Posts Tagged ‘interdisciplinarity’
Elite Saturday Links Enter CANAVAN at Checkout for 20% Off
* A version of this xkcd has been running continually in my brain for two years.
* February 26-27 at Duke University: Pleasure and Suspicion: An Interdisciplinary Conference.
* Open access SFFTV! A special issue on The X-Files from 2013.
* Louisiana universities are facing the largest midyear cut in state history, Governor John Bel Edwards said in a televised speech last Thursday. Even if the Legislature can find additional revenue, higher education will need to cut $42 million this year. Louisiana’s total higher education budget is $769 million, and if the Legislature cannot raise more revenue, higher education could face a $200 million cut.
* RIP, Umberto Eco. What Is Harper Lee’s Legacy After Go Set a Watchman?
* The New Inquiry reviews The Witness.
* The Slow Violence of Climate Change.
* At LARoB: How should we periodize comics?
* I’d been talking just yesterday to a student from my Lives of Animals class about the urban legends involving pigs and pig corpses and the war on terror. I said something like “No politician who wanted a national reputation would talk this way, though. Well, maybe Trump.” And lo, it came to pass.
* Steve Martin Performed Stand-Up Last Night for the First Time in 35 Years.
* Chinese travel blogger likes Chicago but loves Milwaukee. Endorsed!
* ‘Black Sludge’ Pours Out Of Texas Town’s Faucets Days After FBI Arrests Nearly Every City Official.
* The Shocking Truth of the Notorious Milgram Obedience Experiments.
The trouble was that this zombie-like, slavish obedience that Milgram described wasn’t what he’d observed.
* Hero K is the Highly Anticipated New Novel by Don DeLillo. I’m in.
* Half The World Will Be Short-Sighted By 2050? Half of America will be freelancers by 2020?
* In an email to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shortly after the U.N. Security Council in March 2011 authorized military intervention in Libya, a former senior State Department official praised her achievement in “turning POTUS around on this.” Meanwhile, America Is Now Fighting a Proxy War with Itself in Syria. So that means we can’t lose, right?
* And elsewhere in smart battles wisely chosen: St. Louis Archbishop Urges Priests To Cut Ties With The Girl Scouts.
* In her new book, Elaine Frantz Parsons re-traces the origins of the 19th-century KKK, which began as a social club before swiftly moving to murder.
* Proposals for new chess pieces.
* Reds in Space: Socialist Science Fiction.
* Beloved: The Best Horror Novel the Horror Genre Has Never Claimed. That’s something I talk about a lot when I teach the novel.
* Seems like a lowball: Husbands create 7 hours of extra housework a week.
* The weirdest, best photos I found in an old Bernie Sanders archive. Arrest photo of young activist Bernie Sanders emerges from Tribune archives. Footage Shows 21-Year-Old Bad Boy Bernie Sanders Being Arrested at a Protest.
* Clay Shirky: social media turned Dems, GOP into host organisms for third party candidates.
* Bloomberg yes! Bloomberg no!
* Also at Boing Boing: Forced arbitration clauses are a form of wealth transfer to the rich.
* The Guardian reports on an accusation by a former Muskegon County, Michigan health official claiming that a Catholic healthcare provider forced five women between August 2009 and December 2010 to undergo dangerous miscarriages by giving them no other option.
* The Singularity’s all right: A 19-year-old made a free robot lawyer that has appealed $3 million in parking tickets.
* We already knew Doc Brown was a monster, but how deep does the rabbit hole go?
* Financialization and the end of journalism.
* “on a scale of luke skywalker to jaime lannister…”
* The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.
* Elsewhere on the deep time beat: What sparked the Cambrian explosion?
* The Warriors’ Odds Of Going 73-9. Written before last night’s loss.
* This one misses me, but it may help some of you feel better: Coffee May Reduce The Damage Alcohol Does To Your Liver.
* This one’s a real emotional roller coaster: Chimp Abandoned On Island Welcomes Rescuers With Open Arms.
* From the SMBC archives: Lucy, the football, and existential dread.
* And they said my work was useless.
Center for the Advancement of Saturday Links
* Some unexpectedly big news at President Lovell’s inauguration today: Marquette will be developing a new Center for the Advancement of the Humanities as a result of a multimillion dollar gift from an alumna.
* The Science Fiction Working Group at the University of Florida.
* Cost of living map: What is $100 worth in your state?
* Does Louisiana have a future? Bobby Jindal says it’s an open question about which reasonable people can disagree.
* Working With Quentin Tarantino On The Django Unchained Sequel, Django/Zorro.
* Couple Who Let Homeless People Sleep On Their Porch Threatened With Daily Fine.
* Pennsylvania High School Suspends Student Editor For Refusing To Print The Word ‘Redskins.’
* Nightmares: In 2010, a teacher’s aide and the assistant principal at Sparkman Middle School in Huntsville, Alabama carried out a plan to use a special needs student—a 14-year-old girl—as “bait” to catch another special needs student who was sexually violent. The plan failed, and the 14-year-old girl was raped in the school’s bathroom. Earlier this year, that assistant principal got promoted.
* More horrors: Fraternity Allegedly Used Color-Coded System to Roofie Girls.
* It’s been [hastily switches sign] 0 days since the last fact-free trend piece on paying for college through sex work.
* Meticulous Visual Recreation Of Moon Landing Shows It Wasn’t A Hoax. OR SO THEY WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE
* How to Get Into an Ivy League College—Guaranteed.
* Why we can’t have nice things: Ohio Supreme Court: It’s OK To Strip Mine State Wildlife Areas.
* And 9/19/1984: Never forget.
Friday! Friday! Hooray!
https://twitter.com/adamkotsko/status/396245623856300032
https://twitter.com/adamkotsko/status/396242744261095424
https://twitter.com/adamkotsko/status/396242792021647360
* China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween.
* The Halloween candy to avoid if you don’t want orangutans to die. This is why consumerist approaches to struggle will never work. Horrors lurk everywhere.
* Anti-Humanism and the Humanities in the Era of Capitalist Realism. A reminder.
That table reveals that in 1970-1971, 17.1% of students who received BAs in the United States majored in a humanities discipline. Three decades later, in the midst of the crisis in the humanities we hear so much about, that number had plummeted to 17%.
* There is little talk in this view of higher education about the history and value of shared governance between faculty and administrators, nor of educating students as critical citizens rather than potential employees of Walmart. There are few attempts to affirm faculty as scholars and public intellectuals who have both a measure of autonomy and power. Instead, faculty members are increasingly defined less as intellectuals than as technicians and grant writers. Students fare no better in this debased form of education and are treated as either clients or as restless children in need of high-energy entertainment – as was made clear in the 2012 Penn State scandal. Such modes of education do not foster a sense of organized responsibility fundamental to a democracy. Instead, they encourage what might be called a sense of organized irresponsibility – a practice that underlies the economic Darwinism and civic corruption at the heart of a debased politics.
* A new study suggests interdisciplinary PhDs earn less than their colleagues.
* Scenes from the academics’ strike in the UK. Another report from the trenches.
* Most Colleges Still Haven’t Implemented The Right Policies To Prevent Rape.
* A Marxist consideration of white privilege.
* The women in magazines don’t look like the women in magazines.
* Man buys $27 of bitcoin, forgets about them, finds they’re now worth $886k. Exactly how currencies are supposed to work!
* Jane Austen: The Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Game.
* The tragedy of Michelle Kosilek. A better treatment of the issue than the headline’s framing would suggest.
* “Being condemned to death is unlike any other experience imaginable.”
* Macy’s security has arrest quota, ‘race code system’ for nonwhite shoppers. An exemplary case, I think, of the phenomenon Adam Kotsko describes in “What if Zimmerman had been a cop?”
* And speaking of which: George Zimmerman’s Hometown Bans Guns For Neighborhood Watches.
* Boy Who Shot Neo-Nazi Dad Sentenced to 10 Years in Juvenile Detention.
* Appeals Court Gives NYPD Go Ahead to Restart Stop-and-Frisk.
* There’s something really revealing about how the Daily Show can’t process this story about an unaccountable shadow government running the national security apparatus, and so just punts to a random n-word joke instead. Liberalism, I think, characteristically flinches whenever the conclusion that the system is fundamentally broken is inescapable.
* U.S. Teams Up With Operator of Online Courses to Plan a Global Network. MOOCtastic!
* And in honor of the last pop culture lunch of the semester, my favorite zombie short: “Cargo.”
This Week at Marquette
* Thursday, April 18, 11:30 AM, in Lalumiere 114 – “Madman with a Box: Doctor Who.” The third and final (and much-anticipated) Pop Culture Lunch of the semester. We’re still taking suggestions for next year but it looks as if we’ll start with Game of Thrones, followed perhaps by Glee and Sherlock.
* Friday, April 19, all day – “Conversations across the Humanities,” an all-day interdisciplinary symposium. I’ll be speaking at 1 PM on the “Ab Ultra: Space Across Disciplines” panel with a talk titled “Science Fiction in the Anthropocene.”
Some Scattered and Limited Advice for Going On the Academic Job Market from Someone Who Is Emphatically Not an Expert
The following is adapted from a short reflective piece I wrote last spring for graduate students in the Literature Program at Duke, based on my experience going on the job market as an ABD. I’ve had to remove some of the more personal details—such as my hit rate, specific details of my interviews, and so forth—but otherwise I’ve tried to retain the usefulness of the piece as best I could.
To be honest I feel some amount of trepidation posting this at all, simply because I feel as though the mere existence of the “job market advice” genre legitimates the fantasy that the academic job market is a meritocracy, which it emphatically is not. There are no magic bullets; in the final analysis there is nothing you can do to game the system. Even the advice here won’t apply to all schools—much of it doesn’t square with my experience of being hired at Marquette, for instance, to take but one particular case very close to my heart.
Still, there are some practical things you can do to help your candidacy, and with the Job Information List coming out this Friday it seems like a worthwhile time to write this all down. If you’re going on the market this year, good luck, and may whatever God you believe in have mercy on your soul.
Gerry Canavan (searched 2011-2012 while ABD)
Primary teaching field: Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture
Primary research field: Twentieth-Century Science Fiction (mostly U.S. and British)
I was one of the first people to go on the job market with the benefit of the new Lit department job site and sample materials, which I found to be extremely useful. I also took some of the advice in this thread I posted on AskMetaFilter:
http://ask.metafilter.com/183987/so-long-suckers
including setting up a fairly crude professional webpage (http://gerrycanavan.com) with links to my C.V., syllabi and articles and an account on academia.edu, and optimistically getting my cross-country flight to MLA during the summer when tickets were still at their cheapest.
I’ve tried to include some general thoughts about my experience of going on the job market, while attempting to focus on the stuff that I had to learn or improvise along the way.
• Know in advance that the process is extremely time-consuming, with each individual step along the way almost completely unrewarding in itself. I went in with the mindset that because it was my first time on the market, and because I was still ABD, I was going to be “selective” and only apply to jobs I really wanted. In practice, however, this didn’t happen: I applied to more or less every tenure-track job I seemed remotely qualified for that wasn’t a 4/4, and every postdoc it seemed like I had any chance to get. I think this is how you have to do it.
I kept two Excel spreadsheets, one detailing job openings and the other postdoc openings, and used the strikethrough feature whenever I finished one. Sadly, crossing something off your list is essentially the only positive reinforcement you receive for almost all of the process. Dossier requests don’t come until mid-November, and are becoming rarer; with digital submission, I found most schools are just asking for everything up front. Generally MLA interviews aren’t scheduled until early-to-mid December, and some come really last minute; rejections don’t arrive for months, if ever. (Some schools will send you a delivery confirmation, and nearly every job will send you an optional Equal Opportunity survey to fill out, which I always did—but from many places that’s the only communication you actually get back.)
As we all know, the line between a “successful” search and an “unsuccessful” search can be pretty razor-thin. It’s worth it to put the time in going all-out in your applications to maximize your chances of getting something in the end.
• That said, most of the really painful work is up-front. Once you have your generic job letter written, it’s really not that hard to customize for each individual posting. The process has a rhythm: (1) change the date (2) change the address (3) change the salutation (4) change the first paragraph (5) change the last paragraph (6) change the one place in the middle where I say “I am eager to bring courses in this subject to UNIVERSITYNAME” (7) add something specific about the posting or about the campus if applicable. By the end I could do four applications in an afternoon, even taking my tendencies towards neurotic over-proofreading into account.
What took longest, after the initial setup, was tweaking my generic materials to suit the sometimes esoteric requests of individual postings. This is especially, infuriatingly true of postdocs.
The timeline on the Lit website is pretty accurate—you should begin gathering your materials in August (or sooner) so you can hit the ground running with the very early institutional postdocs that are due at the end of September: Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Michigan, Chicago. These are well-paying, low-load, high-prestige jobs with very generous timelines (contracts as long as four or five years), which means several years of guaranteed income and health insurance before you have to start panicking again; they’re definitely worth the hassle of having to do everything early.
Be prepared to significantly revise your interest letter at least three or four times before it feels “ready.” Share it with your advisor and your department’s Job Czar early; workshop it with other grad students.
To be minimally prepared for a job search, you need:
* generic interest letter template
* current C.V.
* two-to-three-page dissertation abstract
* at least one writing sample, preferably a tear sheet from a published article, or if not that an article “under consideration” somewhere—I had three different ones I targeted for different sorts of jobs
* at least one completed, very polished chapter you feel confident about sending out immediately if it is requested
* a statement of teaching philosophy
* your teaching evals, including the statistical analysis your college provides if available
* a “research agenda” specifying your plans to revise your dissertation into a book and describing your initial plans for a second project
* at least two to three sample syllabi—I actually wound up with many more than this. Include courses taught, courses you’d like to teach, intro/survey courses in your field, special topics courses for juniors and seminars, and grad courses
* transcripts from undergrad and from all grad schools
* recommendation letters, including (definitely) someone familiar with your teaching and (possibly) one or two letters from people not on your committee / outside your university
* an endorsement from your DGS that you will finish by the spring (if ABD)Not every school will ask for every document, but you’ll likely be asked for each these documents at least once.
If you’re ABD, you also need an advisor who you are existentially certain is willing to say you will finish your dissertation within the year.
You should contact your recommenders as soon as you’re sure you’re really going to go on the market and follow up with them by mid-September at the very latest. What you want to do is open up an Interfolio account and solicit two generic letters from your recommenders, one for TT jobs and one for postdocs. (I actually created two separate Interfolio accounts so neither I nor they would mix the letters up; this might have been overkill, but at least the plan worked.)
I applied to jobs in lit, film, and American Studies and used basically the same letters for all jobs. Generally speaking I don’t think you need specific rec letters tailored to different disciplines, must less tailored to specific job postings or postdocs. Attempting to do this in any systematic way would drive your letter writers completely crazy, and probably you too.
Interfolio will be your best friend; using Interfolio you can even upload letters into university-specific online applications or at other sites like Academic Jobs Online. See FAQ here: http://help.interfolio.com/entries/166320-applying-to-an-online-application.
I had seven letters in my dossier: one letter from each member of my committee and then two people from other universities who are relatively well-known in their fields and know my work. (If you know someone like this, it’d be a very good idea to have a letter from them.) Opinions differ, I think, but I was advised by one of my chairs to send all seven recommendation letters every time regardless of how many letters the search committee actually asked for. This is what I almost always did.
• The process is significantly more expensive than you might anticipate. All told it will probably cost a person between $1000 and $2000 to go on the market for the first time. I spent several hundred dollars in postage and Interfolio dossier send-outs (minimum $6 a pop, commonly $12 or more), including some last-minute FedExing when I didn’t have my act together in time. Some postdocs even have application fees. I had to buy some interview clothes, including new suits, ties, and shirts, as years of being a grad student had left me with nothing acceptably nice; these wound up being a birthday present from my father. My year, MLA was in Seattle, which meant a costly cross-continental flight, and four nights in a hotel at my own expense; luckily, my dad came through again with airline miles to help me out with the flight, and I shared a hotel room with a friend in Seattle. Plan ahead for the expenses where you can.
• Tailoring your letters to the job/campus seems to help, but don’t go overboard. For the UT Austin postdoc, just for instance, I added a few lines about how doing a postdoc in Austin would allow me to access the new David Foster Wallace archive in the Henry Ransom Center. For the Marquette 21C job I ultimately accepted I added a line about how I tend to teach “very contemporary literature that speaks in a direct way to my students’ life experiences,” language that not only happened to be true but which I wound up liking enough to keep in most of the letters I sent afterwards.
• Networking really helps. I would recommend you decide now to be as cynical as possible about this and exploit every advantage you have. With a market as brutal as ours every little bit helps.
I saw the same thing happening over and over again: people were getting interviews and visits at places where their advisors and recommenders had connections. Again, the iron rule: the academic job market is emphatically not a meritocracy.
Keep your advisors, your department’s Job Czar, and other profs in the department up to date on your job search, both where you’re applying and where you’re getting dossier request, interviews, and visits. You never know who might have an unexpected connection someplace that helps grease the wheel.
• On being “interdisciplinary.” It was obvious from my and others’ experience that some schools know what sort of program Duke Literature is; that other schools believed it was a traditional comparative literature program; and that still other schools thought “Literature” is what Duke calls its English department. While this brand confusion could be read as a potential disadvantage, it also presents an opportunity for us to present ourselves and our academic history in whatever light is most favorable.
To take my own situation: my work in graduate school was unfocused interdisciplinary. My dissertation spanned the entire twentieth century rather than focusing on a particular period or decade, with just enough in the 1800s to justify applying for 19C+20C jobs too. I wound up using material from both Britain and the U.S., as well as writers from Canada and Haiti. I use literature, film, television, comics, and theory simultaneously and somewhat interchangeably, organized around genre rather than medium or period.
With this background, or despite it, I ultimately seemed to be most competitive in English departments. The American Studies jobs I applied for seemed to have very little interest in me, despite my personal feeling that I was a reasonably good candidate for these jobs; it seems as though American Studies departments show a very strong preference for people with American Studies degrees, with History a second choice and English/Lit a somewhat distant third. I think I could have been more competitive for film and media jobs if I’d organized my work somewhat differently earlier in grad school, but in the end I just decided not to apply to most film jobs; I felt my work didn’t speak sufficiently well to film history and theory for a film department.
I applied to mostly 20C and 21C American literature jobs and had all my success there (specifically, in postwar jobs; the job I eventually took here at Marquette was a posting in contemporary American lit, of which there were a few precious listings but not very many). Because of the sorts of texts I focus on, I really wasn’t an especially good candidate for full-20C or 19C+20C jobs, but I applied for these anyway on the grounds that maybe lightning would strike. It didn’t, really.
• On being “elite.” People from Duke Lit definitely have trouble getting attention at “non-elite” schools and “teaching schools,” who assume (perhaps with some justification) either that we won’t actually come, or that we’ll be looking to move on as soon as we get there. Generally speaking, these schools paid no attention to me, and I’m not sure what I really could have done differently to get more attention from them than I did.
• On being “political.” The politics of my work, and of the department generally, didn’t seem to be a strike against me, despite my fears about this before the process started—though of course it’s impossible to ever know why you got an interview and why you didn’t. In any event this is more or less already baked into the cake; don’t try to hide who you are.
To this day I have no sense of whether this blog and my Twitter profile helped me or hurt me, much less at what specific institutions they did or didn’t.
• Really—and please know I hate this language as much as you do—much of your preparation for the job market is about how to sell yourself. You do need to take some time to read the letters from previous applicants in your department and figure out how to position yourself with respect to your chosen disciplinary field. Who is getting jobs? At what sorts of schools are they getting them? What are they doing right that you can steal? Where do people seem to be going wrong?
If you’re applying in English, at a minimum you need to be able to make the case that your project speaks to the concerns of a fairly traditional English curriculum, as nearly all the jobs that are available are in departments that are much more traditional and canon-focused than the work grad students are typically doing in their dissertations (especially at a place like Duke Lit).
You also need to show you bring something new to the table—secondary and even tertiary desirable specialties beyond what the job ad nominally requires. (If you have any remotely plausible case to claim your work is “digital humanities,” do so.)
You also need to show you can teach in your field generally, not just in your chosen subfield. It was very common, even with postwar or contemporary jobs, that I’d be expected to teach introductory and survey classes in 20C American Literature, some extending as far back as the Civil War; be ready to show you can do this. If you haven’t taught much yet, prep good syllabuses.
It was my sense that the “generalism” of Duke Lit, which in previous cycles had been something of a black mark against our candidacies, had transformed in the post-2008-crash environment into something of an advantage. This was true not just of my own experience but across Lit, and indeed across all the people I know who got lucky last year. Not to put too fine a point on it, but many departments and chairs are now viewing each tenure line as potentially their last. Much more so than in the past, departments are looking for people who can solve multiple problems for them at once. (Again, if you have any remotely plausible case to claim your work is “digital humanities,” do so.)
Don’t assume you know where you will be competitive. There are so many different factors at work in these things that you can’t possibly predict in advance which departments will be interested in you and which won’t. You just have to apply everywhere.
• What was a waste of time: One thing I definitely wasted my time on was looking for jobs at the Chronicle of Higher Education, HERC, and other sites like that. Everything you need is on the MLA Job Information List and the Wiki.
• What was worth doing: I’m very glad I did all the workshops available in the department: letter-writing/CV workshop, mock interview, mock job talk. Definitely do these.
My mock interview actually went somewhat terribly, I felt: I knew what I wanted to say, but hadn’t prepped very effectively, and got bogged down in details and my own anxieties about my hireability. In the 30 minute debrief after my mock interview I learned a lot about what I was doing wrong, all the way down to what they were really asking when they asked question X or Y.
I initially approached my mock interview as if it were a second comprehensive exam, which is definitely how it feels, especially when the members of your exam committee are staring at you across the table—but that’s completely the wrong attitude. An interview is nothing like an exam and is much more like a weird, multiple-person first date. In other words, they’re not probing your expertise so much as your demeanor and your competence as an educator, scholar, and potential colleague. I think I needed to do one badly to see how to actually do it correctly, and bombing at home was a lot better than bombing at MLA when it actually mattered.
The mock job talk was also quite helpful, though I felt a lot more confident in that mode than in the interview. (If your experience is like mine, your friends and professors will actually be much harder on you than the department you’re visiting will; my mock job talk was much more intense than the real thing, and the questions significantly tougher.) It’s very illuminating to see what sorts of questions your talk prompts; there was a lot of overlap between the mock questions and the actual questions I received, which meant I already had some good talking points for the Q&A at the real thing.
• Academic Jobs Wiki. Opinions differ here, but I found it absolutely indispensible. Just don’t let it drive you crazy.
• Know that you will be unhappy most of the time you’re on the market, but try not to be. I was stressed out continuously from August to February—first just trying to get the apps out, then while waiting for replies, then while prepping for the MLA interview, then while prepping for my campus visits, then for two weeks of waiting after the campus visits while they interviewed the other candidate. It obviously didn’t help that I had reached the end of my funding, that I had made the decision not to apply for any dissertation completion fellowships so as not to split my energy, and that the baby was due in April.
Almost all of this stress was completely wasted emotional energy. It’s incredibly difficult, but try to remember you can’t actually control any aspect of this very arbitrary process, and that nothing that happens reflects either on the quality of your work or on you personally.
• Lean on each other. A very nice thing about our department is that generally speaking we’re not all competing for all the same jobs. That’s not true everywhere—but even if it’s not, try to live as if it were. I got a lot of help on my apps from other students in the department, and tried to reciprocate / pay it forward as best I could. Be excellent to each other, if only because the hiring committees won’t.
• Really, good luck!
Interdisciplinarity
Could interdisciplinarity already be on its way out again, before I’ve even had my chance to cash in?
Gerry Canavan 