Category Archives: academe

August 10, 2011 · 6:00 pm

Building in Breathing Room

It’s been a crazy week and a half since the end of my vacation (which was supposed to end two days earlier but tell the weather system that shut down a whackload of flights out of JFK and pelted the rental car we eventually opted for with hailstones the size of walnuts). Every time I think I have a handle on matters? Life intervenes.

One kid’s gotten sick. One dog’s gotten sick. There was a student crisis to address. Those are just the tip of an iceberg that’s had me waking up in the middle of the night more often than not as well as running from pillar to post in our city of far-flung destinations. Colour me exhausted: a situation that’s rather scary considering the start of term is still three weeks off!

At the office, today, I chatted with a colleague about our summers and I was struck by his wisdom. With a busy family life, they’d not only opted to not travel (a choice that sounds delicious to me in retrospect) but they’d also taken a long hard look at a big home renovation issue they’d thought to tackle and said “Not right now.”

You’ve got to build in breathing room for those inevitable moments when life tackles you at the knees and brings you face-first to the ground. (By the way, the dirt tastes awful: it’s been a dry summer hereabouts.) I’m taking a look at my schedule and seeing what I can weed back out of it which isn’t much, but still: every little bit helps. Not just for the last few weeks of summer, leading up to term, but through the fall and winter, I’m going to remember to build in and protect some of that breathing room in my schedule.

I’m still keeping up with my Write Early, Write Often program and am happy to say that I got another four thousand words done on two projects over the last four days. I have two editorial projects to plow through by the end of the week. These need to be done now but does everything else? Not so much!

I’m not going to kill myself to get those course outlines finished this week when two weeks from today will do just fine. Breathing room: it’s important and worth protecting!

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Filed under academe, personal

July 17, 2011 · 8:58 pm

Infantilism? I think not

With all the attention refocusing on the Harry Potter franchise as the last movie is released (I see it tomorrow!), the press seems divided between celebrating the cultural impact of Rowling’s books and mourning what their popularity means.

On the upside, we see articles like Lev Grossman’s literate and respectful treatment of fanfiction in Time magazine, The Boy Who Lived Forever. Fanfic is one part of the participatory fan culture that’s exploded around Harry Potter over the past ten years and more, although this one fandom is only a small part of a broader phenomenon rising around books, music, films, comic books, television shows and more. Groups such as the Organization for Transformative Works champions ordinary people who want to follow those same impulses that inspired Malory to write a new take on Arthur in the fifteenth century and Shakespeare to remix the historical chronicles of English kings that he used for his history plays (some of my favourite takes on RPF or Real Person Fiction as fandom knows it).

Another in this vein comes from my local paper, The Sudbury Star, where Wayne Chamberlain explains how the Franchise is Pure Magic. He spoke with professors like Colleen Franklin and librarians such as Monique Roy who saw value in the series and in the genre. But the most touching and telling example came at the end:

“People can’t wait to read her books,” Franklin said. “And that can’t help but spill over into them wanting to do more reading.”

Ray Provencher, 34, is testament to that fact. The Sudbury man, who works as a projectionist at SilverCity, said the Potter books inspired him to read after 10 years of avoiding books.

“Since then, I’ve read The Inheritance Cycle and Kathy Reichs’ books based on the Bones (TV) series.

“I mean, I had maybe four or five books before. Now, I have shelves of books thanks to J.K. Rowling.”

More reading. It’s almost always a good thing and it’s clear that these books are part of a renaissance for reading as popular activity in ordinary culture.

On the downside, we get articles like John Barber’s more problematic How Harry Potter Rewrote the Book on Reading which raises the familiar academic criticism spectre of Harry Potter destroying our culture. Nameless academics are evoked, cursing the series for encouraging “cultural infantilism” when adults start indulging in children’s literature. (And Barber gives us extra-bonus points for apparently ‘padding’ our reading lists with Harry Potter books when we don’t condemn the works out of hand.) Let’s also not forget the condemnation of many dark trends in young adult books made by Meghan Cox Gurdon in Darkness too Visible (a position which she strongly defended in her response to criticism, My ‘Reprehensible’ Take on Teen Literature).

Won’t someone think of the children?

Ptui! First, it’s hardly a phenomenon of recent invention when you have children and adults reading the same books or that the said books have dark themes. The rise of a dedicated “children’s literature” section is relatively recent in the history of bookselling and many works we consider classics for children were widely read by adults in an earlier time and written with such readers in mind. (Robinson Crusoe, I’m looking at you!) For more reading on children’s literature to give you a sense of how permeable these boundaries have long been, see Seth Lerer’s entertaining and eloquent Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter. You can write with children in mind, and not craft something inferior. In fact, it’s more challenging to write well for an all-ages audience than for a smaller subset.

Let’s admit, once and for all, that the wall we’ve built up around children’s and young adult literature is a fiction. It’s one less sturdy than those spun in the pages of many of those books. Just as Trevor Dayton, VP for children’s books and Music at Indigo, noted in Barber’s article, the Harry Potter books have made the division between adult books and children’s books “almost indistinguishable. Also from Barber’s piece, you see that the vast majority of these YA books are bought by adults (over 75%), whether for themselves or for younger readers. Overall, more people are reading more books these days thanks to Harry Potter and company.

Adults reading books marked or marketed as suitable for children and young adults. What’s so bad about that? What’s so bad about parents and children, youth and adults, finding common ground in the books they read? Honestly, I find a lot less pretense and posing in the best of young adult literature than in much of the literary fiction I’m told represents the best of the best today. So, if you’ll excuse me, I have some great YA novels to finish reading. Then maybe I’ll check out the fanfic archives, and see what’s happening there!

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Filed under academe, pop culture

June 30, 2011 · 9:13 pm

Write Early, Write Often

When I’m not embroiled in editing (a very pleasant chore in many ways, let me tell you, given the calibre of contributors we’ve found for The Hobbit and History) or taking care of the various mundane chores of Real LifeTM, I’m writing.

Even as my sabbatical winds up this very day (sniff!), I’m writing. I have two chapters to finish, an article I’m trying to wrestle into shape and various bits and pieces for the book project, all important and pressing professional obligations. Plus there are a few other pieces I’m writing for fun. . . .

I spoke with a colleague this week, who’d just read a book of writing advice for academics. What she drew from it was unsurprising and coincides a great deal with how she’s successfully worked to complete a book project despite her own heavy teaching and service loads. It also fits in well with what I’ve been reaffirming over this sabbatical. I don’t need fancy tools (though I would love to learn more tricks for using Zotero). I just need to follow my four rules of writing productivity.

  1. Write Early. Not early in the day. At least not for me, although I don’t open my email first thing since I’ve learned that’s a way to quickly get hijacked into serving another person’s priorities. For me, early is in the timeline of the project. I try to psych myself out with an even earlier deadline. I start with schematic plans of the project that are very loosey-goosey at first, often just a few paragraphs and points for what will be a chapter-length piece. Then I can spot the “holes” where I need to add more and research more (hence the two most recent interlibrary loan books sitting on my coffee table: The Military Leadership of Matilda of Canossa, 1046-1115 and Queen’s Apprentice). As the research is completed and the archival material is organized, I fill in the holes and keep on trucking.
  2. Write Often. Daily if at all possible. Five days a week if not seven (I’m of two minds about keeping weekends free from professional writing since I often lose chunks of weekday afternoons or evenings to other responsibilities.) Even if I can only get out a hundred words one day, or flesh out the outline another two or three points, that’s better than nothing, isn’t it? Five hundred words in a day is my best steady output. And if you’re aiming for a six thousand word chapter or a thirty-five page article, you can break it down into chunks. Five hundred words a day gets your chapter done in twelve decent writing days, leaving time if I’ve started early to put it aside and then return with a fresh eye to make all those vital revisions.
  3. Anything Will Do. Editing, yup: it’s necessary, but not when I’m writing. I have to strangle that inner editor when I’m trying to get writing. Editing doesn’t count in my daily goal-setting. I do my best now not to edit more than I absolutely must before a first draft is complete. I might leave notes that remind me I want to reorganize the second section to clarify the chronology or split up the economic examples across the entire chapter, say, but I don’t do that until I’m done. Otherwise, perfectionism rears its ugly head and slows me the heck down. (This is the lesson which took me the longest to learn!)
  4. Accept No Substitutes. I’m often asked to work on a policy document or edit a student’s work, sometimes on very short notice. During teaching terms, I have almost unending piles of marking. (Seriously, I have had dreams that it multiplies just like the brooms did in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.) I can’t count the other stuff I’m doing in my daily achievement. It might fill up my day, you betcha!, but even then, I can usually squeeze in a hundred words or so on my real writing priority.

What’s on your list of ways to get into your writing groove? I’ll check back in once I’m done with today’s writing!

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Filed under academe, personal, writing/editing

June 20, 2011 · 2:37 pm

The Ivory Tower’s Basement (A Female Perspective)

Professor X launched a tidal wave of commentary when he published an essay on his dispiriting adjunct experiences in The Atlantic in 2008.

I finally got around to reading the book this month and, for the most part, I found his sad story entirely comprehensible. There, but for the grace of a tenured position and a less hectic housing market, go I. I also experience shock at the sheer level of incomprehension my students display when asked to tackle basic concepts in the first year course (hint: not understanding what the words ‘Christian’ or “European’ signify is worrisome when you’re vaulting right out of the end of the Middle Ages in a Western Civ survey) but I freely admit that my work is never so challenging as that of an English instructor expected to remediate students who can’t write, period, in one or two college-credit courses.

It’s an interesting read, not just for academics. Caleb Crain’s NYT review suggests that this is, at its heart, a book about shame. I’d counter that almost every book about academia is, in one way or another.

My most visceral response to the book came Professor X related a story of a tenured professor who gave grades solely based on student improvement. This leads him to muse on the effect women have had on higher education:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 1975, 31 percent of college teachers were female; by 2009, the number had grown to 49.2 percent. There are more women teaching in college than ever, and it is quite possible that their presence, coupled with out discovery of the postmodern narrative, has had a feminizing effect on the collective unconscious of faculty thought. Strong winds of compassion blow across campus quads. Women are more empathetic than men, more giving, simply more bothered by anyone’s underdog status. Many of the female adjuncts I have spoken to seem blessed and cursed by feelings of maternity toward the students. Women think about their actions, and the consequences of their actions, in a deeper way than do men. Women may not be quite as inclined to sigh and, with a murmured “fuck it,” half-angry and half-miserable, possessed by the fatalism of someone throwing the first punch in a bar fight, mark an F in the grade book. (153)

Now, he doesn’t pursue this line of thought any further but, oh really? Did you see that? We have feminized the faculty and, oh no!, brought in with us the corrosive forces of empathy and maternalism. Professor X is hardly alone in this assumption, so I don’t want to tar him with a broad brush. He’s a symptom more than a cause (very much a symptom in his contingent faculty status stuck in impossible tasks of remediation). But it’s all part of the fear that female faculty lower standards at worst or simply subvert academia to warm, fuzzy and anti-intellectual ends at the best. (120 years on and we’re still dealing with the same damned fears as women academics did in the late Victorian era.)

I don’t feel like a mother to my students, but some treat me more like a mother, or a K-12 teacher, than tmy male colleagues. They speak of their personal problems to me. They empty my tissue box repeatedly over the course of the term in teary office visits. They address me as Miss or Ms. My male colleagues are Professor or Doctor. (This is hardly unusual. See Takiff, Sanchez & Stuart, “What’s In a Name? The Status Implications of Students’ Terms of Address for Male and Female Professors” Psychology of Women Quarterly 25:2 (2003), 134-145.)

Professor X earlier admitted that he inadvertently benefits from the assumption that a male instructor must be a professor, much as he protests the improper use of such a title by his students. Now, I don’t want to be petty enough to deny him that or to make much of an issue of forcing students to recognize the fine differentiation of faculty rank, but I think those of us who teach at university should all be mature enough to step back and see these assumptions and behaviours for what they are: a reflection of how deeply-rooted gender roles are in this culture.

Women faculty haven’t emasculated the academy but I think Professor X might be well-served to consider how much the concentration of women in adjunct positions has done to reduce the prestige of that position he and others once saw as more an admirable sideline for a non-university professional. And he might be surprised how many of us women faculty quite easily say “Fuck it” as we mark that F in the grade book if a student has failed to do the assigned work, even as we recognize that their failure might be part of a larger problem.

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June 11, 2011 · 11:33 am

Catching up at the Berks

Friday was such a busy day that I didn’t have a chance to post any blog reports from the conference, but I did tweet a couple of sessions which I enjoyed greatly. If you haven’t already done so, check out the #Berks2011 twitter feed which compiles all the updates shared by historians who’re here and sharing!

First off, click through to the Berkshire Conference Digitial History Showcase which offers an in to all sorts of amazing digital tools from blogging platforms to virtual classroom tools. I was taken by their explanation of tools for exhibits and tours, particularly Omeka. I’m itching to give this a whirl with one of my classes in the fall: maybe my graduate students in historical methods?

I posted a series of summaries from my Friday sessions to Twitter already. One key element threading through all of this is a worry that maybe we read too much agency into how women appear in the legal and economic record. Simply because a woman is on record as having been part of a loan or donation, can we know how much she was involved in the planning and approval of the action? Shannon McSheffrey of Concordia, in her comments to the last panel I attended on Friday dealing with Generative Labor, also wisely cautioned that we need to remember that our modern interest in economic resources as desirable end isn’t always so much of a focus in medieval lives where chastity and religious aspirations figured greatly. This morning’s session where I presented my research on early modern English stepmothers provoked all sorts of interesting insights from the audience directed at the larger issues the panel raised (and our discussant, Lynn Botelho, carefully teased out) about how we are concerned with questions of language (stepmother is a loaded word, for instance, in the early modern English records) and sources (I want to cast my own net wider and bring in local records from a couple of parishes and/or villages that might support a prosopography of blended families beyond the very dysfunctional relationships the Old Bailey Online records document).

Tenured Radical has already filled readers in on some of Friday’s activities, up to the blogger meet-up at 5:30. We were sad that Historiann couldn’t join us, but we still had enough people there in force to take over the big table in the Grad Lounge. Knitting Clio, cliotropic, Clio Bluestocking, Scattered and Random, Another Damned Medievalist, Tenured Radical, Tanya Roth and one other non-blogging historian sampled the fine beverages from the bar while discussing strategies to make digital history more accessible to our colleagues.

After grabbing a quick dinner at the Dining Commons, I convinced some of our group to follow me to a presentation by Deborah Harkness whose A Discovery of Witches was a novel that I read this spring and adored. Romantic paranormal suspense woven into a world of archival research and historical alchemy: what more could you want? Especially when it’s written by a historian who knows her field and has a way with words. She read some passages from the book and discussed a bit of how she brought it into being. Best of all? She told us that she’s heading off to finish up the second book in the trilogy. I can’t wait for it!

ADM compiled some of her thoughts about what we could do better to represent premodern history in her open letter, Dear Berks Organizers. Since the next Big Berks will be in Toronto in 2014, I have good hopes this will come to fruition since Toronto is where Judith Bennett and many other scholars (including yours truly) learned something of the craft of history. We can come full circle there in 2014 to highlight the best in women’s history from across the globe and across the eras!

I have to praise the fine work of the site committee and volunteers for working so hard on supporting the conference. Heroic endeavours brought people in at the wee hours of Friday morning from the airport and some of those same volunteers were up and at them to make sure the 8:30 sessions started smoothly. I volunteered a few hours, myself, to assist people with technology but that was just a drop in the bucket with so many people lending a hand, whether officially a volunteer or not. There’s a wonderfully supportive attitude amongst the conference-goers at the Berks!

But now it’s lunchtime and I have much more of the conference to enjoy, including the infamous Saturday night dinner and dance. See you anon!

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June 9, 2011 · 11:07 am

Live-blogging the Big Berks: Thursday

Like Historiann, Tenured Radical, Knitting Clio, Another Damned Medievalist, Clio Bluestocking and likely other history bloggers I’ve yet to meet online or in-person (except for ADM who I’ve hung out with at Kalamazoo’s big medieval studies conference), I’m attending the Fifteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at UMass, Amherst.

We’re having a blogger get-together, Friday at 5:30, in the Grad Lounge of the Campus Center (main conference building) – hope to see you there and if you can’t make it, I will share the fun details here on the blog!

Travel Notes: I arrived in town last night after a long trip. My flights from Sudbury to Toronto and Toronto to Boston were smooth (I flew Porter Airlines and they are simply marvellous in terms of service and price). Drove a few hours west and a bit north from Boston to Amherst, too – that wasn’t quite as fun, at least not for the last half hour when I was driving in a driving thunderstorm. The only illumination were a few fuzzy signs along the roadside (obscured by driving rain) and occasional flashes of lightning. Let’s just say it’s a good thing that I’d memorized the directions as I couldn’t have stopped to look at either a map or GPS to guide my way.

Tech support: I’m excited to be volunteer tech-support for the conference, too. If you have problems getting your wireless connected (you need a guest account for UMASS – the helpful folks at registration will give you a slip of paper with that information), I’m batting 5/6 so far (one Mac user still wasn’t connecting to the net for some reason, but could get her email). I’ll also be running in and out of a couple of conference sessions today and tomorrow to make sure everyone can connect their laptops to the projectors and so forth!

If you’ve forgotten any cords, let a volunteer know! We have some that you can borrow. You can also check out the the UMass Express store in the Campus Center on the second floor. It’s well-supplied with books, t-shirts, tech tools (if you’ve forgotten your VGA cable!) and all sorts of other necessities. It’s only open until 4:30 on weekdays, though, so don’t go looking for stuff on Saturday!

First day impressions: Registration was hopping at 8:30 as early arrivals rushed to get their stuff, but things have quieted down a bit. I love that the conference badges come with hang tags (so you don’t have to clip or pin to a shirt if you don’t want to do so) and people are getting a nice cloth bag as schwag. Perfect for carrying the registration folder and any books you pick up at the exhibit which opens tomorrow. The organizers were also wise and included a slim pad of paper in the folder so you can make notes at interesting sessions.

Sessions start this afternoon at 3:30. I’ll do my tech support walk around three of the rooms to make sure everything’s good, then I’ll settle down in one of the rooms. Can’t decide which as there are so many cool sessions! Maybe I’ll take in one of the round-tables? (Still too many to choose from!)

There are also interesting tours today but I opted out of any given the forecast is for searing heat and thunderstorms. I don’t do well in searing heat and really don’t want to freak someone out by swooning at a historic location!

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May 29, 2011 · 10:54 pm

What About Workspace?

Last year I got an ergonomic redesign of my university office. It didn’t go smoothly at first but after getting them to move the keyboard shelf to the orientation I’d originally requested and then moving the desk to the other side of my office, I made it work. I now have a pretty good modus operandi at the university, although I’d love to get rid of the filing cabinet that eats up too much floor space. (Sadly, there are many papers I have to keep, including an entire drawer full of exams and unclaimed course papers that must be retained for twelve months.)

What’s important for my workspace to feel, well, workable? Here’s a short list of my must-haves:

  • I have to SEE you: I can get really engrossed in my reading and writing. A quiet visitor stepping in, with my back turned toward them? Freaks me the heck out. Not to mention that some visitors will then proceed across the room to read the paper I’m marking or the text on my computer screen. So my desk has to face the door. It does increase the distraction level as my office is on a very busy hallway, but it’s a worthwhile pay-off to eliminate the paranoia.
  • I need a blank slate: For many years, I worked with piles of papers abounding. I cleared all of that out about six years ago and immediately wondered what had taken me so long. A clean desk invites possibilities. You can spread everything out to plan out a new project or you can leave it empty to limit distractions. Sadly, I haven’t been able to entirely banish piles of paper from my office, as I currently have over a metre high pile of outdated student exams and other confidential paperwork that need to be shredded. As the old shredder died in the flood of August 2010 and there’s no money in the department budget for the mandatory shredding, these have been piling up in my office for over a year, now. So not impressed
  • I love my toys: Well, yes, there is a Starbuck action figure hanging out in my office. But more than that, I find a few good tools help make the work environment better. Isn’t Levenger one of the best things ever? I have a bookstand from there which is a wonderful aid for note-taking and transcription. I also find my keyboard shelf and external keyboard great once I went through the hassle of getting them properly arranged.

What makes your workspace work for you? What are your dealbreakers?

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May 24, 2011 · 1:46 pm

The E-readers Excellency

A New Poste Wherin are divers Admirable Workes Wrought With Pixels. (and with acknowledgement to John Taylor’s Needles Excellency of 1631 as well as my esteemed blogger-friend, Historiann, who holds an opposing viewpoint on e-readers.)

E-readers, tablets, smartphones, e-books – the practice of reading is shifting in the electronic age. Not for the first time (consider how much the practice and use of journalism has changed in the past twenty years!) and not for the last. The book as we know it in the modern era (a bound volume of printed text) is apparently under threat as Amazon trumpets that its ebook sales have outstripped those of hard copies. Should we panic? Should we bar the barbarians from our fair citadel of Academe?

I say nay, partly out of principle, but partly out of the pragmatic realization that the barbarians (e-reader users) are well-ensconced in many parts of the citadel. We have met the enemy and he is us, to quote Walt Kelly. Well, to be honest, I’m your enemy if you’re opposed to e-readers and those who use them. But I don’t want to be anyone’s enemy: I simply want to share my perspective on the value of e-readers as a codex-loving scholar.

  • E-readers and Citations: Even historians can breathe easy as more e-books support pagination. The Kindle began to do so in February. The change is still rolling out so it isn’t universal, but I’m seeing more books with this when I look. If you have a Kindle book, you can see the ISBN of the print edition for which this holds. So it’s possible to provide a fully robust Chicago style citation for your e-reader texts although there is some talk about coming up with new models for e-book citations
  • E-readers and Costs: Yes, e-book prices aren’t consistent (either in ratio to print editions or within a genre). Some e-books are less expensive than either hardback or paperback versions (check out the prices for Jeanne de Jussie’s Short Chronicle which I’ll be teaching with in the fall – $9.99 for the Kindle e-book, $25 for the paperback and $55 for the hardback). Other e-books are priced in-between the two (or just below a hardback version where no paperback exists). Still other e-books prices outstrip that of any new-in-print version. Sometimes the pricing is untenable (I’m interested in seeing the effect of Apple’s 30% price-grab on sales through apps. It’s already caused one e-book app, iFlow, to pull out of the Apple marketplace. academics are well-accustomed to dealing with whimsical and autocratic book-selling venues where pricing bears no reality to the costs of production or marketing: university bookstores! I’m not suggesting you buy e-books at any cost – I certainly don’t! But we can let publishers and distributors know what we’ll pay and what we won’t, both by our choices in the marketplace and our feedback to them as textbook adopters and frequent book-buyers. We all know what our personal price points are – time to let the business people in on the secret!
  • E-readers and Convenience: What sold me on my Kindle was the prospect of lugging around lots of books with a lot less weight and bulk. I spend a fair bit of time driving into the hinterlands of the north for family sports activities. While I’ve done some grading during the downtime, my preferred pastime is reading. With my e-reader, I bring a boatload of books with me everywhere and the prospect of more (3G connectivity has saved me more than once when I’ve run out of books to read while miles away from bookstores, work and home). I’m also accumulating e-reader versions of many teaching texts – not the big textbooks, mind you (their publishers seem to be lagging behind more conventional academic presses and trade publishers in making electronic versions widely available). I also download public domain ebooks from Project Gutenberg and other online archives. Lots of books, anytime, anywhere? It works for me. I can also convert documents that I have on hand into e-book format with
    Calibre – E-book conversion and management software. Literally, I have more to read on my Kindle than I have time to read. Just like my print bookshelves!

Yes, there are drawbacks and downsides to e-readers and e-books. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a major concern – do we really own our books? When proprietary systems interfere with your purchases, break down or are simply no longer supported, the results can be catastrophic. But for many readers, this may not be the galvanizing issue it is for the bibliophiles of the world and when your e-books are backed up at your distributors (as my Kindle purchases are), this may be enough to comfort many. Even with DRM, e-books are opening up to lending, whether privately by individuals or publicly through libraries. An e-reader can even break down but is print perfect? Hardly! You may think that print books are immune, but you didn’t see the effects of last summer’s flood in our university building!

I don’t know any serious academic who’s saying “Away with print!” There might be a few who’re doing it for show. But most academics can see an e-reader as an adjunct to their print library, especially as we grow to rely more and more on digitized content. It’s not going to be a requirement any time soon, though. I’m not ready to write the codices’ obituary quite yet and neither should you.


Don’t worry. There will always be tech support!

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May 17, 2011 · 6:42 pm

Sabbatical Update #2: What’s Added

Sabbaticals set up a different rhythm of work and life. As you shed the schedule of classrooms and meetings, you make room for the creative endeavours of scholarship. (And if you don’t think that scholarship is creative, you’re wrong, wrong, wrong!) I’ve spent the past four months and a bit engrossed in scholarship, my own sources and writing.

Immersion in Scholarship: In the normal course of the term, I try to keep semi-current by reading one scholarly article a week relating to anything in my teaching and research portfolio. Since I teach 5500 years of history touching on three continents with occasional forays into a fourth, that’s a lot of possibilities (and probably a good explanation for why I seem to know a bit about an awful lot of historical periods). During my sabbatical, I’ve immersed myself in the scholarship of a few particular elements and topics. This time around it’s been gender and the English family in the long seventeenth century along with some forays into medieval aristocratic households and the culture of Byzantium from the 11th century onwards. (Yes, for me? This is actually fairly focused. And it’s for two different projects, anyway!)

Getting back into the discourse of a field you’ve only been following superficially for several months or longer? It takes time. Even though I started right into my neatly accumulated pile of books and stash of PDFs on the Monday after New Year’s Day, it took me a while to re-orient myself to what was going on in the field and how my own ideas fit into place.

I take a lot of notes and am still experimenting on integrating this with Zotero as my bibliographic management software. My “old school” system isn’t too crafty: I start a new file in my word processor that’s stuffed full of transcriptions, notes and commentary from sources along with a full Chicago Manual of Style citation for the piece.

Immersion in Sources: More than reading what others are writing about your subject, delving into the actual material of study is sabbatical challenge #1. I’ve learned that it takes me a good week to ramp up to true productivity in my primary source research, especially if the material is not in modern English and/or is in manuscript form. People say you never forget how to ride a bicycle, but you can sure get rusty over a year or two away. It’s even worse with deciphering a particularly crabby form of secretarial hand in a sixteenth century inventory or decoding the formulaic Latin of a semi-literate and presumably un-engaged medieval clerk. The problem of teaching a lot outside my field of expertise is that it takes me that much longer to get back “into” my research. (Don’t suggest I just teach more “in my field” as that’s untenable when I’m the only premodernist teaching in English in my department so if students need any history before 1700, it’s my job.)

In contrast to previous sabbaticals, I’ve spent much less time breathing in the dust of distant archives and much less money on travel. My research was planned around a number of documents I’d already reviewed as well as others that I could obtain digitally. The Old Bailey Online website rolled out a fantastic new workspace for users which allowed me to shift my research from a series of bookmarked searches and records to a more synthetic and comparative analysis of the trials and Ordinary’s Accounts.

Mass Quantities of Writing: I write during the regular term, of course, but my sabbatical plan was to ramp this up with a presentation text that’s the nucleus of an article and a chapter for another project. I naively thought that I’d be pouring out words in print as soon as my sabbatical started. It never happens that way, of course. My writing began as note-taking, proceeded into a rambling outline for the first paper, and then took advantage of the computer’s cut-and-paste functionality to drop in bits and pieces, rearrange them and rewrite entire sections as needed.

One lesson I’ve re-learned in writing the four chapters I’ve had come out in print this past year: start anywhere in the text you plan to produce. Like my own students and my grad student self, I can spend forever fixated on the first line, the starting point, the opening, whereas the body of the paper contains many elements I can visualize clearly before the entire argument’s fully realized. So I started in the middle, wrote a bit, threw in some background, moved things around and kept adding until I had another complete chapter. I set it aside, read it back through (the second most painful point in the writing process: revising!), found the holes and weaknesses that had to be addressed. Then I did just that.

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May 16, 2011 · 1:18 pm

Sabbatical Update #1: What’s Missing

My sabbatical started on January 1st and it’s nearly over. How can that be? I opted for a half-year sabbatical instead of a full year off at reduced salary. Since I can’t uproot the family, especially autistic youngest, to explore the archives of the world, a longer sabbatical at a lower salary isn’t what I wanted.

What’s my sabbatical experience been this time around? I’ll focus here on what I was able to step back from my normal routine, i.e. “what’s missing.”

Teaching: I’ve had six months of release from teaching, except for ongoing supervision of my senior thesis student and graduate students. The supervisions have been a constant concern, especially the senior thesis student’s work. There was a lot of editing involved on an early deadline (all the work had to be completed by early April) but it was a successful and satisfying project. I’ve got a good grad student prospect for the fall, now!

So I wasn’t disengaged from teaching for the sabbatical but it was a big difference from a normal academic term. If you were to take a sabbatical while supervising more students, especially those who were in the final stages of a research project, essay or thesis? You definitely wouldn’t feel a difference in these responsibilities.

What I really noticed was the relief of six months away from the classroom, except for one special appearance when I gave a workshop on facilitating discussions in large classes. A term without worry about designing courses, updating course preparations, reviewing assigned readings, holding office hours, providing feedback in-class and out, marking, writing midterms and exams, writing special midterms and exams, accommodating students with illness and crises, tracking down late papers, filling out endless paperwork for grade submissions, incompletes and the like? Priceless.

Administration: Six months away from meetings (mostly) and administrative responsibilities (almost entirely): that was pretty wonderful except for the few times I got called back in for meetings I “couldn’t miss”. There were real and compelling reasons for my attendance at those meetings, but one of the benefits of a sabbatical is to be truly disengaged from the stress and management of the regular term. Every time they pulled me back in, I could feel my blood pressure rising.

Being on a short sabbatical means that I’m already knee-deep in book orders for the fall term as well as having to engage with the crisis that is our fall/winter schedule. Even as a selfish sabbaticant, these issues directly concern me and I have to address them. But I’m trying to minimize this as much as possible, especially because the clock is ticking on the last six weeks of my sabbatical release!

Next up? I’ll tell you about the cool things I’ve added into my schedule beyond attempting to raise my high score on Scramble!

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