2010-10-03T22:06:00.003-04:00

Big Berks

Hey -- I am doing my Big Berks registration, and have booked a room at the hotel for my roommate (another blogfriend who most of you know) and me, but was wondering if there were any other bloggers going who might want to share one of the dorm suites. There's not a lot of difference, price-wise, but the fun of hanging out would be nice. Also, does anyone have ideas about the meal plan? One of the things I liked about the last Berks was the ability to hang out with friends, and I'm not going to get any money from SLAC for meals (or at all?) so it seems a good deal. But I don't want it to be like the Zoo, where buying meal tickets means giving up spontaneity...

And yes, registration is due next week!

(I know, this is not a real post -- life, grading, and trying to remain objective through a serious storm of shit is hampering my ability to cope with anything but getting through at the moment)

Accounting for Culture

2010-09-08T21:18:00.010-04:00

Accounting for Culture

My academic year started on an interesting note. At our first faculty meeting, the SLAC president stood up and read some of the responses to the annual, 'what could we be doing better?' survey. A couple were pretty harsh. One pretty much said, "There are faculty who repeatedly not only don't pull their weight, but also who make life more difficult for those who do. Some of them even get ahead because they write while the rest of us do the service. When the hell are you going to address this?" There was a gentle susurration, a flow of murmurs, and then we moved on. Later that day, someone asked if it were my comment. Nope. I knew whose it was, though. Hell, I knew by the tone. Two other people have asked me if I wrote the complaint. They were glad someone had finally talked about the elephant. I'm not sure what it means that they thought it was me, although it probably surprises no one that I am often the person who misses the "don't talk about the elephant" signals. The thing is, I don't tend to talk about such things anonymously. That's a little weird, because -- believe it or not -- I hate confrontation. I hate being angry. I hate being on the spot. It makes me physically ill. Really. Even asking questions at conferences when I know those questions might be elephant questions makes me a little sweaty and queasy. But I feel this compulsion. If a question begs to be asked, I have to ask it. *

Still, that question of, "what are you going to do?" hangs in the air. What will we do? What can we do? We can, apparently, imitate ostriches or headless chickens pretty well. Pretend it goes away. Run around complaining. Fix things? It's amazing how powerless a SLAC full of advanced degrees can be when it comes to confrontation and job performance.

Job performance. Being a faculty member is a job. I have one. Lots of people don't. I've got quasi-tenure, and it would take at least a couple of years to get rid of me, unless I did something egregious, but honestly? I have a job, with a boss, and a set of external standards that may be less rigorous than my own, but are standards nonetheless. But so much of my performance as an employee depends on my own set of standards and ideas of professional ethics, and those things are not, apparently, universal. My own standards require that I put students first and actually fulfill my service obligations. Those are, fortunately, the standards espoused by Superdean and the Provost, as well as by many of my colleagues. Not all of them, though. And that seems to be the rub for a lot of the people I know who teach in SLACs. I think that this may be one of the issues more glaringly obvious at SLACs than at other places, if only because SLACs tend to be smaller, and are often private. These two factors, even more than a generational one that I think might also exist, are arguably the most influential in creating the sorts of tensions that the comments at the faculty meeting indicate.

The S in SLAC stands for 'small'. Small student bodies mean small faculties. Small faculties often mean small departments. In a department of 20, it's pretty easy for one or two people to fly under the radar when it comes to teaching and service. This is especially true where research is clearly an important, perhaps even the most important, part of the job. That also tends to be true in the larger departments, which are most often found in what used to be called R1s (or, in the UK, Russell Group unis). At research campuses, the greatest rewards tend to go to those who are the most productive. Because they offer postgraduate degrees, faculty often have marking help from TAs, students who don't necessarily think to go to academic advisors for hand-holding, and large lecture-style classes. Teaching and especially service are often seen as unfortunate responsibilities in such institutions. This isn't always true: I can think of a dear friend who is at an Ivy and tends to do a lot of service, and LDW is a senior faculty member at a research uni, has always carried a heavy teaching load, a heavy service load, and publishes voluminously in our field and in another -- and regularly marks 400-500 exam scripts each term. So I know that even in some Research unis, teaching and service can also be important, or at least take up substantial amounts of time. BUT -- there is still that ability for those who are successful scholars to fly under the radar in bigger departments.

At SLACs, that's less likely to be true. We know who is doing what. In the best situations, we know what our colleagues think about teaching, what they are researching (or would like to be, if they could find the time), what committees they are on, and what's happening on them... and that's seldom limited to our departments, because we are so small. People actually read newsletters to see what's going on with the colleagues they don't know so well (and, admittedly, to see who got funded for what so they can congratulate them or nurse grudges -- this is academia, after all!). In the worst situations, departments or programs can disintegrate under the stress caused by one or two people. Sometimes it's not all that visible: a new and interesting colleague comes into a department, and leaves in a year or two. And then the next does the same. And then a third. Other times, it might be a matter of someone behaving unprofessionally, but the people who notice have reputations for taking things personally, and their complaints are not clearly rooted in what is really the most important issue: person X is not doing hir job. And sometimes, it seems, everybody knows there's a problem. And it seems like nothing is being done. Morale suffers. A disgruntled person notices a colleague in another department seemingly getting away with murder, hears gossip, internalizes it, and thinks, "hell -- why should I be working this hard when so-and-so doesn't have to?" And so it goes. There is an impression that we are not really being held accountable.

The thing is, we are. We are accountable to ourselves. We are accountable to our colleagues, we are accountable to our students. But our culture is not one that is transparent about these things. Nor should it be. Job performance details are privileged information. Nowhere else would you have people essentially expecting to know if Henry's evaluations were ok, or if Sue had been placed on an action plan. But in the business world, Henry and Sue could be terminated quickly, or could be given an action plan that might be as long as 3 months to meet certain metrics. Academia works on another calendar.

You knew that, didn't you? We start our year in the Fall. We think in terms, plus Summer. We submit papers to journals and they might be published 18 months later. And our timeline for dealing with professional issues is necessarily different, too. Say a colleague appears to have disengaged from students, service, even showing up, except for classes (this is not normal at a SLAC, to the best of my knowledge). A few people notice, but someone says they heard the colleague was having personal issues -- death in the family, divorce, illness, feeling burnt-out, whatever. It's one semester, and everybody has a bad semester now and then. Hell, I've had semesters where I had a really hard time getting to classes on time. In my case, this was because I was commuting 45 miles each way, going through a divorce, and generally not sleeping. My body and brain were really not operating very well. And that can happen to anybody who is dealing with a lot of stress. Few people noticed, but I knew, and tried very hard to make sure it didn't happen again. Still, I was surprised my evals were almost as good as usual. Anyway, so one semester goes by. There's no complaint, no documentation, because the rumor-mill has provided an explanation.

And then it happens again. And mid-semester, someone says something to an administrator. The administrator might document it, but might not. Because we are all professional adults, and a friendly talk might be enough. But it's not. Meanwhile, the faculty member has received her annual contract (because even tenured people still have to agree to terms of employment in most places), and knows that she is safe for another year. So one year has gone by, and no documentation. The next year, the administrators are more wary, but there are no serious complaints. Grumbling, but the students seem happy enough, and the colleague shows up for the meetings for the single committee she's on. She's doing the bare minimum, but that's not enough to fire a person. It might be enough to deny a merit increase, but if a faculty member isn't worried, then that's not really a stick. And so it goes. It can take several years of assiduous documentation to get to a point to show cause for firing a faculty member, because in academia, annual review is often not based on meeting certain metrics or losing one's job. And there can be a difference between doing a good job in terms of one's students, colleagues, and institution, and doing a good job in one's own terms. Academics tend to measure worth in terms of scholarship. If a person wants to move up, it's not done through great teaching or exemplary service. It's done through publishing. It's a weirdly oppositional arrangement. The things that are most portable in terms of our CVs are also the things that are least community minded. They are the things that come out of the most solitary aspect of our jobs, and so we are in some ways rewarded for a sort of independence that really isn't - it relies on the goodwill of our colleagues and their willingness to pick up the slack. But in terms of how we function and how the research and writing is done, it is independent. And traditionally, we bring a sense of entitlement derived from our independent work into the classroom. And there, we really are becoming more and more accountable. Talk about a clash of cultures!

And I will, next time. In the meantime, I need to get the house ready for a party, mark 50 essays, prep classes, send in paperwork for a conference panel, send in an application for conference funding, set up a schedule for a program I'm running for our Provost, register for Berks (YAY! I am giving a paper there! and I might even be able to travel by train to get there!), and write a bunch of stuff.

Yeah -- it's a big list. I expect I'll be back well before then, because I need to write regularly and thoughtfully, so here I go.

*There's a lot more that could be said about my conference questions, but for now, I'm sticking to the others...

Re-thinking teaching, professionalism, and a bunch of other stuff

2010-09-06T11:06:00.002-04:00

Re-thinking teaching, professionalism, and a bunch of other stuff...

...probably not all in one post. One of my goals this academic year is to get back to blogging more regularly, despite having a much heavier load than I've had in a long time. I need to do this because I need the discipline of writing something thoughtful on a regular basis, something that in the post has helped me to focus better on my research and teaching, Some of you are aware that the last year has been pretty hard -- so much so that I really couldn't blog the way I wanted to, i.e., objectively enough that I could mask enough details to preserve my friends' and colleagues' privacy. But there are a series of posts I would like to write about teaching, assessment, maturing in the profession and at an institution, wearing an administrator's hat, and what it is that we do for a living. Hint: it's not some of the stuff in this. So here's an update on what's going on, and a solicitation of opinions on what you guys want to hear first. While you're thinking about that, I may be writing. More later today.

Carnivalesque!

2010-08-25T16:00:00.002-04:00

Carnivalesque

Hey all, sorry for the late notice, but term started on Monday, and I have NO INTERNET AT HOME! OMGWTFBBQ!!!

So I missed that my very esteemed colleague, Jonathan Jarrett, had posted the latest edition of the Ancient/Medieval Carnivalesque at A Corner of Tenth Century Europe. It's easily one of my favorite editions so far, in both content and format. You should go look at it!

Some quick thoughts on the MAA thing

2010-08-10T10:18:00.008-04:00

Some quick thoughts on the MAA thing (updated)

I have an internet connection at the moment, so thought I'd belatedly say my piece on the MAA going to Arizona. To sum it up, I'm pissed off and disappointed, but mostly, I'm upset at being surprised.

I'm NOT surprised that the meeting is going on. A big chunk of money had been spent already, and I can see that the organization's leadership might have felt that they could not simply write off that kind of investment. I can even see that they would think that it was important to some of the putative presenters' careers to give papers at the meeting, although at this point, I doubt it would have affected anyone's funding for travel.

What I AM surprised at, and what really guts me, is that the letter, written by committee or not, expressed absolutely no reference to the laws that those of us who opposed holding the meeting in Tempe objected to, except as some sort of bullshit "collective political action." This upsets me, I think, because to me, the laws are clearly wrong in a moral sense (and in a constitutional one), and are not at all "political." And to a certain extent, because I am acquainted with a couple of the members of the Executive Committee, I feel a little sick at not knowing if they willingly characterized racial discrimination as 'political' or if they were somehow argued down. It's not a good feeling.

I'm also upset and, perhaps naively, surprised at how this entire thing has been characterized by some, especially in the Inside Higher Ed comments, as being a 'leftist' issue, or a case of 'political correctness.' I don't know how people who have read the US Constitution and know anything about US history can see a support of equal rights and equal protections as being 'leftist'. Admittedly, I have a dog in this fight -- my family includes people of color who are Southeast Asian, African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latino. Some of my family members are also gay. But of all of those people, only the Latinos are likely to be personally affected by SB1070. This is a big country, though, and it's not all about my family -- it's about anybody. I don't see that this is any different morally than making ethnic minorities wear identifying clothing or denying people of a certain skin color the right to eat with Anglos. Shouldn't we have reached a point where civil rights are seen as patriotic, rather than partisan?

So that's why I'm saddened. Not so much about the decision to go on, but about the apparent unwillingness of the leaders of an organization to which I belong to publicly recognize that this is a moral issue at all, or even, at the very least, to publicly recognize that this is a moral and ethical issue for a fair number of the membership. This lack of acknowledgement of something clearly very meaningful to at the least a sizable and vocal ~~majority~~ minority comes across as a lack of respect and a dismissal that is entirely unwarranted and at best, very uncollegial.

update:

Today, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen posted a piece on his reactions and why he is maintaining his membership in the MAA. It is thoughtful, and very convincing. Jeff also noticed something that I had not in the CFP that came out yesterday: an acknowledgement of the moral concerns for some of us. It's a far cry from the condemnation that I feel is necessary, but it's something. And, as Jeff says, it probably indicates that there are rifts on the council. Again, knowing that some of my senior colleagues seem not to think it is one is disturbing to me. And I hope I shall one day find out who argued which way, because that would at least relieve the sick feeling of wondering, but would replace it with the sick feeling that colleagues whom I respect didn't find Arizona's racist laws (and I'm talking about the whole passel of them, not just SB1070 -- a law that requires teachers to have 'a correct accent' seems ludicrous at best to a left-coaster who's lived in the Deep South, and we know it's code for non-Anglo English) morally objectionable. In the meantime, I have been informed via a listserv that three members of the local program committee have resigned, because they cannot give their support to a meeting in the state where they live as long as the laws are racist. They also point out, for those who have forgotten, that a boycott worked to get Arizona to recognize Martin Luther King's birthday as a holiday. So yeah, I'm boycotting, but not quitting.

eta: I missed my eighth bloggyversary. Happy eight years!

Moving and penguins

2010-08-08T08:48:00.003-04:00

Mobbed by Penguins

Girl Scholar asked for the penguin story, so I will tell it. It is an odd story, as no actual penguins were involved in it, and yet, there was, by the end of the evening, great assurance that we would, indeed, be mobbed, or mugged, by penguins.

This year at Leeds, I stayed in Oxley Flats. Unless I am wanting to share a bed with someone there, I do not ever anticipate this changing. Best conference dorm accommodation around, I say. I was told last year by the amazing Dutchwoman that that was where to stay, and she's right. Well worth the extra £10 a night, if you can afford it. So I checked in. And got a bunch of paperwork, including one which mentioned that we should please to keep our windows closed whenever possible. It said something along the lines of: "Danger! A masked band of pigeons have been entering rooms looking for food!"

Yes, Pigeons.

When I got to my room, there was another sign.

But somehow, when I was at a party held in the flats, trying not to be intimidated by the fact that I'd even been invited because I was surrounded by Big!Scary!Names!*, the scholar with the flowing tresses and I were explaining to someone about the dangerous pigeons, except that, when I said it, it came out "penguins." It caught on, and there were penguin jokes for the rest of the evening. Apparently, medievalists would much rather imagine penguin banditry than pigeon muggings!

Meanwhile, in ADM land, the kitchen is almost finished being unpacked. There are a shiny new fridge and stove, and the plumbers are coming tomorrow at 7 am (eek!) to plumb the gas line (and fix a leak, which they don't know about). On Tuesday, if all goes well, the stove will be hooked up, and I will indeed be cooking with gas! The new furniture is in the living room, and today I will be able to put the TV on the mantel -- this seems a bit high to me, but opinions all pushed for not putting it directly in front of my non-functioning fireplace. There are boxes to unpack there, and I shall need to buy some shelving and a coffee table or ottoman, because there is nowhere to put my feet up, dammit! Upstairs is still a disaster area, and I am somewhat dismayed to find that the litter box must remain in my office (hence the sweeping of much more cat litter than I'd like), because: a) the basement needs a dehumidifier, and that means leaving the door closed; b) the door to the basement is hollow-core, so not great for installing a cat flap, but also; c) I need to figure out how to install a cat flap so it's almost flush with the floor so that the aging Mr Soppy can get through easily, as there is not a lot of top step on the other side of the door, and finally; d) the basement is dark and scary and unless I want to get some lights that remain on permanently, Mr Soppy seems very distressed at climbing the stairs at the moment. His vision seems to have deteriorated in the past couple of months. Anyway, today we hang curtains, and tighten up the bookshelves in the office/guest room, which is very large and comfortable.

Huzzah for DIY Grrl and her wife, the Coach, who are coming to help today!

*Actually, they are all really nice people, even though they are intimidating intellectually, and I fear their questions at conferences. But it's possible that people dread mine, too. Still, I am intimidated and also, now that I know them and have been let in, so to speak, I feel tremendously obligated to produce good work. Which is really not a bad thing. I'm sadly motivated by trying to live up to imaginary standards I project on others - this is one way in which the dread Imposter Complex can work to my advantage!

Almost in the land of the living

2010-08-05T21:28:00.001-04:00

Almost in the land of the living

Survived move. Now for the unpacking. Back soon!

T-2 days till the big move...

2010-08-02T22:37:00.001-04:00

T-2 days till the big move...

So the closing went well, work on house moves steadily on, with a few contractor glitches. And I need to finish packing. More soon...

RBOC -- where have I been?

2010-07-26T21:13:00.003-04:00

RBOC-- where the hell have I been? edition

There should be a Carnivalesque coming up at A corner of Tenth Century Europe ~~Real Soon Now~~ next month -- please help with submissions!
I have spent the last week at a Think Tank (TM)-run institute, aka Smart People's Citizenship Camp. It was a mixed bag. Some really cool people and great conversations, a beautiful location (marred by the ridonkulous heat wave, which meant that I could not actually enjoy the beautiful location), and some weirder-than-hell dynamics that left many of us feeling uncomfortable, but not ready to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Supposedly, I close on my house tomorrow. This would be easier if they had told me the closing costs, but presumably I'll find out in time to run down to the bank and get a cashier's check before closing. Holy crap. I'm buying a house!
The cats have not yet convinced themselves that I am not leaving them alone for a while.
I have a LOT of admin work and teaching prep to do before I'm due back on campus (not counting today's lunch meeting), and did I mention I'm moving into a new house in a week or so? Depending on when I can get re-wiring done. And appliance, sofa, and curtain shopping. Which comes first?
I will at some point possibly blog about Leeds, because it was awesome. I can honestly say that Kalamazoo is fun, but Leeds really regenerates me. I think part may be the timing, but also, there are people there who know my field and who make me feel both able and obliged to up my game, and I like that. Anyway, if you're lucky, I'll remember to tell you the story of how I didn't get mobbed by penguins.

meet-ups

2010-07-13T19:29:00.001-04:00

meet-ups

if you are at Leeds, some of us will be in the Stables from right after the last session till whenever. For me, whenever is at about 7:15.

Leeds, Day 1

2010-07-11T19:29:00.002-04:00

Leeds, Day 1

Extremely cool colleague across the hall. Dinner with a friend in Classics. Geezer-fu still working. Meet-up with other people from Grad U and TenthMedieval and friend. Too much beer. Yep, I'm at Leeds. Seriously, the one thing I dislike about Leeds is that the bars are rather further from each other than is convenient. Actual posting on scholarly stuff tomorrow.

Workation, all I ever wanted...

2010-07-08T15:39:00.002-04:00

Workation, all I ever wanted...

So this is still not that post about my first year of quasi-tenure. Instead, it's about what I'm doing Right Now. Sort of. Because, I am currently in my favorite big European city -- favorite because many people I love live here, and so is the BL, which is one of my favorite places to work, because I am always able to be somewhat productive there. The weather has been very warm. Very warm. And I've had to use my inhaler every day. But I'm still having a blast. Watching the World Cup with my family and friends, going to the zoo and to pubs, and meeting up with a lot of people. Meanwhile, I've spent a lot of time reading up on diplomatics and charters -- ugh. But useful. And getting ready to go to Leeds. So basically, I've worked every week day, played every night, and have had a very lovely time. I'll be telling you more later. Because I had something to talk about, but I forgot about it, because my family is watching Desperate Housewives, which I've never seen, but it seems a lot of fun.

Really?

2010-07-07T16:53:00.003-04:00

Really?

Dear person offering to do my research for me,

Are you effing serious?

Also, eff right off.

Also, yeah, because what I do is sooooo easy. Clearly if I am having difficulties wrapping my head around diplomatics in German, you'll be able to just go on the internet with your super-cool internet research platform and your not-yet-complete undergraduate degree and do it for me.

Did I mention...

Please eff off. Now.

ETA for Cranky Professor

Dear The Author of Blogenspiel,

I am following up on an email I sent you last Monday.

My name is [redacted], and I am an undergraduate student studying English, Philosophy and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. I am writing to offer you on-demand research support: a high quality intellectual service exactly when you need it.

The mechanics to facilitate this are easy since I am on the [redacted] research platform. [redacted] is based in Canada and was originally developed by professors for professors as a way to connect top students with faculty to assist them with their research. The platform is now open to serve the private sector. I was invited to contact individuals for whom I would be keen to conduct research. I chose you, among others, due to your field of work.
{redacted] works:

1) Visit www.[redacted].com, click “start your research,” and enter your research assignment,
2) Select how long you would like the researcher to spend on your assignment (in 2-, 4-, or 6-hr increments) and how fast you need the report delivered,
3) Register and pay (a 4-hr report can be as low as $69).

[Redacted] is so confident about the quality of its researchers’ work that it offers a full money-back guarantee. To see samples of the quality of work that we produce in just a few hours, please visit www.[redacted].com.[Redacted] researchers are top students from leading North American research universities who are selected and trained by professors. Many professionals spend a lot of time searching, synthesizing, and presenting information. Instead, we can do that quickly, effectively, and at minimal cost, making our clients more productive. The service is hassle free – researchers work on your assignments on demand (when you need it, without employment contracts or price negotiations).

So, if you are swamped and could use a highly motivated, high-performing student to save you time on tasks involving online research, then please let me know.

Should you have any questions, please feel free to be in touch. I am happy to contact you by phone if you prefer.

Sincerely,

[Redacted]
[redacted] Researcher
www.[redacted].com

I'm really tempted to send them a list of German references on diplomatics and ask them for a precis in English... I bet it takes more than 4 hours!

History Carnival

2010-07-01T05:49:00.002-04:00

History Carnival!

Summertime is carnival time, right? And there is a new History Carnival up at Jonathan Dresner's place. So go and play!

The 2 1/2 orders?

2010-06-25T15:45:00.002-04:00

The 2 1/2 Orders?

Following on tenthmedieval's comment on this post, and a conversation at the massive group exam read of last week, I have some thoughts.

The conversation was about the F word at first. A group of us were talking, me, a Late Antique person, a very modern person, and two high school teachers. I mentioned the F word, and one of the high school teachers said, as they often do, "but wait, I always teach the Feudal Pyramid -- it's in the textbook! What am I supposed to tell them?" Me being me, I said, "well, really, that's a model that has been pretty much abandoned. Textbooks tend not to be written by medieval specialists, so the information is often very outdated. If it were a university course, there's a good chance that the first half would be taught by someone who was a pre-modernist, and they'd correct the misrepresentations." So we talked a bit about feudalism and Peggy Brown, and Susan Reynolds, and Chris Wickham, and manorialism, and other such things... like Duby and the Three Orders and how a feudal obligation is between members of the same social group.

Fast forward to the last post.

Because what do you do with the three orders? it doesn't really work unless 'those who pray' are really the low-level monks -- except that in the Early Middle Ages, at least, even monks tend to be not from the lower echelons of society. And if we look at the people who are at the top of the ecclesiastical food chain, so to speak, they are members of the leading families. Their brothers and fathers are comitesand duces -- and even kings. And yet we have a model that is based on lines that we see more and more to be very fluid between the first two orders. By birth, they are largely the same people. And yet, so much of the existing scholarship of the past, oh... hundred years? has created an understanding of society that means that we always seems to express some sort of surprise, or at least forceful assertion, when we find something that indicates that the interests of ecclesiastics and laity were often the same, and were intertwined. And yet, it is only logical. So where do we go from here, to get to where we can start really changing our models? Or should we?

this confuses me

2010-06-24T10:45:00.002-04:00

This confuses me

SO I'm in the British Library, more falling asleep than working (I only got here yesterday morning, and had only three hours' sleep Tuesday night), and read something I've read over and over for years... basically, an author states that lay elites and ecclesiastical elites had similar interests. In this case, we're talking about charters. But really, is this supposed to be a surprise? Because I thought it was pretty clear by now that we are talking about the same people, by and large. Yes, ecclesiastics do have additional interests, because their allegiance is, or should be, somewhat divided.* But hasn't there been enough work done, at least for the Franks, that we can now assume that the two groups are generally related to each other by kinship, and that, especially in the cases of proprietary churches and monasteries (or royal ones), the holders of ecclesiastical office are doing it precisely because they are connected by blood to the lay elites?

Or am I missing something important?

*should be in the sense that they are supposed to be looking out for the church's property and interests, whoever their relatives.

Carnivalesque 63

2010-06-22T09:22:00.001-04:00

Carnivalesque 63

Hey everybody!!!1

Carnivalesque 63 is up at The Cranky Professor. It's full of all sorts of fun stuff, so take a break and read!