Latin revival and a little hope for the humanities

Given the generally gloomy (if not downright apocalyptic) tone of much recent discourse about the humanities specifically, and higher education more generally, this Inside Higher Ed piece on the burgeoning demand for Latin in Australian universities came as a heartening respite. What was even more surprising to me than the demand from arts and language students was the fact that students from the sciences actually narrowly outnumber their humanities fellows in some of the courses (and these are big courses, too – 100+ students).

According to IHE: 

 At the University of Western Australia, where [Rachel] Currie is taking a double major in biomedical science, introductory Latin this year has 129 students, an increase of 150 percent. Currie prizes Latin as a kind of master key of language that unlocks scientific terminology and opens up insights into English grammar as well as Romance tongues for travel in Europe.

But sheer fun can't be overlooked, and the textbook Lingua Latina, with its Roman family saga, helps teachers deliver. "Marcus beats up his sister, one of the uncles joins the army -- it's exactly like a Roman soap opera," Currie says.

(A Roman soap opera like this one, perhaps...)

Amusing comments about Harry Potter’s spells giving Latin a new mystique aside, this actually makes a lot of sense once you think about it. I’m reminded of the discussions that occurred during the interdisciplinary research workshop I blogged about recently, where we talked a lot about having to somehow map modern disciplines to often-noncommensurate disciplines in the past. In other words, in order to study medieval or early modern scientia, you first need to understand it on its own terms and in its own language. It seems that the same questions are occurring to a number of the science students interviewed in the IHE article.  After all, how better to really grasp the principals of physics and natural philosophy expounded in Newton’s Principia Mathematica, or the structuring of biological taxonomy first established in Carolus Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae?

Australia’s ‘Latin revival’ reminded me of a recent initiative here in New Zealand to teach philosophy to high school students. Not ‘pop philosophy’ either, but the real deal, like Aquinas, Boethius and Descartes. (Okay, it is more than possible that there is also a bit of Alain de Botton in there...) Naturally, the ‘education should be about teaching skills to get a job/make money’ crowd have got their knickers in an enormous twist over this one, but the students themselves are wise enough to recognise that the skills they are learning in logic, critical thinking, and reasoned debate will stand them in good stead regardless of future employment or career trajectories. In what may come as a shock to hardcore educational utilitarians, the programme is also supported by the Employers and Manufacturers Association.

As the Dominion Post reported: 

[EMA] Chief executive Kim Campbell said if he found a job applicant with philosophy skills he would grab them. “Finally I might have someone who probably has an interest in what is going on around them as a human being. We're hiring a living breathing person, not a qualification. Someone who is thinking about who and what they are, why they are justifying taking up space on earth - we're hiring people's values and attitudes.”

Here at the frontlines of humanities education, the news these days often seems rather dark. These two stories brought me just a little glimmer of light and, dare I say it, hope.

From blancmange to perfectly structured gateau

Well, after struggling with my formless blancmange of an article for a few days, I finally had a breakthrough. Exercise definitely helped get things unstuck, as I was in the middle of a fairly vigorous bush walk when my head miraculously cleared and I saw what I needed to do to tighten this piece up and get it structured properly. (Oddly, I don't really think at all when I run - it's more meditative - but I find walking to be very mentally productive. Not sure why that should be, but as long as some cerebral action is happening at some point, I'll take it.)

I thought it would be reasonably easy to get this article written because I already had a good chunk of the evidence in place, culled from my MA thesis and a conference paper. But it turns out that was actually part of the problem. In the culling and cutting-and-pasting and reconfiguring process, I also ended up bringing in two related, but ultimately separate, arguments - too much for an article, which needs to have a single central idea to drive it.

So, Argument Two (and its related evidence, juicy as it was) had to go. It was a lovely argument, sleek and perfectly formed, but it just did not fit. I find it's always painful having to cut stuff that in itself is really good (especially when I've worked  hard to make that way!) but it's been put in a safe place for future use.

Once I'd done that, everything else fell into place. I spent a couple of hours recrafting the opening few paragraphs and making some clearer links to the supporting theoretical framework, but there isn't too much left to do now. Just beefing up some of the primary material with some new sources recently discovered, and tidying up the footnotes and citations.

So there we go - from wobbly, unappetising blancmange to beautifully disciplined, sharp-edged gateau in just under a week! Mmmmm...gateau...

A cultural history of politics, and the politics of cultural history

My experiences at IMC Leeds - the papers I heard and the many interesting discussions I had - along with my pre-conference meetings with a couple of Leading Scholars in my field, have got me thinking about the kind of history that I want to do, and more broadly, about how various 'types' or approaches to history get defined (and, at worst, pigeon-holed as hopelessly outdated or 'politically irrelevant'). While to those outside the field/academia, the question may seem somewhat rarefied, it is an important consideration because the way your research is perceived and ‘labeled’ can have a significant impact on opportunities for funding, publication, participation in collaborative projects etc. Broadly speaking, my thesis could be classed as political history in that it deals with the actions and motivations of those who hold the reins of power, both formally through institutions like kingship or parliament and, more informally, through bonds of personal loyalty and kinship. But, by asking questions about how perceptions of gender (and ethnicity – but I won’t go there in this post) shape the way power is distributed, applied, reproduced, and contested across these institutions and relationships, I'm also taking an approach that overtly applies 'cultural theory' (let's call it that for simplicity's sake, as I don't have the space or inclination here to go into the nuances of my feminist / postcolonial theoretical toolkit) to the analysis of late medieval politics.

So does that make me a political historian? A cultural historian? Both? Neither? Are such distinctions even useful? My thinking on this was in part prompted by a discussion on the political relevance of cultural history, started by Jon Jarrett over at A Corner of Tenth Century Europe and then expanded upon by Magistra et Mater. I agree that for medievalists, making one's research politically relevant within contemporary culture is more important than ever in these days of shrinking humanities funding and ever more stringent demands to prove one's 'impact factor'. (For those unfamiliar with the world of academia, this is basically the demand - expressed in different ways in different countries - to prove that taxes invested in higher education/ research are not being 'wasted' on 'frivolities'. Its nastier and more ignorant face can be seen in the public comments section of any major newspaper when some hapless social science or humanities researcher gets a grant for studying bogan subcultures or some other perfectly sound academic question that the Commentariat, in all its collective wisdom, considers outrageous.*)

But (getting back to the point) I am made distinctly uncomfortable by the idea that political relevance implies an overt association with identity politics, or that an absence of such overt identification and its agendas infers the 'depolitisation' of cultural history. I'm having trouble articulating this well, but I guess that as someone who is focused in part on the history of masculinities, I was brought up short by John Tosh’s claim (via Magistra) that the cultural turn in the field of gender and masculinity has detached it from the ‘men’s movement’ of the 1970s, and thus robbed it of its political edge, an argument that has also been advanced in somewhat different forms by a number of historians who identify as feminist.** I have to say, I never considered that my interest in the history of masculinities (in my case, knightly masculinity in particular) has anything to do with any kind of 'men’s movement' or with unearthing positive male role models from the past, and I’d be pretty disturbed if other people thought that was an agenda that is driving my research. I suppose I am thinking of gender in more abstract (but no less politically relevant) terms, in that I am hoping that by uncovering and unpicking the hidden gender dynamics that underpinned and supported (and also contested) particular relationships of political power in the past, I can not only shed new light on historic events and structures, but also make people look with new eyes on such dynamics at work in the modern world. There is a clearly a political agenda driving my work on medieval political history, as I believe that the first step to changing a system is to understand exactly how it works and how it preserves existing privilege. I often find that when I start explaining my research to IRL friends and acquaintances, they very quickly have an ‘a ha’ moment when they recognise parallels or resonances within a specific contemporary political context.*** (For those of you about to accuse me of shameful anachronism, I’m always at pains to emphasise that I am not positing any simplistic causal relationship between the medieval past and the present.) The way I see it, cultural history is an inherently political (and politically relevant) project, even if it is not overtly associated with any particular movement or strand of identity politics.

* Just to be clear on this, I absolutely support Dave Snell’s research and think his PhD topic was completely legitimate (and really cool!) Indeed, his investigation into the construction of identities bears a certain, if distant, relation to my own interests.

** Important disclaimer here: I have not yet read Tosh’s piece in the edited volume Magistra discusses (Sean Brady and John H. Arnold (eds.), What is masculinity? Historical dynamics from antiquity to the contemporary world (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)), so I may be completely misinterpreting this.

*** I will explore this in more detail in a future post, as I think it is best done through concrete examples rather than trying to explain it at an abstract level.

Scottish drinks (not whiskey, but drinking with Scots!)

I'd like to open this post by stating, with oh-so-good intentions, that when the time is right and I am in the right scholarly atate of mind, I will blog more extensively on my experience at IMC Leeds, and on all the thought-provking/ stimulating/ aggravating papers I have listened to. But for now, I'd just like to extend a hearty 'thank you' to the merry band of Scots and fellow travellers whose drinks party I crashed on Wednesday night. This came of strategically hanging around at a reception hosted by the Medieval Academy of America, which was then sort of overrun by people from a neighbouring session on 'The Breaking of Britain', a brilliant digital humanities project being progressed by Dauvit Broun and various other bods from Glasgow, Edinburgh and farther afield. Check out the website at http://www.breakingofbritain.ac.uk/. It's initiatives like these that make it perfectly viable to do a PhD in medieval history fron New Zealand! Anyway, Dauvit and co. hosted a very convivial 'meeting of the minds' back at their accommodation, and I was delighted to be invited along. I think I have mentioned before that I find this ginormous conference (1000-odd people, I believe) somewhat overwhelming, so it's always a relief to me when I get to meet and talk with people on the much more human scale of standing around in someone's kitchen chatting over a beer! It was great to discover several fellow scholars from other corners of the world who have very similar research interests to me, and email addresses and promises to share ideas and work-in-progress have been duly exchanged. At one point in the evening, I found myself talking to someone who has discovered in the pipe rolls (quite by chance, as I understand it) some very interesting and, until now, unpublished, information on the execution of William Wallace (that's 'Braveheart' to all you non-medievalists) and the disposal of the four quarters of his body. There is an article in the works so I won't offer up any spoilers, but given my interest in treason I am naturally dying to know more!

Leeds is my first major conference, but I'm quickly getting the sense that it is often these serendipitous meetings and conversations that turn out to be the most valuable and interesting bits. So the advice of my university's graduation speaker this year (who is world-renowned in his field but whose name I can't remember at the moment) that 'if you get an invitation, accept it', has proved* to be quite sound. Oh, I also, quite unexpectedly, ran across the very gracious Magistra et Mater (who blogs at magistraetmater.blog.co.uk **) at this same drinks party. Last I saw of her, she was off to the dance!

* To Jackson if you're reading this - you will note that I have learned from your legalistic linguistic (lingualistic?) pedantry! (although perhaps in this somewhat-Scots context, you would have allowed me 'proven'...)
** Apologies for the crappy limks. I'm posting this from my iPad (while on a train, no less) and the blogger platform is not entirely iPad friendly. In fact, it's bloody frustrating!

On York.

I spent last week in York, reputed to be the 'best preserved' medieval town in England (or something along those lines). It's hard for me to know what to say about my experiences thereof. On the one hand, I became fully immersed in my visit to Micklegate Bar, the ancient stone gateway on which the heads of a number of 'my' traitors were displayed to such devastating (though sometimes unintended) political effect in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Mickelgate museum, although tiny,  has a very good exhibition on the battle of Towton, aided in no small degree by a video that explores in detail what has been learned from a recent archeological excavation of a mass grave from the battlefield. (On this, suffice it to say that if 'chivalry' ever lived in the treatment of the vanquished, it seems to have well and truly died at Towton.) At the other end of the historical scale, I also visited a number of wonderful late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century pub survivals. My 'local' was the Mason's Arms, built in the late 1800s and incorporating into its quirky interior a stunningly carved wooden fireplace from the medieval gatehouse of York Castle (long since destroyed). I discovered some of the best architectural and decorative features (art deco tilework, glass etc.) in a couple of 1930s pubs that haven't suffered too much from 1960s and '70s 'improvements'.

But...( and as a great friend of mine always says, 'everything before the "but" is bullshit'), on the other hand, I can't deny that my first impression of the old town centre was an anticlimax. I had heard so much about York's medieval streets and 'walking the walls' that when I first entered the city, I was utterly shocked and disoriented to find that the first buildings I saw inside the walls were those of a 1960s brick housing estate! To be fair, I came in through the somewhat less tourist-friendly Goodramgate, and was primed with expectations that had been set, just two days earlier, by my experience of Saint Malo. Saint Malo was almost entirely reconstructed stone by stone after WWII, so it was able to be kept entirely 'in character'. By contrast, I imagine York is a more organic survival, so it bears many scars of its industrial past. I had high hopes of the Shambles, which is sold as an authentic medieval cobbled street complete with half-timbered buildings hanging over it at wonky angles. But here again, I'm afraid France won out. I saw much more extensive and better-preserved medieval quarters in places like Vannes and Rennes. I'm probably making myself very unpopular with the locals by saying this, but I'm afraid York was simply too over-built and over-touristed to charm me. Not to mention heinously expensive!

On the up side, though, I did have a couple of excellent meetings with professors from the University of York, which has a highly-regarded Centre for Medieval Studies and a very active scholarly press. Both the people I visited are senior scholars with big reputations in my field, so as a lowly PhD student from antipodean  obscurity, I was initially a bit intimidated. However, they both proved to be very positive and encouraging about my research topic and ideas, and they have given me lots of good advice, contacts etc. It is wonderful to have some validation from scholars of this caliber that I even *have* a research topic and questions worth pursuing. Of particular help, I think, is the offer to read and critique my work as I progress. This is an offer I'll definitely be taking up, starting with my attempt to turn my conference paper from IMC Leeds into a publishable article (my first! in academia, anyway). That will be a project for July-August. I already have a pretty rough draft, so I just need to make sure I dive straight back into it when I get home next week.

I'm delivering my paper at Leeds this afternoon. I'm much happier with it now, after some late editing has tightened up the argument and trimmed some loose threads (all those weird/funny little bits that you so want to include for their entertainment value, but which sadly suck up precious presentation minutes). I'll write more on the IMC in a future post. It's my first time here, and I'm a little overwhelmed by the scale of it, but I have met some very cool peeps, including some fellow medievalist bloggers.

Wetting the baby's head

On Friday, I wetted the baby's head, so to speak, by presenting my research project at my School's annual postgraduate research seminar. I was speaking at 10am, and while I was listening to the students who went before me, I went through a few angsty moments of self-doubt, thinking, "do I really have an argument here?" and "all these people going to think my ideas are whack". But, in the end, it went really well and I got a lot of positive feedback (including from the Dean of the Graduate Research School, who asked some good questions that allowed me to bring in a few choice points I'd had to remove from my original presentation to keep it within the time limit. Very gratifying.)

The thing that was great about the day was that the research projects presented were so varied. The School combines the departments of History, Religious Studies and Philosophy, so amongst the topics were the history of a secretive quasi-fascist group operating in NZ in the 1930s, the peculiar historiography of a highly controversial incident that took place during the 19thC Taranaki land wars, Theosophy and quantum physics, time and the nature of God, the history and demise of technical schools, and Muslim-non-Muslim relations in NZ post-9/11 (by a scholarship student from Pakistan. It was very interesting to hear her perspective as both a Muslim and a non-New Zealander.) There was one other medievalist presenting, whose work is on the Hospitallers in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. We had a good chat at one of the breaks and she gave me some tips on a surprising number of medieval manuscripts held by several NZ libraries. (But I forgot to ask her if she'd seen Kingdom of Heaven. You all know how much I love that movie.)

Afterwards, I was kind of buzzing. I always get quite nervous just before I have to speak, but I do get a kick out of the actual 'performance'. So before jumping in the car to drive the 90 minutes home, I headed to a local park and decompressed with a long run through the native bush alongside the river. I love running in the bush. All those narrow loamy tracks winding away from me into cool green shadows. The way I can't hear anything but the call of tui, my own breathing, and the occasional rush and gurgle of a stream or river. The elegant strength of soaring mamaku and kahikatea, and the delicate beauty of unfurling ponga fronds. At home, I have plenty of places to enjoy this goodness, but they all require running up and down hills - sometimes seriously big ones! So it was lovely to be able to enjoy the bush sans searing lungs and burning calf muscles for a change.

And now, thanks to all your great advice on my last post, I have my first proper conference abstract just about finished and ready to send to my supervisor tomorrow morning. After fluffing around over it for the better part of a couple of weeks, I woke up yesterday morning with the whole thing - including the rather catchy title - quite clearly formed in my head. I just had to get up and type it. (I love it when that happens.)

Awesome abstracts anyone?

So, things are starting to get a bit more serious for me in this whole postgraduate study adventure, and my supervisor is starting to push me (oh-so-gently and enthusiastically) into submitting abstracts for conference presentations. I'm used to giving presentations - I've been doing it for years in my work so I have no great anxieties about public speaking. And I'm also pretty confident my research is starting to generate some interesting and worthwhile things to say. BUT I have no real experience of academic conferences and I'm not quite sure how best to go about writing the abstract. (I'm not even worrying about the actual presentation content at this stage. I figure I'll tackle that as and when something actually gets accepted!)

The first conference I'm looking at is a big medieval/early modern shindig here in NZ early next year. They require a 200 word abstract for a 20 minute paper. Some of the other CFPs my supervisor has pushed my way ask for anything up to 500 words, but presentations always seem to be about 20 minutes in length. (Curious: is this some kind of 'gold standard' in terms of academic conferences?) I figure such a short time slot requires something really tight and specific - like a brief source-based case study or example that illustrates a wider theme or interpretation - rather than anything broader or more generalised. Does that sound like a good way to approach it? And is it normal to quote from or reference sources in the abstract? Or would you just give an outline of your argument and where it fits into the existing scholarship on the topic? (Or do you even worry about that second bit?)

So, questions, questions. Naturally, I'll be asking my supervisor for her help, but do any of you have any tips for writing a really kick-ass abstract? Or links to good posts or advice on the best way to structure it? I remember Notorious PhD had some good stuff up towards the end of last year (maybe?) on seminar presentations, but damned if I can find it now.

On that note, I'm presenting my current research project to the world (well, to all the bods from the School of History, Philosophy and Classics anyway) for the first time at a postgrad Research Seminar this Friday. When I was doing the methodology weekender a couple of weeks ago, a few of us were talking about what we were going to be presenting and my topic seemed to arouse quite a bit of interest. On the face of it, it sounds pretty racy - there's nothing like a medieval chronicler for giving you good opening lines to work with. I just hope I don't disappoint!

Summer of research progress report

Exhibit A: The learned Miss Jones, one of the two kittens we adopted for Christmas. Her brother is a cat-man of more plebeian tastes and prefers to spend his time rolling around under the sports section of the newspaper.

Exhibit B (located beneath Exhibit A): A sampling of the books I’ve read so far in my summer of research. I’ve only skimmed to the good bits in the chronicles at this point, but I’ll be going back for close reading later (and probably more than once).

The weather has been conducive to long uninterrupted spells of reading in the garden, so I’ve also managed to plough through quite a bit of other material, amongst which:

• Michael Bennett’s Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (which is still irritating me with its referencing, or lack thereof, but this post by Gesta on writing book reviews makes me realise I was probably unfair in blaming Bennett instead of his publisher.)
• Nigel Saul’s Richard II and his EHR article “Richard II and the vocabulary of kingship”. I was surprised to find Saul’s 1997 book is the first scholarly bio of Richard II since Anthony Steel’s 1962 outing.
• Lynn Staley’s Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II. I found this a richly detailed interdisciplinary study of the social and political contexts of works by Chaucer, Gower, the Gawain poet and other 14thC texts. It also offers some valuable insights that I haven't come across elsewhere (yet) into Charles V of France's influence on Richard II's court and the connections between literary patronage and ideas about kingship.
  
• Jeffrey J. Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler’s Becoming Male in the Middle Ages
• Paul Strohm’s Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts
• Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval
• Karma Lochrie et al., Constructing Medieval Sexuality. I read Mark Jordan’s chapter, “Homosexuality, luxuria and textual abuse”, on the bus. That got me some odd looks.
• Assorted articles on feminist and queer theory

In addition, I’ve re-read Christopher Fletcher’s useful article “Manhood and politics in the reign of Richard II”. I wasn’t able to track down a copy of Fletcher’s 2008 book on the same subject through my library system, so I ended up ordering it from Amazon. It’s hardcover and a bit pricey (though way cheaper than the list price in pounds), but with the NZ dollar being so strong against the US dollar at the moment and it being Christmas and all, I was able to talk myself into it. From what I can gather from the reviews, Fletcher achieves an innovative gender-based reading of the sources on Richard II’s kingship, but he also gets called out for skating over some major issues. One reviewer also calls Fletcher’s assessments of other scholars’ work “uncharitably critical”. Sounds like it should be a lively read if nothing else.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve also developed a much more refined picture in my mind of the approach I want to take to this research project and of the specific questions I’m going to be working to answer. Thanks to some unexpected connections the background reading has been sparking, my ideas have changed a fair amount since their initial incarnation. I expect they’ll morph quite a bit more in the coming months but at least now I feel like I have a clear direction and some markers to follow. (This is just as well, because it won’t be long before I need to front up to the Postgraduate Research Committee with the formal research proposal.)

I’ve been relieved to find that, as I suspected, I’m going to be covering some solid new ground and my advisor is pretty excited about it. I went through these weird phases of anxiety at first, swinging between ‘wow, I can’t believe no one has thought about this topic in this way before,’ and ‘crap, maybe no one has done this before for a good reason’. Now that my project has been approved in principle by both my advisor and the postgrad research co-ordinator (thus validating it is indeed worth pursuing), I’ve settled into a sort of steady state where I crack open each new book or article alternately hoping to find something along my lines that will be useful, and fearing that I’ll find my great original idea isn’t so original after all.

Here’s a question for all you scholarly and creative types, though. I’m really excited about this project and want to prattle on about it to anyone who will listen. But at the same time, I’m instinctively wary about putting too much detail about it on the public interwebs, given those cases we all hear about of academic plagiarism and people having their ideas nicked before they can take credit for them. In fact, I haven’t mentioned a couple of the books/articles I’ve read, as I feel like the titles alone could give away a bit too much about the way I’m thinking (this is, of course, assuming anyone but me even gives a damn). Is this just paranoia? Am I being overly cautious? Do you talk about your original ideas and research in any specificity online before you present or publish in a more formal context? If so, have you ever had an ‘oh crap’ moment, where you suspect someone else has pinched your work?

Debating history-as-fiction and fiction-as-history

While I was busy contemplating the awfulness of Colin Farrell’s bleach job in the film Alexander, Magistra et Mater picked up on my post as the opportunity to ask some deeper questions about “the rising cultural importance of historical novels … [and] the uneasy relationship between the two genres of history and historical fiction.” What, she asks, “do authors or would-be authors of historical novels think that writing fiction allows them to do that more conventional historical forms don’t?”

Amongst the possible answers she poses is the ability to gain a much wider audience and therefore to sell more books than the lowly historian could ever dream was possible. The historical novelist may also have the ability to write more vividly than the historian, though I think this is debateable. Some best-selling 'historical' novelists write dreadfully clunky, lifeless prose (Dan Brown, I’m looking at you!), while some historians have the ability to sweep you along in stories that are more exciting than any fiction. Of course, the novelist also has the unique freedom to make things up when it suits them.

It seems to me that Magistra is also touching on some much bigger issues, such as those old unanswerable questions about the purpose of history and the historian’s role in society, and whether history is an art or a science. If we consider that the historian has some responsibility to reach out to the general public (and I do, because if historians don’t do this, then politicians have free reign to manipulate history to suit their own purposes), then we have to be concerned about developing the communication skills to engage a wider audience at least some of the time. I’m also of the school that believes that the way scholarly and academic history is written - the narrative approach used, the rhetorical constructs chosen and so on - is as much a part of the history itself as the research, the facts, the analysis and the scholarly apparatus.

I find it interesting that Magistra appears to make a very black-and-white distinction between being a writer of fiction and being an historian, as though one can be one or the other but not both. The creative writing that I do definitely enriches and improves my academic writing, and a number of the novelists I enjoy reading are qualified historians (have PhDs in history), so I see more overlap between the genres and skills than she perhaps does. To me, it’s a bit of a cop out to think conveying the facts in dull, workmanlike prose is enough just because the historian’s task is to write about ‘what really happened’. Yes, it’s true that most historians aren’t going to be able to come near what the best writers (of fiction or non-fiction) are capable of, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t take good writing as seriously as they do thorough research and well-supported analysis.

I also believe that novelists should not be the only ones aspiring to make us emotionally engage with the past. Historians like Marcus Rediker or Judith Walkowitz have the ability to tell what really happened with faultless attention to the scholarly apparatus, and to make us care about what happened and possibly use that knowledge of the past to help fuel change in the present. To my mind, that is an extremely important skill for historians to possess, particularly those who work on the histories of the marginal and the previously unconsidered (the poor, the mentally ill, migrants, slaves etc.). But it does open up the fraught question of whether academic history should also be serving the causes of social activism (as many historians believe - that was, after all, integral to the feminist history that emerged in the 1970s), or is indeed by its very nature political regardless of any claims to objectivity.

To write history that engages us on both the intellectual and emotional planes does not mean making things up. But it does require a more mindful approach and a commitment to honing one’s writing as a craft in and of itself that perhaps some (many?) academic historians either don’t have time for or don’t consider a core part of the job. In my experience, writing skills are often an under-rated, if not completely ignored, aspect of the teaching of history at university level. (For any history teachers/professors reading this, do you consider teaching the skill of writing in itself as part of your purview? Or is that something for the literature/composition teachers to worry about?)

Magistra is right in saying “Most of the books by academic medievalists/early modernists which do find a wider audience are either on conventional kings and battles topics or are lucky enough to have found sources/archives which contain a lot of information on a small group of people (such as the inquisition records for Montaillou)”. But in the case of Montaillou*, for example, it was not simply the unique nature of the evidence that made it such a popular work but Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s vigorous and accessible prose style, which is characteristic of the best of the Annales school. (It might also reflect a different and distinctly French view of the historian’s function in society, and therefore of what types of skills the profession requires.)

Having said all that, I confess I’m bothered when writers of historical fiction try to blur the boundaries and claim more for their creations than they merit. For example, this quote highlighted by Magistra really disturbs me: ‘As [novelist] Sarah Dunant puts it in History Today: ‘I want to sink the reader deep into the period, to say, “Have the confidence to follow me because I know what is true”'. My response to that is to say yes, Ms Dunant, you may have done in-depth historical research and ‘know what is true’, but when it comes to choosing between what is true and what is interesting or what best moves the story along, you’re going to pick the latter every time.

* This was a history of the lives and beliefs of peasants living in the village of Montaillou, in what is now southwest France, in the early 14th century. It was based primarily on the previously unexamined records of the Catholic inquisitor Jacques Fournier. Le Roy Ladurie's interpretation is profoundly flawed because he took Fournier's highly-mediated accounts as factual descriptions , but the book still stands as one of the first examples of 'history from below', which sought to expand academic history beyond the study of the lives of elites.

Just write, damn you!

So it seems I’m not the only one who’s engaged in a grim battle to write at the moment. Academic, Hopeful is trying to wrestle the thesis into submission. Clio Bluestocking has writer’s block (though she phrases it rather better as “I cannot get to the place where I keep the words.”). Fait Attention is writing the ‘why this happened’ chapter, and finding historical explanation is never as simple and straightforward as it may at first seem. And Notorious PhD reflects on writing as an act of defiant optimism in the face of the sterile corporatisation of education.

As for me, I got nuttin’. My word count for the day – hell, my word count for the month! – is a big fat goose egg. I can’t figure out why I’m not into full on panic mode at the moment, because I have a major essay due on Monday and no sign of even a shitty first draft yet. Oh, I have lots of notes, both in Word and scrawled on various index cards and sheets of paper (many of which are currently drifting aimlessly around the legs of my sofa. My feet are up on the coffee table so they can’t pounce on me and assert their demands to be immediately organised into their rightful paragraphs.) I even have a very detailed outline, including a bunch of quotes and citations I want to use, which is derived from a recent seminar presentation on this very essay topic.

But despite having all the groundwork in place, I’ve been finding all sorts of ways to procrastinate the act of writing. I’ve formatted up some references I have no real intention of using (for some bizarre reason, my institution does not use any of the standard citation models in EndNote but has its very own, unique-in-all-the-world reference system, so I always have to fiddle about with adding commas in the right places and other such pointless activities). I’ve read a completely extraneous book chapter that I know will add nothing to my overall argument but simply re-states information for which I’ve already got better citations. I’ve taken the pup for several walks even he doesn’t need. (Who knew ten-month-old puppies actually don’t have a boundless supply of energy?)

I’ve been alternately kicking myself around the house yelling, “just write, damn you!”, and falling into zen-like states wherein I manage to convince myself that inspiration will come when the time is right, and when it does, the words will flow “like water my friend”. Academic, Hopeful’s post backs me up with the advice, “Don't worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.” But if that’s the case, it better hurry the hell up!

Bruce Lee advises, “You must be like water, my friend.”

More thoughts on academic careers

I’ve been away for the last few days at a residential graduate seminar and while I was there, I had a few more thoughts on the merits (or not) of the academic life.

The seminar itself was great, just the sort of stuff I love. It was for the standard advanced historiography course, and we all took great delight in debating various philosophical approaches to history and theories of historical change. Three different professors, each of whom seemed oddly suited to their subject matter, guided us through the various sessions over several days.

First up was a be-spectacled, soft-spoken tie-wearing gent (in all senses of the word) who dealt with the 18th and 19th century historians – men like Edward Gibbon and Thomas Babington Macaulay who saw history as a leisurely literary pursuit for the cultured man-of-letters. Next came our Sorbonne-educated expert on the French Annales school. Elegantly dressed and precisely spoken, with beautifully accented French, she shared her experience of studying under the renowned French Revolution specialist Michel Vovelle. Finally – and a stark contrast – our expert on the British Marxists was a bearded, wild-haired enthusiast who regaled us with his own stories of discovering social radicalism as a 19-year-old student at the height of the Thatcher years. (A discovery, which, he wryly pointed out, was the perfect platform from which to launch a rebellion against his staunchly right-wing father – Freud in history, indeed.)

Here’s the thing that gave me pause, though. These people are all very accomplished, with international reputations in their fields and a veritable bookshelf of books between them. They are excellent teachers, each with their own unique style of pedagogy, and all of them take several courses each year alongside plenty of research and writing. But if I decided to follow an academic career path, it wouldn’t be until I reached this level of seniority, after many, many years of hard work (assuming I could even get there), that I would be earning what I earn now in a challenging but not particularly difficult job in the private sector (pro rata based on my hourly rate, as I only work 15 – 20 hours a week).

Their working conditions aren’t great, either. The building which houses the History department was once the epitome of elegant Art Deco, but it doesn't appear to have been renovated since it was built in the early 1930s. Inside, it’s dim and dank with a pervasive smell of mould (and the occasional piquant whiff of dead mouse). There are years’ worth of water stains on the ceiling and, underfoot, carpet that looks like it saw the last days of World War II. A few of the best offices have nice views over the surrounding trees and parks, but it would take a heroic obliviousness to your surroundings not to get depressed in the tiny windowless inner offices. Adding insult to injury, it is quite noticeable that the business and science faculties on this campus are ensconced in much newer, nicer buildings (I know, I’ve checked them out).

The other thing that struck me during this course was the average age of our graduate group. Most of them were at least in their late thirties or early forties, and a couple were a good deal older (I’d guess late fifties – early sixties). Only two were in their early twenties, and appeared to have followed the traditional trajectory from school to undergrad to grad school. This raised a few questions for me. First, is this kind of age distribution unique to my institution? If not, are young people just starting out in their careers no longer very interested in working in the public university system (at lease in the Humanities)? And if that’s the case, where will our next generation of history professors come from?

Career angst and the scholarly life

Academic, Hopeful has a post up this week asking how graduate students should react to the inevitable question “what are you going to do next?” and/or variations on the theme of “why don’t you get a real job?”.

I’m having a hell of a month, just crazy-busy, and this post came close to triggering my own little existential crisis. I’ve come to graduate study as an older student, having already had two other careers. I suspect that because of my age, I've probably missed the boat on the standard academic career trajectory to tenured professor (and given the parlous state of academia these days, I’m not entirely sure it’s a career I would want anyway). The alternatives might be finding a niche in non-tenure-track academia, working as an independent scholar, or even being a genteel lady writer of historically-accurate medieval murder mysteries (I secretly quite fancy this last option).

Generally, people react positively when I tell them I’m doing graduate study until they find out I’m not doing something ‘useful’ like an MBA or a law degree. When I tell them I’m studying history, I’ll be received with bemused silence, a stuttered ‘why are you studying THAT?’, or – perhaps the most irritating response –patronising indulgence, as if I’m engaged in a somewhat eccentric hobby but at least it's keeping me out of trouble.

My personal experience is merely a microcosm. Those of us pursuing Humanities degrees are more likely to be accused of elitist dilettantism by politicians who have become increasingly focused on universities as factories for churning out tomorrow’s happy work-bots, rather than places where the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual freedom are considered as social goods in their own right. Because my main interest is medieval history, I get really prickly at the fact medieval studies often gets a star mention in newspaper articles scoffing at the ‘useless’ things universities are teaching these days. Yes, ‘useless’ things like critical thinking (perhaps politicians would secretly prefer it if the rest of us had less training in this area?), the ability to effectively analyse and synthesise complex information, or the skills to read and research both widely and deeply and then assess all the evidence on its own merits.

I’m fortunate to have earned a scholarship that covers my tuition fees (though who knows how long that will last?), and I also make enough from part-time PR contracting to pay the bills and keep a roof over my head. Without those factors, would I still be pursuing graduate study? I don’t know, and I’m certainly conscious of the financial privilege that makes my current situation viable. But at the same time, I simply can’t imagine being content with an existence where I’m not engaging in a life of the mind that rises above the mundane issues of our day-to-day world.

It’s difficult, daunting, and sometimes-tedious work (formatting references, anyone?), but when I’m doing it, there’s a thrumming inside me, a steady stretching of both cognition and intuition that seems to reverberate through my very centre. To anyone who hasn’t had the experience, it’s difficult to describe the sensation of discovering a single paragraph in 400 pages of text that opens a door in your mind, maybe even utterly changing the way you’ve been looking at the world. Or the secret thrill of finding a group of 600-year-old legal cases that appear – finally! – to confirm a theory you’ve been quietly harbouring for ages. Or the sheer enjoyment of the robust intellectual exercise that is taken tussling over the cracks in someone else’s long-cherished theory.

Rembrandt’s scholar may be a crusty old guy wearing a ruff, but I experience deep sense of empathy when I look at him. Across the gap of centuries, I can sense the cramping in his hand as he takes yet another page of notes, and I can feel the tired itchiness of eyes and a brain that have been tightly focused for hours. In him, I see my own drive to keep reading, keep looking, keep questioning. A drive that can sometimes be stronger than those most basic human needs of sleep and food. A drive provoked by an even deeper fear (certain knowledge that is yet unacknowledged), that my days will run out before my questions do.

That is ‘why’ and that is ‘what comes next’ because for me, it is coterminous with life itself.

* Image: Rembrandt, A Scholar, 1631. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

On service, social pressure and separation

The Letters to Our Daughters project featured a thought-provoking entry this week from Dr Pamela Carmines, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Cellular & Integrative Physiology at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine. She raised the issue of women in academia frequently carrying heavier service commitments than their male colleagues. This reduces the amount of time they can dedicate to their own “hot science, papers and GRANTS!”, with the flow-on effect of limiting their career advancement and/or causing their professional efforts to be taken less seriously than those of male counterparts.

Both within and outside academia, women are often expected to take on more service commitments and to provide support to colleagues or junior staff, sometimes at the expense of getting ahead with their own work. I believe this is directly related to broader gender-based social pressure for women to be ‘nice’, nurturing and co-operative instead of just saying no. Even when we do say no, we often find ourselves feeling compelled to explain our decision and come up with a slew of good excuses, whereas in my experience, males will usually feel quite comfortable leaving it at a simple ‘nope, sorry, I can’t’. As someone who has an irritating propensity to say ‘yes’ and over-commit myself, this is something that concerns me when it comes to ring-fencing time to work on projects that are important to me and to advancing my career.

The other interesting point Dr Carmines raises is the existence of special women’s committees within larger professional groups and societies. Does this serve to ghettoise women and make it harder for them and their work to be taken seriously? As she asks:

Is it possible that compartmentalizing ourselves into the women's group associated with an organization might actually impede our efforts to have "equal" (or higher) status in the eyes of our male peers?

Or are women’s committees serving a necessary purpose? It's probable that without them, women would have even less influence and recognition in fields still seen as traditionally masculine, such as the 'hard sciences' and IT. And certainly, their very existence highlights the fact that such initiatives are needed because gender-based discrimination continues to be a big problem in many professional and academic settings.

The question of separation versus integration is a topic of perennial debate in the field of women’s history, too. The methods and theoretical approaches developed by historians of women and historians working from broadly feminist perspectives have revolutionised the discipline of history over the last few decades. But it also seems that the establishment of women’s history as a recognised specialty within the academy has enabled some (many?) scholars working within specialties such as political and diplomatic history to assume they don’t need to integrate women into their historical inquiries, because ‘the women’s historians do women’s history’. As a result, women – who make up over half the human race – are still invisible or appear as only token participants in many of the ‘master narratives’ of western history*.

*My own research is centred on England/western Europe, so I don’t know if this is the case elsewhere. If you’re a historian working outside that framework (or within it), what’s your experience?