April 24, 2012 · 10:32 pm

Strange Medicine

Healthcare was largely a woman’s province in the early modern period. Diseases were fought and injuries treated at the home and it was women’s work to know how to treat all sorts of these problems. That’s why, when you venture into manuscript collections of the period, you’ll find a serious gender divide in what readers collected in their commonplace books.

A commonplace book was a collection of texts and tidbits appealing to its owner. I’ve studied many commonplace books over the years, men’s and women’s. Most of the men’s collections included witty epigrams and learned passages taken from longer works of scholarship. Women’s commonplace books are almost always very practical collections. We might call many of these “recipe books” although the recipes within weren’t always food for the table. Instead, they were recipes for the medicines these women would prepare and use to treat people in their household.

In 1639, Katherine Packer collected “Very Good medicines for Severall deseases wounds and sores both new and olde”. These weren’t evidence of idle curiosity as Packer’s next line indicated. Instead, these recipes were tried through “carefull practice.”

Here’s one example I transcribed a few years back:

To make childrens teeth grow with little paine hang about the necke anoules tooth that the child may red the goomes . . . when you make the first pape for the childe the mother must milke therein a little of her milke & let the childe eate * the teeth will grow wthout paine. Probatum est

Probatum est – “It has been proven”. Packer had either herself enjoyed success with this cure for a child’s teething pain or known someone who had done so. Fascinating, no?

Examine some of Packer’s medical manuscript thanks to the fabulous Folger Digital Image Collection (This is Folger MS Va 387 if you’re interested).

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April 23, 2012 · 4:45 pm

A Window Opens

A brief grading window, that is – I just finished marking the last of the tutorials (and recording marks from the oral presentations) in my super-huge class of 80. My TA, bless her heart, is tackling a bunch of the other discussion portfolio material.

Tomorrow, at 9, the same class writes their final exam and the entire pile should be ready to claim at noon.

*headdesk*

Then the marking begins anew!

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April 20, 2012 · 12:55 pm

Come to Potterfest 2012

I’ll be giving the keynote at Edinboro University’s 2012 Potterfest‘s Ravenclaw Conference focusing on the theme of human rights and animal rights. The conference runs October 18-20, 2012 and will feature both public and academic aspects. A Quidditch tournament! A chance to take in the National Library of Medicine’s traveling exhibit on Harry Potter’s World: Renaissance Science, Magic and Medicine.

I think this keynote invitation is a great fit given my contribution about women’s history to Harry Potter and History, “Witches vs. Women: What Muggles Could Learn from Wizarding History”. Trust me, there’s a lot more about the wizarding world that didn’t make it into print so there will be more to discover.

As part of Potterfest 2011, the organizers archived a selection of papers that is linked from the Potterfest main page – check them out. I’m reading one about Hermione Granger written by Sheila Gross, a graduate student from Gannon University, and happily anticipating what will come for the 2012 edition.

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April 15, 2012 · 7:13 pm

Super Size My Seminar

I’m wrapping up the 2011-12 term this month. One aspect that’s felt luxurious has been my seminar. It’s both been a good class and a small class with under twenty in either term. (Pro tip to faculty wanting to shrink their course sizes: schedule your class for 8:30 on Friday and then have the registrar screw up the listing to suggest it starts at 8:00. You’ll scare all but the determined or the desperate away!)

Next year, the picture is bleak. Due to budget constraints and sabbaticals, we’re offering very few senior seminars: fifteen credits worth (or 2.5 full year options). Students with a concentration in history have to take twelve credits of seminars to graduate while majors only need six. Theoretically, fifteen credits should be enough but not when you factor in the large number of majors and concentrations history attracts. And I don’t even get the scary Friday morning time-slot for my seniors. This fall and winter, I meet my seniors on Wednesday mornings. (Grad students? Prepare for a Friday morning fun-fest!)

The crisis of classes and credits has become personal for me in the looming fall and winter terms. I’m teaching six of those fifteen credits offered in our program: seminars on Tudor Britain in the fall and Stuart Britain in the winter. Having crunched the numbers and chatted with others in the department, I safely expect to see a record-setting enrollment of more than 38, especially since some majors have ambitions of finishing up their 2012-13 coursework in the fall term by taking my seminar in conjunction with another scheduled for the fall. In the winter term, mine will be the only senior seminar into which a student in need of seminar credits can enroll (the other six credits on offer is a fall/winter course): also an enrollment booster!

Help?

I’ve told our admin that my ‘hard cap’ is 44. There are twelve weeks in the term and every student needs to make one in-class presentation the way that I run seminars. (I’m not willing to negotiate on the presentation component: I don’t consider it a seminar without students having to prepare and make a formal in-class presentation.) Week one won’t count for those purposes since I can’t get students ready to present before class has begun. So there are only eleven weeks left and I know that I can’t run a good discussion session in a three-hour class and take time for more than four oral presentations. The math is then simple: 4*11=44.

Gulp!

Now I have to come up with 44 presentation topics stretching from Henry VII’s reign through Elizabeth’s (with forays into Scots and Irish history along the way). I’ve used biographies before: these are very easy to generate as topics but also quite easy for students to plagiarize. Nothing demoralizes an educator quite like listening to your senior students read the Wikipedia entry word for word! I don’t want to use articles or monographs for presentation topics: these tend to turn into snooze-fests as most students do little more than summarize the contents.

I’ve toyed with the thought of having the in-class presentations be on historical events but I’m a bit staggered at the thought of coming up with so many topics that I can also equally and usefully distribute across the 1485-1603 period so that we’re not having someone present on an early Tudor topic when the discussion’s all about late Tudor wars! So wish me luck or give me suggestions of the almost four dozen topics I’ll need to nail down for Tudor history presentations before the syllabus goes to the press in late August. Please?

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April 13, 2012 · 5:25 pm

An Invisible Immigrant

Just the other day, I ran across a casual example of anti-Americanism and sighed, just a little. Making fun of Americans is a way of life in Canada: it happens all the time. We’ve all heard the (true!) stories of Americans driving to the border in July with their skis and parkas, looking for igloos and open ski hills.

I’m an American but not that many people know that, living and working as I have in Canada for decades. They call us Canada’s invisible immigrants and that’s not far off. While other immigrant groups are invisible in other ways (I think particularly of women who work in the domestic programs, brought over from overseas to work as nannies or caregivers with relatively little contact outside their employing family), Americans sound pretty much like Canadians and can ‘pass’ in one way or the other.

Honestly, I like being a Canadian. I took my citizenship oath over a decade ago and still think it’s rather awesome that I can swear a loyalty oath to the queen as I did a few years back when sworn to the provincial graduate scholarship board. (Away with your wussy oaths to the political leadership: give me monarchy or give me the next best thing!) I am proud of Canada’s values of inclusiveness and social democracy. I love our healthcare system and our public education. I even think the beaver is an awesome national symbol (who needs the polar bear as some sort of upstart substitute?)!

But that doesn’t mean that I’m ready to give up on the red, white and blue even if I’ve become particular fond of the first two colours.


Tom Brokaw explains Canada to Americans for the 2010 Olympics

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April 9, 2012 · 2:07 pm

Life of the Mind

The upside of academia is that it’s brain work and not brawn work. Having spent some summers shoveling horse manure and school semesters running an industrial dishwasher, I appreciate not being up to my forearms in a messy stream of food and water or up to another body part in steaming muck.

The downside of the professorial career is juggling all of my various activities in one mind that doesn’t have any way to turn off the lights on the other parts of the job. Unlike my old food service gig, I’m not clearly ‘done’ when the last of the pans are washed and racked, I hang up my apron and take off my hairnet. This is the time of year when I acutely feel the round-the-clock pressures of a job that never ends even if I know that I’m more than fortunate to have this job! People enviously congratulate me on term being over. I suppose they envision some sort of slothful repose where I pop the occasional bonbon into my mouth and languidly turn the pages of some esoteric academic tome. No way!

This term I’ve taught topics that ranged from 3500 BCE to 1600 CE and stretch from Bactria to Britain – my brain is still busily processing new readings and discussions on those subjects. I’ve written a grant application that will eat up much of the summer and fall if its funded and mentored a number of students in preparing proposals for all sorts of projects that will require some further support and attention along the way if they’re successful. I’ve co-edited a book that will be in print this fall: so exciting! I’m researching and writing on several only lightly related topics, editing on yet another and occasionally having to pull my head up out of the sand to do a few time-sensitive tasks to prepare for the fall term (book orders coming soon!). My brain feels as if its being tugged in too many directions at once.

Keeping track of what’s on the go for what project is almost as much of a challenge as actually teaching, writing or marking. Without my to-do list that helps me track which assignments are marked and which have yet to be assessed, which inter-library loans I have out and which I’m awaiting, what professional society memberships are to be renewed and what research tasks are next in line for which project, I really might fall apart. I’m certain that the stereotype of the absent-minded academic had its roots in our occupation’s enforced multi-tasking. How can I be expected to remember where I parked my car if I’m trying to remember whether or not I got today’s research tasks accomplished?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have another whackload of assignments to mark and I need to prepare for tomorrow’s final grad student seminar. Thank goodness my to-do list and calendar alerts are there to keep me on track!

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April 3, 2012 · 10:34 pm

Term’s Over, Marking’s Not

Hooray! The last undergraduate class met this morning. No more 8:30 classes until September. I’ll still be up as early every day, mind you, but I won’t be staring out at a sea of sleepy students at that hour.

Classes wound up wonderfully. Now all that’s left is exams and marking. That won’t even be so bad, thanks to this being my lighter term (our U is on a 3-2 system and this is my 2 course term, although I’m teaching more than that when you count my two grad courses).

And then there’s all the writing and researching. . . .

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March 30, 2012 · 3:03 pm

Pleasure Reading: Looking forward

It’s the weekend (well, almost) and except for marking, two chapters to write and many others to edit, I’m free! Well, let’s not forget the normal household and personal chores. But close enough, eh?

I’m dangling a reward in front of my eyes for when I hit the next marking milestone: reading Alan Taylor’s The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels and Indian Allies. I picked up the book on the recommendation of a former colleague, Dr. Andrew Smith, who blogged about Taylor’s book in December.

After all, we’re celebrating the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 this year: shouldn’t I get back to a topic I haven’t touched since Professor Million’s Indiana History class that I took as an undergrad?

I’m two chapters in and quite hooked, but I’ve sworn to hold off reading the rest until I get more marking done. It’s a thick book (about 450 pages of text with another 150 of apparatus) and will take hours to digest. What’s slowed me down is that it’s in a volume that’s heavy enough so I can’t just drop it in my purse and haul it everywhere (I tend to pleasure read in fits and starts when I’m on the go with my busy family).

Another busman’s holiday, I suppose: I grew up not far from the site of Prophets-town and the Battle of Tippecanoe. Tecumseh was a household name but there’s already so much in Taylor’s story that I’m learning anew, particularly Canadian history elements but also some useful perspectives from my European interests. Even if I don’t often teach the modern topics (and my research interests stay mostly before 1750) this book is shaping up as a valuable read!

Let’s see if I can get the two sets of tutorial responses marked early enough this weekend that I can get back to this fun book.

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March 29, 2012 · 12:46 pm

Who’s Afraid of Quantification?

When I decided to become a history major, the counsellor/advisor at my undergraduate university looked at my transcript to date and said “You should go into quantitative or maybe architectural history.” I admit, with courses in an accelerated calculus sequence, a joint grad/undergrad course in statistical analysis and classes in optical mineralogy, mechanical engineering and what have you, that might have seemed like a good fit. But the aspects of history that interested me most weren’t in statistics or buildings. Even then, I was interested in texts and politics, personal or national.

That said, I still love to play with numbers and technology. I used databases while I was in grad school in the late eighties to do everything from manage conference registrations to a meeting of the RSA our institution hosted right through tracking all the Henrician texts I reviewed for possible use in my thesis. I’ve recently returned to topics for which statistics makes sense, working with some data drawn from The Old Bailey Online and London Lives. Every few years, I teach a unit combining statistical analysis and the history of crime in Britain since 1600 to our sophomore majors.

Some of them are afraid of numbers. The overlap between people who choose to be history majors and people who feel they’re mildly innumerate is large. Many of them are also students in the B.Ed. program where they have to take an introductory statistics course. Many of them still bear the scars of that course (which, by itself isn’t a bad course, but it has to try to be all things to all people and, when you have a decent percentage of math-phobes, that’s daunting).

Few of my colleagues here in Laurentian’s history program are deeply into quantitative history, at least that’s my impression. (I could be wrong: correct me, please!) But recent discussion in the department has started us thinking about quantification. I’m dusting off my old notes and pulling down my copy of Making History Count, not that I have a lot of time to explore anything unrelated to marking and my next chapter project at the moment but I’m pretty sure this summer’s research plan is going to require me to do some quantification and I want to re-engage those old brain cells appropriately.

Wish me luck!

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March 26, 2012 · 8:31 pm

Thoughts on Grant Applications

First off, the good news is that I finally have a version of this grant application that pleases me. It’s taken too damned long and involved an awful lot of wailing, but now I have something that I believe both fills the requirements of the format and also intrigues me as a research proposition. That’s not an easy feat to achieve!

Part of the challenge with this grant and others yet to come is that I’m being forced out of my lone-wolf mode. Employing students is the key priority and that’s always been a bit scary for me. Not that I don’t admire my students: I’m fortunate to have some of the finest junior scholars working with me and others in my department. No, it’s more a fear of how do I properly employ them without exploiting them or pushing them somewhere unsuitable in the demands of the research program.

I don’t know about you but it’s rare for me to supervise a student researcher whose work closely aligns with mine. This might be different in the sciences, but in the humanities and social sciences, students and faculty are often only connected by one link in a chain of interests. So my research focus right now hits up subjects in sixteenth to eighteenth century social, family, legal and gender history. The closest we come in the current crop of grad students is one who’s working on late sixteenth-century historical memory in literature, sermon and on stage. That’s not really much of an overlap, though!

When it’s teaching, the matter feels oddly easier: learning how to prepare, present, assess and mark are clearly transferable abilities. I can even, with enough warning, work in course elements that allow a graduate student to teach topics that play to his or her own strengths or ambitions. But research pushes that to a higher level – if the object of this is to for me to come out with more scholarly publications, the work has to be directly related to my scholarly program and it has to come together in such a way that I’m able to digest what they’ve put together and apply it in my writing. All of this on a maximum of 10-2o hour/week – not enough to truly support them as they do both their work and mine!

So when I pencil in thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours for prospective student research work, I worry – how far off their own tracks am I taking these junior scholars? How can I balance what needs to done against their skill sets, availability and interests? How can I make sure that they reserve enough time and energy to build their own skills and pursue their own research during the rest of their time?

As it stands, I’m coming to appreciate the difficulties of managing employees and collaborators as well as realizing how big an industry university research has become since I started on the tenure track. The application process has become far more structured, maybe even formulaic: structures that try to be appropriate for every discipline but are a good fit for none. Spending so much of the month of March trying to articulate my research program in ways that fit the grant structure instead of just getting on with it hasn’t been easy, either, particularly as I contemplate the chance that I won’t be awarded the monies.

Will I be destroyed if my application is unsuccessful? No, I’ll chalk it up as a learning experience, schedule some time with a colleague who can advise me how to improve for the next go-round, just a year away. And then there’s the next even bigger grant deadline coming up in a few months. Got to get myself ready for that!

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