Author: Emily

Should I do a PhD in history? Which country should I do it in?

Between finishing my PhD last spring and teaching master’s students this term, I have had more conversations than ever before about whether to do a PhD in history and whether to do it in North America or the UK. (Many of the people I have spoken to this year are, like I was, Canadian or American students pursuing master’s degrees in the UK and weighing whether to stay or not.) Finding myself saying the same things repeatedly, I thought I would distill here some of my principles for thinking about these questions.

The usual caveats apply: I benefited from immense structural privilege throughout my higher education, am fortunate to have only a negligible amount of student debt, and do not have any dependents. Your mileage may vary depending on your economic and family situation. 

Principle 1: A PhD is an investment in you, not in a future employment outcome—though it might also be simply the right job for you right now.

Hopefully I am not the first person to tell you this, but there are no jobs. The number of people earning PhDs in history every year far, far outstrips the number of traditional full-time, long-term academic jobs available. This was true before the pandemic and is even more true now. The majority of people who earn a PhD in history statistically will not be able to work in academia long-term, no matter how much they might wish to, how elite the program from which they graduated, and how qualified they might be in other respects. 

Therefore, pursuing a career in academia should never rank top on the list of reasons why you want to do a PhD. Some compelling reasons to pursue a PhD might be because you feel intrinsically excited about the prospect of studying history at graduate level, because there is a particular long-term, book-size research project about which you feel extremely passionate and motivated, or because—regardless of what you wind up doing for a living after—a PhD is the right job for you right now. Graduate school might be the right job for you for all kinds of reasons. A term of at least five years (North America) or three years (UK) of guaranteed employment at a certain minimum standard of living might be more job security than you’ve had previously in your working life. It might be a vehicle for you to move to a certain city to follow your partner’s career or simply for the satisfaction of living there. You may have a clear sense of how you will balance developing a more precarious career (say, as a writer or artist) alongside your PhD work, which might provide an opportunity to pursue that creative work that you might not otherwise have had. (Though doing a PhD can be very all-consuming, and you might find that multitasking more difficult than you anticipated.) Few of us do the same job all of our working lives these days, and there are all kinds of reasons that starting graduate school might be a sensible, stable, and exciting choice for several years, provided that you are clear-eyed about the reality that it will not easily translate into a specific career outcome afterward, and that the work you will wind up doing after may well not be something for which the PhD has specifically qualified you.

For these reasons, I can think of very few circumstances in which one might reasonably want to pay for a PhD. Maybe if one is very wealthy to the point that money is absolutely no object; or if one is older (retired, say) and has a pot of money available specifically to put towards pursuing a passion project. But if you are thinking of starting a PhD in your twenties or thirties, and there is no reason to think of a PhD as an investment in a guaranteed future career outcome, it simply doesn’t make any sense to go into debt for it. You can’t look forward to a return on your investment in a way that you might, say, for American graduate professional degree programs like law school or medical school. I would recommend only pursuing a PhD if you are funded at a standard that is financially feasible for you to live on (taking into account other relevant circumstances like a partner’s income, etc.).

There are, of course, things that you can do both before and during grad school to make yourself the most competitive candidate that you can for academic jobs. Discussing these is somewhat outside the scope of this post, and would also be presumptuous coming from someone who hasn’t (yet?) secured a permanent job in academia. But when you’re just considering whether to apply, the important thing to remember is that there are no guarantees—and indeed, the odds are stacked against you—even if you do everything right.

Principle 2: There is no huge rush to start a PhD.

I often speak to prospective grad students who are anxious about the time commitment involved in a PhD and are eager to get started right away. I would advise against rushing simply for the sake of rushing. Again, there may well not be a long-term career in academia waiting for you on the other side of the PhD, so it is worth taking your time to consider a wide range of career trajectories and try out possible paths. Right after college is the time that it’s easiest to get a short-term fellowship or paid internship to try out a career in journalism or teach English in another country. You can be a paralegal or an editorial assistant for a year or two, then leave it behind if you don’t care for it. All of that is much harder when you’re in your 30s.

Furthermore, starting a PhD in your late 20s or your 30s might be beneficial. You might have some emotional distance from college, and be more prepared to treat the PhD as a job and not as an all-consuming experience (which will help to guard against burnout). You might have had the opportunity to pursue higher-paid employment, or to live with family rent-free, and thus to put some money aside or pay down some debt. To be sure, there’s a balance to be struck here—by the time I finished my PhD at 30, I was very excited to be rid of the minor indignities of being a student and to make slightly more money (as I am extremely fortunate to do in my present position but is of course not guaranteed). And of course not everyone has other job opportunities, and grad school might be the best way to nail down an income right now, to secure a necessary immigration status, or other practical considerations.

If you’re able, though, taking a year or two out after undergrad or a standalone master’s will give you the time to make a considered decision about which programs to apply to and what broad area of research you would like to pursue. (If you are applying to UK PhDs, I would think you would definitely need that time to develop a sophisticated and thorough thesis proposal.) It will also allow you to draw on a completed undergraduate or master’s thesis in your application, showcasing the best evidence of your capacity to take on graduate-level original research. The programs will still be there next cycle, and a year is not very much time. If you don’t quite feel ready to give the applications your best shot, and you’re financially able, then wait.

Principle 3: A UK PhD and a North American PhD are not, actually, the same qualification.

As you probably know, the structure and norms of the PhD in the UK and in the US and Canada are very different. The PhD in North America includes two years of coursework, comprehensive exams, language training, and a fairly substantial teaching load that is at best extremely valuable professional experience and at worst exploitative grunt labor (sometimes it’s both at once). It typically takes 6–7 years, with a standard funding package guaranteeing funding for five of those years and the rest made up with full-time teaching or external fellowships. While at many UK universities grad students do increasingly assume (increasingly exploitative) teaching responsibilities, the degree is still primarily oriented around exclusively writing a thesis. There are no coursework or exams (the one-year standalone masters does not, in my view, approximate the extent of the work one does in the first two or three years of a North American PhD). The degree typically takes around four years, with three of those funded in a standard package. These are different and on some level incomparable experiences, from which one leaves with different skills and having been prepared for different job markets.

My experience of doing my PhD in the US was that the coursework, exams, and teaching experience were absolutely invaluable both in preparing me to write the best dissertation possible and in preparing me to work in academia, including in my current role at a UK university. Like most US PhDs, I did not write the dissertation I imagined that I would write when I applied to my program. The intervening years allowed me to develop a larger and more sophisticated project and to conduct the huge amount of archival research necessary to execute the project. It is difficult to imagine how I could have done as well as I did on the US tenure-track job market last year if I didn’t have the breadth of teaching experience and other professionalization opportunities that I gained through my US PhD; that experience has also served me well in being able to pursue teaching and other professional opportunities within my UK university. My sense, based primarily on my own experience, is that if it is important to you to be legible to and competitive within the academic job markets on both sides of the Atlantic, the North American PhD is the better bet—and well worth the added time commitment, not least because that’s three more years during which one has more secure paid employment than one might have otherwise, which is not something at which any of us can turn up our noses these days.

That said, optimizing your life around the tenure-track academic job market is, for the reasons discussed above, in some sense a fool’s errand, and there are several countervailing reasons one might wish to do a PhD in the UK. A particular supervisor(s), research group, or large research council-funded project who happen to be based at a UK institution might be exactly the right person/people for you to work with. You may actually know that you do not wish to pursue a career in academia after the PhD, and that what you need out of grad school is more of a residential fellowship to write a book, for which three years of income and access to a research library is actually more useful than all the trimmings of a North American PhD. There might be personal/family reasons for you to be living in the UK, and settling in the UK long-term (with an academic job or not) might be your desired outcome. It is always fine to prioritize personal considerations in terms of where to live for grad school! Though sometimes it involves taking into account tradeoffs of various kinds, and it’s important to be clear-eyed about what those tradeoffs are. The important thing to bear in mind is, I think, that if you start a UK PhD with the desire ultimately to seek academic employment in North America, you should be very aggressive from the start about maximizing opportunities such as transferable teaching experience, connecting with North American mentors and peers, etc. so as to counteract some of those transatlantic differences in the nature of the qualification and the academic culture.

On (Academic) Writing

For several months now, I have regularly been posting on social media photos and screenshots of my efforts to write my dissertation. Some might call it self-aggrandizing, but I have found this habit—and the “likes” and comments it generates from my Facebook and Instagram friends—to be a powerful source of motivation that keeps me cranking out words daily. Due to posting these photos, I often receive requests to describe my writing process, and in particular what I am doing with the hundreds of little slips of paper with which I cover my desk and bedroom floor. So (and really this is just an excuse to procrastinate on cataloguing the endless varieties of misogyny expressed by interwar male undergraduates, which I find rather wearing) I thought I might write something describing how I write.

It’s necessary to begin with several caveats. First, there are not objectively better ways to write—or to do research, or any other academic or creative task. People find the systems that work well for them based on their learning styles, writing styles, and other life circumstances (for example, if you have children, your writing process may look very different to mine!). Second, while I am probably fairly good at being a fifth-year graduate student, I am not the right person to advise peers at the same career stage as me how to write a dissertation, because I haven’t written one yet. Furthermore, due to a combination of the structure of my program and receiving an extra year of funding through an additional internal fellowship, I have not had to teach for the last two years and thus have been able to engage in an intensive period of research and writing. While I do part-time work to supplement my income, it amounts to less than ten hours per week, and I mostly do it in the evenings and weekends. I say all this not to brag, but rather to observe that structural privilege accumulated over many years affects our ability to write in the way that we would most like. For example, the flexibility of my schedule allows me to block out a few hours every morning, at the time when my brain is sharpest, to devote only to my dissertation, a circumstance available to few graduate students. I am thus not the right person to advise the many peers whose path through graduate school has been considerably more difficult than mine.

In general, most of the brain-work I do is not very systematic. I have a free-associating mind rather than an analytic one, whose natural tendency is to dive very deeply into one topic rather than assessing patterns across different cases or bodies of material. I mostly do history by collecting very large quantities of archival material and then simply telling the reader, at some considerable length, what they contain, before embarking upon an editing process in which I compress that description to a more manageable size. When I get round to writing, therefore, I have spent many weeks or months in an archive or several, and have hopefully had the time to organize my findings, taking apart the Word document of hundreds of pages in which I have recorded my stream-of-consciousness impressions of the archive and creating an entry for each document in my Zotero database. I don’t do much in Zotero beyond recording the correct citation information and organizing all the documents by repository and by date. But I can then print off that database—the poor trees, but for me the most essential part of the process (enabled by the laser printer I bought out of the research account I am exceptionally fortunate to possess)—and get on with writing.

The writing, then, starts with several hundred pages of source material, and a space like a floor or a big table, large enough to lay it all out and get a visual sense of the shape of it. Even a large computer monitor doesn’t quite provide the scope for this, for me. Spreading it out makes it possible to see patterns—for example, if student politicians across many different institutions all became preoccupied by a particular topic in a particular year—and also to trial different ways of structuring the argument and exposition that I might follow over the course of the text. It’s actually possible to skip this step if the piece of writing is very short (such as a conference paper or a blog post), as in that case it might be possible to hold the whole structure in my head at once and/or to take a less comprehensive approach to incorporating all the source material. But for a dissertation chapter, it is absolutely essential—I shouldn’t be able to do any actual thinking without it. I used to nail down a structure on the floor and then paste all the slips into a notebook, but more recently as I have been working with larger and more complex quantities of material I have found that I want to revisit and revise the structure as I write. I keep the slips laid out on the floor, or file them in a more mutable way with paper clips and folders.

So that’s what the slips of paper are. They become the raw material out of which the story is written up, and I interpellate in my own words context and analysis that lead the reader from one slip of paper to the next and sum up what the whole picture is. To draft, I use a piece of software called Scrivener, which allows one to do various fancy split-screen things that make it possible to see, for example, an outline, multiple chapters, and the footnotes all at once, and to save notes and chaff in different folders as part of the same database as the main text. (Scrivener costs $38 with an educational discount; I am fortunate to have been able to afford to buy it.) I write at the rate of about 600–1,600 words per day, which will take between two and four hours of concentrated, intensive thinking that typically leaves me too exhausted to do brain-work the rest of the day. I do this about six days a week, every week (it has been many years since I took a vacation). I usually write between 10am and 1pm, and do other work, paid work, or housework in the afternoons, but occasionally this varies or I have enough energy to be able to write all day. I try to push myself if I can, but listen to my body and stop if I can’t. I never write in the evenings, and only rarely, under extreme time pressure, do other work at that time.

While on the face of it this quantity of word production in this amount of work time might seem productive, it is actually not efficient at all. With so many slips of paper, it can take weeks to progress through a given section of the text as it is laid out on the floor. Almost every aspect of writing the dissertation so far has taken much longer than I had imagined it would, and my goal of finishing a draft by September has slipped progressively further out of reach. Moreover, this word production is the first in a series of revision stages. The first drafts of the chapters that have so far got as far as a first-draft stage have been 35,000–40,000 words long: baggy objects that are not only of an inappropriate length for the genre of thing that they are, but would be much too onerous to ask anyone, even my long-suffering advisor, to wade through. It takes another series of weeks to sculpt this material into something that looks like a chapter. My goal is always to get it under 20,000 words before I show it to anyone, through a painful and painstaking process of winnowing. Then comes the slow round of workshops and seminars, getting feedback from expert and general audiences that will be the basis for further revisions. In previous writing tasks this process, potentially endless, has been put to a stop by a university-imposed deadline or by publication of one sort or another (in a journal, on a blog). But in this case I am several years away from the book going to press which will mark the formal end of writing.

My way of thinking about and doing writing has been influenced—I am still realizing how much—by the semester I spent in John McPhee’s writing workshop in spring 2009. McPhee, a longtime New Yorker correspondent and the author of many works of long-form journalism, has taught a creative writing seminar at Princeton for decades. Most of the students are aspiring journalists, as I was then—though most were much better writers than I was, and I think McPhee was rather tired of my tendency to insert myself into every piece of writing I created for the class. The main lesson McPhee impressed upon us was about structure. Clarity, he said, comes from the structure the writer creates, which leads the reader through the events or concepts discussed in the text and slowly opens out its central meaning to the reader’s understanding. In class, we scrutinized the diagrams McPhee had drawn to visualize the structure of his own essays, often metaphors taken from the natural environment which has been the subject of so much of his writing: a snail shell, a wave. This class was my first realization of how important it is to be deliberate and disciplined about writing, rather than just expressing one’s feelings. I took to heart the structure lesson. It fell to the back of my consciousness when I became disillusioned with journalism and began to study history, however, and I was surprised recently when reading a New York Times review of McPhee’s new book to be reminded that his office, like my bedroom, is filled with little slips of paper that he obsessively arranges and rearranges in an effort to make meaning. Evidently, I had taken away more than I had imagined; evidently, too, there is more than one way to be a writer. But now I, too, tell my students about structure.

I have always had a natural aptitude for writing, though it has improved considerably as I received more formal instruction in the subject and have been prompted as a professional academic to think more consciously about suiting one’s writing to a specific task. As an adolescent, I had perceived writing primarily to be a means of self-expression, and rebelled at restrictive formats. But now I see it primarily as a means of communication, and am happy to embrace formats as constructs that convey meaning and aid the reader. A dissertation chapter, a grant application, an online essay for a general audience, an email all have different audiences and purposes, and the format and style one selects must vary accordingly to be effective at getting one’s message across. I believe it is possible to (strive to) marry beauty and eloquence with clarity and analytic rigor. I admire in others, and try to achieve, a style which is engaging but also articulates a clear argument and makes it possible for the reader to follow it without working too hard. I have had interesting conversations with colleagues who opt for what I might call a more subtle or literary style, to tell a story more than to deliver an argument. It is clear that this is a matter of personal preference that might vary, and that when workshopping others’ writing it is important to respect what their aspirations for their own writing might be.

It is difficult, however, to remain true to personal preference in the context of an academic environment, where one has the sense that one is constantly being evaluated, that extenuating circumstances affect one’s ability to follow one’s instincts. Almost daily, my feeling of pride at having created 1,000 usable, relatively intelligent words in a morning is subsumed in my feelings of guilt, anxiety, and exhaustion: are those words good enough? why am I so tired now? how might I summon up the energy to do an afternoon shift? how will my advisor, or a conference audience, react to them? am I making enough progress to finish on time? will anyone else find this interesting, or just me? If I had to live solely by selling my words instead of by the strange cocktail of things that might see one lucky enough as to win the academic jobs lottery, I might be asking different anxious questions. But I have often felt that if I somehow had income coming in regardless and could still be writing for my own gratification, I would be much more confident in my ability to do good work, and to stop when I am tired and it isn’t possible to do more. It does not help that many in permanent jobs seem often to advise advanced graduate students about writing in precisely the same tone they would take with undergraduates ten or fifteen years younger, forgetting that grad students might have extensive professional training and experience in writing and editing—or, as I indicated above, that writers’ own personal processes and styles may differ and that what works for one person may not work for another.

We all, whatever our level of seniority, I think, often forget that work does not always look like work, and that there are all kinds of non-obvious pursuits—baking, going for a walk, sitting in the pub with friends, playing video games, childcare—that for many are actually an integral part of the writing process. For those who do their best thinking while doing something else, it is necessary to set time aside in the day not only for office/desk time but also for these activities. It is necessary also, whether an individual graduate student’s routine includes caring responsibilities or not, to respect that a 9–5 office schedule is not everyone’s best way of achieving work–life balance. To me, the greatest benefit of academic work has always seemed to be the flexibility of its hours. While for some the babysitter’s schedule is the most important constraining factor, or the 9–5 really is an ideal setup, for others the time that has to be set aside is late at night, or as in my case the hours of 10am to 1pm and those alone. For others still, the luxury of being able to do the grocery shopping in the middle of the day on a weekday may be the one thing that allows them to get the housework done alongside their more-than-full-time job. Much as the writing process takes many forms, and not everyone may be best served by drowning themselves in little slips of paper, so too is it the case that different people work best at different paces or at different times or in different ways. We do not guard work–life balance in the way best-suited to making academia accessible to everyone if we insist that everyone conform to a 9–5.

And with that, I am off to play video games. A happy 2019 to all!

Advice to Those Starting Graduate School

(geared—due to a friend’s request for such advice—to those starting a PhD in the humanities at an elite program in the US)

Always keep a sense of proportion and perspective, and keep alive your contacts with the world outside academia. Few problems you will encounter are unique to academia or uniquely bad within academia, and have much more to do with negotiating the working world/adult life generally, especially in our present blah blah neoliberal precarious gig economy which affects most of us under 40. Limit your engagement with academic social media and the social life of your department if you find that stuff only dials up your anxiety.

Take advantage of one of the really special things about academia—the opportunity for flexible working—but make it work for you. There will be times in the course of graduate school when your timetable is not your own and you won’t be able to impose limits on your work, but make sure you’re only working 24 hours/day when it is absolutely necessary. If you need to work 9-5 in order to impose boundaries around your work life, then great. But if you work better at other times, that’s great too. You do NOT have to work 40 hours a week, or any other set amount. Intellectual work happens at different paces for different people. You might find it more helpful to make to-do lists/set goals, and stop when you’ve finished them.

Some actors—university administrators, maybe your advisor or other professors—will try to treat you as if the category “student” means you’re not really an adult. But always act like the professional adult you want to be treated as, and insist on that treatment if it isn’t automatically given you. You have the right to dignity and respect, as do others—don’t defer to someone else simply because they are professionally senior to you, but be polite and professional if you disagree. Act like the dream colleague you want to have when you’re in your dream post-PhD job, including with your grad-student peers. While you may well become good friends with many of your peers, you aren’t obliged to hang out with (or even like) your whole cohort. You are obliged to be civil—unless someone has done something so egregious as not to merit your civility, in which case you shouldn’t give it them. (This will happen at some point—you may want to think in advance about where your boundaries are.) Like any office, the department will have a rumor mill. If you’re a budding academic politician you may wish to use its powers for good—but otherwise remember that if, for example, you date a classmate, everyone else will soon find out.

When you’re teaching, you are a staff member of the university. Dress professionally (within whatever remit makes you feel comfortable according to cultural norms/gender identity/whatever—I am continually surprised by how flexible these norms seem to be now, even for women). Don’t sleep with your students. Do join the union and insist that the university recognize you as the worker that you are.

Always remember that you have agency and power and independence. Disagree with your advisor if you want to take your dissertation in a different direction from what she prefers, or if you have aspirations for your post-PhD life that he hasn’t considered. Disagree with your cohort-mates if they’re causing drama about something that doesn’t merit it. Never lose sight of the job market, but I don’t mean freak out about it. Constantly ask yourself where you’d like to be in 10 or 20 years, and while recognizing that absolutely nothing is guaranteed or absolutely within your control, do your best to stack the odds to make that vision possible. If you want an academic job, it is your responsibility to seek out as many sources of information as you can, attend every professional development workshop your department puts on, stack up your publications and your teaching experience and your progress on your diss and your network of contacts. No one else is going to hand all that to you. If you don’t want an academic job, great—and your PhD journey and the scholarship you will produce along the way is just as valid and valuable as anyone else’s. But do what you need to do to gain a realistic picture of how to enter the sector that interests you when you graduate. Have back-up plans. You have the right to make whatever tradeoffs you need to make, and no one cares if you disappoint your advisor by not following the path she has imagined for you—but don’t expect you can both land a tenure-track job and keep your family in your current city where your non-academic partner is employed (or whatever).

There are limits to what it is reasonable to feel entitled to. If you are fully funded at a top program at a private US university, always remember that you are the most privileged of all possible grad students, and that if you don’t have dependents you are making a comfortable middle-class wage; and think about how you can help those both within your profession and outside it who are less fortunate than you.

You will encounter many people trying to peddle their crack system for note-taking or memorizing or organizing information or archive workflow. I can tell you about my generals study strategy or my archives system, but these sorts of things are highly individualized and through trial and error you will find the system that works for you. Coursework seems important when you start the PhD, but a year after generals you’ll have forgotten all about it. Remember that you spend most of your time as a grad student researching and writing your dissertation and teaching. Anything you find stressful or annoying about coursework will soon pass.

In conclusion, I really cannot emphasize enough perspective, autonomy, self-confidence, agency, dignity, and dialing down the drama whenever possible!

Orals Diary, 3; or, Reading and Writing Through Current Events

“It’s always open season on gay kids.” So begins Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” published as an article in 1991 and then, three years later, collected in her book of essays Tendencies, which I read yesterday and today in the Upper Reading Room, compulsively toggling back to social media every few pages in order to take in the tragedy that happened early Sunday morning in Orlando. Of those of the over 50 victims who have been identified, over half were under 30. For those of us who teach college—the late and lamented EKS, me, maybe you—many of them were the age of our students. The youngest was 19. Sedgwick writes in the introduction to Tendencies that she had young people, her students, in mind when she was writing. At the time she was writing some of these essays, surely some of her students were dying—certainly, she writes in Tendencies of a very close friend who did—and she was one of many people who put their queer shoulders to the wheel, putting pressure on the US government and the public to do something about a cruel fate that so many young people needn’t have met with.

At the time she was writing the essays in Tendencies, Sedgwick was also living through and with breast cancer, and so the book is very much about death and mortality and suffering, but it is about slow deaths, enervating ones, a drawn-out work of mourning (she writes a eulogy for a dying friend while he is still alive). Not so the young people shot down in cold blood on Sunday morning, whose families (and their chosen families, who, as Claire Potter has pointed out, are still being denied visitation rights, as they were 25 years ago) in some cases are still waiting to learn their fates. But the metaphor of “open season” that Sedgwick invokes (she’s talking about the pathologization of effeminate men) is not inappropriate for our age in which queer people out dancing, or college students, or seven-year-olds, can be shot like so many sitting ducks in places that should have been safe by weapons that those who have shot them in war zones believe should never be allowed in civilian contexts.

I didn’t expect that setting out to chronicle my orals reading would have any relevance to the outside world. Instead, I thought it would keep me going despite the frustration of having to spend so long doing something that doesn’t seem that useful. Evidently, I can be a better historian if I set aside these seven months to absorb lots of information, but in the moment it’s easy to look round at all the other people doing good and become angry at yourself for spending hours in a 400-year-old library reading yet another attempt to explain why X canonical work of 18th- or 19th-century literature is sexually transgressive. I was taught Sedgwick in college, in graduate school, have read her on my own, and have admired her work and, through the testimony of others, who she was as a person for many years—and yet, truth be told, going through her catalogue for orals can make it seem a little formulaic. Some other literary critic produced a reading of a canonical work of 18th- or 19th-century literature—or perhaps another cultural artifact—that was pathologizing, or too crudely-drawn and obvious, and Sedgwick sets out to put them right, with all the tricks available to a talented critic showing the text to have meanings both more and less transgressive, more and less complex, than the first reader could have seen. Several of the essays in Tendencies are like this: the one about Diderot, the one about Wilde, the one about Cather, the one about Austen, even the one about John Waters’ films. They do all relate elegantly back to her central, vital theme: an extension of her argument in Epistemology, which explored the connections and contradictions between homosexuality as a minority identity and as a more public and diffuse signifier; and between homosexuality as a transgression of gender norms and as an institution of gender separatism, but also moving further beyond “gay and lesbian” into this new world of the word “queer.” And so the characters in texts don’t just turn out to be gender-transgressive, or sexually unstable, in Sedgwick’s readings: they disrupt what “family” means (as in The Importance of Being Earnest, where uncles and aunts matter more than mothers and fathers); they refuse to be categorized into the homo/hetero binary (as in Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, for whom Sedgwick makes a case that I do not entirely follow but am happy to respect as having a sexual identity as an “onanist”). The historian, who is perfectly content with the finding that the Jane Austen heroines of this world did not understand sexuality, gender, and love the way we do today and does not seek to upset any further apple carts, sometimes gets a little lost around here. But Sedgwick has more to say when she lays the literature aside, as she does with many of the essays in Tendencies, and puts her critical acumen to work in other fields. She writes critically about her own identity, with wonderfully moving things to say about her identity as a fat woman, her identification with gay men, the love-relationships of her life. Adding the chapters together, it’s possible to see how the literary reading might have helped her to read the text of her own life.

I can’t imagine this was easy. Because it’s a special, emotional, tragic occasion, I’ll tell you why. I had a friend in college who was sometimes very reserved, but put that reservation to good use watching and understanding the lives of the people around her. Once at night when some of us were drinking tea in her room, she suddenly turned to me and said, “Emily, why do you want so much to be a gay man?” I stumbled over an answer, not sure how to provide one while also denying the presence of the question. I recall others in the room remarking that it was a weird, and maybe a rude, thing to say. But it has weighed on me for years, because obviously it spoke something of the truth. As I have gotten to know Sedgwick through her writing, it is a great relief to know that—like countless queer people who found community through literature where they couldn’t among the living—I am not the only woman who has questioned her commitments to her feminist politics because of her deep emotional investment in communities of men, nor the only one who has sought to live out queerness despite what would seem very much to be unavoidable cross-gender erotic and affective commitments. I am grateful to Sedgwick for having such an unconventional critical style, with so much of herself in it, because if it weren’t for her writing I might not have known that it is okay and honest and ethical to have the inclinations that I do, couldn’t have seen someone else state them so matter-of-factly, and then work to create a larger space in which any kind of affective position that doesn’t fit into the categories available to us might be articulated.

What is the point of reading books in a 400-year-old library while the world burns around us? Some, after all, believe that those of us who find ourselves reading books at times like this are unredeemable, and advocate the violent destruction of the institutions in which it is possible for us to read them. They can rest in the comfort of their unbesmirched leftist politics, pure as the driven snow, while it is left for those of us who still read in buildings named after slaveholders to wrestle with our consciences. Wrestle we must, I think: it is dangerous to assume we are right that we are not doing harm to our students by making them confront new ideas they might find troubling; dangerous for us to assume that the world will be all right without us, or with only the odd modest donation to a cause or vote for a Democratic candidate; dangerous if we pass up the opportunity to bend the talents with which advantages and good fortune have bestowed us to some more urgent, and more life-saving, purpose. Yes, teachers do good, but that rings hollow on days when we have to remember that there are not a few teachers in recent years who have done the most good not by words and knowledge but simply by shielding their students from an unstable man wielding an assault rifle.

I think that we can take some comfort from the fact that all through the AIDS crisis, through which tens of thousands of queer and other vulnerable people in my country perished in part due to the government’s slowness to come to the assistance of some of the most marginalized and persecuted members of society, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick kept writing. She kept writing through her own illness, celebrating even when she herself was very ill the lives of her ill gay male friends. And she wasn’t just writing work with an obviously political or emotional purpose: Tendencies allows us to see that even MLA papers with provocative titles about the inner workings of classic novels, or about the minutiae of the methodology of the field of queer studies that she helped to found, add up to a larger picture of a corpus (a body, a body of work) devoted to changing the way people think.

A somewhat fainter, but really quite present, political backdrop to Sedgwick’s writing in this period is the canon wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. As LD Burnett has noted, in this respect as well we are living through a remarkable echo of 25 years ago (weirdly, I was born a little more than 25 years ago), as older and more conservative college teachers and members of the public greet with mystery and hostility the wishes of the young to pursue a course of study whose rationale they can comprehend. In the early pages of Tendencies, Sedgwick has the best possible reaction to such views:

In the very first of the big “political correctness” scare pieces in the mainstream press, Newsweek pontificated that under the reign of multiculturalism in colleges, “it would not be enough for a student to refrain from insulting homosexuals…. He or she would be expected to… study their literature and culture alongside that of Plato, Shakespeare, and Locke.” Alongside? Read any Sonnets lately? You dip into the Phaedrus often? (Tendencies, 20)

What we do with canonical texts, we weirdos who work with them to ends other than to appreciate them (or at least, not only to appreciate them), is to show our students how to look at them from perspective after perspective until the student finds just the lens that will give her strength. For one student the Phaedrus is the epitome of classical Greek prose; for another, it is a key to the philosophy of writing and poetics; for another, it proves that another civilization long ago gave public sanction to his desires; for another, it is evidence of a rigidly hierarchical, sexist and class-bound society which modern democracies should have more sense than to revere. Or, I think Sedgwick helps us to understand, all these things can be true at once. And for that reason, turning one’s mind away from Twitter and towards such study is a moral path, perhaps even (not to get too grandiose, but) a salvific one, one that can help us know what to do when we are confronted with pain.

Don’t be stupid or self-absorbed. If you are American, contact your elected representatives and urge them to support universal background checks and an assault rifle ban. If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me and for all the other teachers who lose sleep at night wondering if it will be our classrooms next. Do it for the queer Americans who have spent the twentieth and twenty-first centuries dealing with enough shit. And then take up your Plato or your Auden, kneel in prayer or go out dancing, and teach your children (for they’re your children even if you only have them fifty minutes a week in a discussion section) well.

Orals Diary, 2

Another two days staving off jetlag and mild boredom in the Upper Reading Room, another two orals books despatched. I move on tomorrow to Sedgwick’s Between Men, and as I trudged down and then up the circling seventeenth-century staircase on yet another unnecessary bathroom break, I remembered that five and a bit years ago I took a selfie (before we called them selfies) in the Easter vac—my first Easter vac (and my first Easter)—reading Between Men for the first time outside the Rad Cam on a sunny day (it was March, and too cold to sit outside the Rad Cam, but I was trying to look picturesque), because I thought it might help me with Symonds. I am still of an age when five years seems like a very long time, long enough for me to have been a different person then. I saw someone today in the street whom I first met when he was a first-year undergrad: now he’s a fourth-year, and he and his comrades finished their finals this week. My youngest grad-student friends here are submitting their doctoral theses over the next few months. I have yet to submit my exams—and I am still here, still in love; though oddly alone, while others are moving on.

It’s a strange and overdetermined segue, but in Diana Fuss’s introduction to the volume Inside/Out, which she edited in 1991, she writes of the instability and uncertainty of language used to describe gay and lesbian identities and desires, the collapse of language in the face of concepts which seemed at such radical disjuncture, it appears, with the society in which many American theorists of the ’80s and early ’90s lived. This is evident also in the second half of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, which I covered yesterday and today, in which the past looms large in how to think about lesbian and gay identities but in which almost none of those writing about it were trained as historians. I googled one after another, found them to be emeritus in a great English department somewhere—but only John D’Emilio, in his essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” made what seemed to me to be the kind of argument a historian would make. I didn’t agree with the heavy causal weight he puts on a marxist narrative of economic development in the essay, but his desire to relate the emergence of new ways of thinking about sex, the family, and society to other social and economic transformations is simply and recognizably what historians do. It was very different—puzzlingly—from David Halperin’s contribution, a set of facts Symonds could have told you about paiderastia in classical Athens (which is made to stand, as Symonds made it, for all of antiquity); or from Martha Vicinus’s and Gloria Hull’s essays, which are focused on recovering a lesbian past that I am not so sure really existed, even a hundred or two hundred years ago. I know all too well the historical context that might have given Halperin a recourse to such tropes, and I look forward to engaging further with them when I reread his One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, also on my list. But I lack the context to make sense of Vicinus’s or Sue-Ellen Case’s sense that it is a radical and essential move to emphasize the presence of butch/femme dynamics in lesbian communities. Perhaps a reader might be able to explain to me why this seemed so politically progressive in the days of the Reader, why it seems important to Vicinus to conflate historical women assuming masculine-gendered dress and behavior and historical women having romantic friendships with other women. Of course, now that we have the category “transgender,” and it is so culturally widespread, we don’t need or want to do this. But maybe the present and its politics are not the place from which to write of who people in the past wanted to be and whom they wanted to love, and maybe Vicinus’s “mannish lesbians” (in the 19th century! really!) or Ulrichs’ anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa (for he was a queer theorist too, in a sense) are no more transgender than they are gay; they are simply themselves, no matter how earnestly the academics-who-are-most-decidedly-not-historians, writing around the year that I was born, try to throw all the forces of Lacan and Derrida at them.

And so Oxford, which is sui generis: its conservatism (which I have begun to liken to that of the Catholic Church) resisting calls, however well-intentioned and urgent, to become otherwise; the kind of mystical force it exerts on its captive audience (me) defying easy explanation. In Howards End the most ill-fitting of all the Schlegel siblings, the brother Tibby, describes Oxford, not any man (or woman, but really the alternative is a man), as the object of his love. It’s been a while since I read the novel, but as I recall Tibby’s location in the plot is uneasy; he’s not swept up in the plot-driving “muddles” that his sisters are and that are the larger point to what Forster does as an author. It’s as if Oxford is a kind of unstable sexual orientation: if we were to put it in Fuss’s densely theoretical Inside/Out framework, we would surely say that it’s the slight puff of air that causes the deconstructionist house of cards (or should we say house of binaries) to come falling down.

I kept forgetting it was Saturday today, and wondering why the library was empty and the city centre clogged with tourists (if living in New York has done anything for me, it has made me exceedingly impatient with large groups standing and gawping on narrow pavements). But on Saturdays the Bodleian closes at 3, as it has at least since I have known it (Sunday opening hours, however, an innovation that occurred in my time, much like the Gladstone Link, the old tearoom and its successor, the reopening of the New Bodleian, and other such things that make it seem as if I have been here for an age). And so, now that I no longer have borrowing privileges, I set out to walk back to my accommodation along the scenic route—in both senses, that is; a detour and the Thames, on whose banks lie some of the most beautiful places I have ever beheld. It turned out to be Eights, wouldn’t you know it, and you couldn’t have picked a better case to illustrate how Oxford has not changed in 150 years, despite what should have been the grand upheaval of the admission of women: the boats half female (the marshals, though, mostly not), yet the women’s-college boats mostly men, and the towpath was clogged by people and the air thick with the echoes of coxes’ commands. I don’t care much for sport, but there it is, at once terrible (I read a couple books for my last term paper that in part blame Oxbridge rowing for World War I) and banal. So the front bedroom of the sturdy brick terraced house which I am currently inhabiting, about a hundred years old, on a side street in East Oxford next to a pub and a playing field. A hundred years ago, a family of six whose pater familias worked in the auto factory? Today, an alternative medicine clinic on the ground floor, and a spinster temporarily lodged in the flat above: with its retro wallpaper and its unconvincingly boarded-up fireplace, the stair-railing giving her déjà vu every time she walks out onto the landing and thinks of every other identical terraced house in England she’s ever entered, and the people a hundred years ago who did so before her. Said spinster heard a spooky creak a couple hours ago, and comforted herself in realizing that a century-old brick house is as sturdy as anything.

Did I think that orals would (thus far, anyway) turn out to be about being lonely, haunting a city I should have left long ago, not knowing how to explain why I’m still here, learning from what queer theorists have taught us about the limits of language? Of course not—but also yes, of course, how could I not? This is what the deconstructionists teach us, I think: the cutesy-clever wordplay that looks much less impressive than it did five or six or seven years ago, that sets me nodding off in the Upper Reading Room, isn’t really about that house of cards crumbling into nothing. Collapse the binaries and I don’t actually think you have neither. You have both. So Anne Lister can be a lesbian to a woman in 1990 who needs to know she’s not alone; and she can be a woman completely of her time whose terms are impossible to translate to another woman, not so different, yet for whom faithfulness to the past’s distance and incomprehensibility carries more personal meaning. And Oxford, odi et amo: the same place it was a hundred and fifty years ago, and yet entirely modern; I, the same person I was five and a bit years ago outside the Rad Cam, and yet changed utterly.

Aged 21, still new to Oxford.
Aged 21, still new to Oxford.

Orals Diary, 1

Yesterday I arrived in Oxford, on a glorious warm and sunny day in seventh week of Trinity. It is beautiful to be here in term: it’s light till 9.30pm, and last night I walked for an hour along the Thames despite my jetlag and having spent the previous night on an airplane, and milling about in the city centre today I was surrounded by young people (too many of them white, too many of them posh-accented) ruthlessly dissecting their exams, doing the same for parties, or (in one case) vigorously advertising a start-up. I met a friend for lunch in a college garden, and finalists floated by, covered in glitter and silly string. They look younger every day, undergrads: but I was one of them, here, only five years ago.

I came here despite intending not to, and I can’t fully explain why I came. Yes, it’s my home—I felt that for certain as I set eyes upon the river last night, cast a familiar eye over the familiar terraced houses of East Oxford—but like most people I have a conflicted and ambivalent relationship to my home, mine perhaps more so because it’s an adopted home, located in a country of which I am not a citizen, where I have lived for a total of about three out of 26 years, a place so strongly allied with class privilege and imperialism in so many people’s eyes that to have chosen it as one’s home is mildly reprehensible. And yet it is, and here we are.

I didn’t even have to come here for work, though I have let a great many people believe I am here for the archives. But no, I am here for the copyright deposit library, for I am spending the summer ramping my frantic reading for my departmental comprehensive exams up to fever pitch. At Columbia, we take our exams (“orals,” for they are) at some point in our third year, and I am slated to do mine in December or January, at some point before the start of the spring semester. I have four fields, for each of which I must read about 50-80 books, on which I will be examined viva voce. The fields are Britain 1688-1832, Britain 1832-present, European social and political thought in the long nineteenth century, and queer theory/history of sexuality. Particularly in the latter two fields, a lot of the books are new to me, and I thought I might do a bit of light writing as I go along about the experience of encountering these new texts—for I think I will be doing a lot of reading, and very little socializing, in the next six or seven months, and I thought it might ease the burden somewhat if I could talk to you. I thought it might ease the burden also of being in Oxford, a painful place where I am not at all sure I want to encounter the people who filled my past lives here, about which I am still not sure how I feel. I may not keep this up, but I will carry on every once in a while as energy and enthusiasm permit.

Today, then, the first day I cracked an orals book open, I started with my queer theory list, and I started slow, with the Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, a weighty tome edited in 1993 to bring together what then was the current state of scholarship in what then was called lesbian and gay (rather than LGBT or queer) studies. I read Part I today—not much, 137 pages, but I was jetlagged—and focused particularly on the first two essays, Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” and an excerpt from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s book-length The Epistemology of the Closet. I hadn’t encountered Rubin’s essay before, and I was shocked by some of the assumptions it could hold in 1984 that we could not countenance today. Rubin writes about the need to develop a radical politics of sexuality that combats “moral panics,” denying (or so it seems to me) that any moral valence should be placed upon sex. Fair enough when she’s talking about the AIDS crisis, which many groups and individuals in her day were leveraging to stigmatize gay men; but this 26-year-old has to wonder whether feminists who worried about sadomasochistic pornography, or people concerned about how children’s sexuality might be exploited by older people, might actually have had a point. In our current atmosphere of renewed concern about child sex abuse (many of which newly-discovered instances occurred in this earlier period of support for children’s sexual freedom that, as we now know, covered up instances of exploitation), it is hard to see how someone could (as Rubin does in this essay) regard NAMBLA as right-thinking or inveigh against the law’s exclusion of minors from sexual expression.

More interesting for my purposes, though, is the way in which Rubin and Sedgwick both make historical arguments. Neither is a historian, but both take seriously the view, shaped by Foucault among others, that sexuality is historically constructed—and that, moreover, our modern paradigms of sexuality were fundamentally shaped in the last decades of the nineteenth century. I think of myself as someone who knows the last decades of the nineteenth century (as far as they pertain to sexuality in Britain, the US, and Germany) very well, and I don’t necessarily think of Foucault as a historian or this moment as the most critical one in which our present-day notions of sexual identity coalesced, although it was certainly a very important time for expert (legal, psychological, scientific) understandings of sexuality, particularly homosexuality. Recourse to this narrative lends itself to a stereotype about “repressed Victorians” that I believe fundamentally to be untrue and unhelpful, as unhelpful as describing premodern people as “gay.” It also makes me wonder about how to relate this past to the authors’ present: that is, the AIDS crisis, a time of great urgency in thinking about sexuality and its relation to society, a time in which everyone’s individual right to sexual self-expression must surely have been cast into doubt (this is testified to by the many primary sources which discuss the divides in the gay community in the very early years of AIDS about whether to adopt safer sex practices). AIDS permeates deeply the entire first part of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, which is about politics, and I am sure it will make its way into the other sections as well. Recently, I reviewed a theory book for EHR which started its narrative earlier than Rubin and Sedgwick do, but which also took AIDS as its present, even though it was published last year. What are the consequences for theorizing about sexuality when it assumes a periodization that begins with the Contagious Diseases Acts, with Oscar Wilde’s trials, or with Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld, and that ends with AIDS? What is left out of this narrative, and what paradigmatic assumptions (Foucault’s?) does it make?

Another thing that surprised me about the Reader so far is that all the writers I read today assumed a constructivist position, i.e. they imagined sexual identity to vary according to time, place, and the cultural factors present therein, and not to be constant across time and place. They all believed, after Foucault, that homosexuality arose in the context of the late nineteenth century West, and did not seek to apply that paradigm to, say, antiquity, or to discuss cultural products from before Proust and Wilde. They extended the constructivist position to apply to other concepts, such as one author, Monique Wittig, who argued that the concept of “woman” is as constructed as the concept of “lesbian.” This shows some of the ideological thrust of the Reader and its editors, perhaps: for it seems evident to me that there were in 1993, in the ’80s, and still today scholars who believe strongly and centrally in transhistorical notions of gender and homosexuality.

Obviously I’m just starting out in the massive knowledge dump that is orals, and my thinking about these questions may well change. But today they made me think about the real intellectual gains of being a historian having designed a theory field that largely asks what use queer theory is to historians (my list is evenly split between classic works of theory and more recent historical monographs which engage with the theoretical paradigms). When I first encountered queer theory it was in college, before I became a historian, and I knew many grad students from other humanities departments who were very au fait with theory and often a bit dismissive about historians, who they saw as rather dull and interested only in facts, not in greater hermeneutic possibilities. Well, that was sometimes true in the history department talks I’d go to in college. But now I have my own frustrations with scholars of sexuality and other subjects who from a literary background pronounce upon the past: for instance, making statements about the invention of sexual identity in my historical period drawn entirely from literary sources or the biographies of canonical writers, or quoting academic historians as the purveyors of facts, upon which the theorist intends to put the interpretive gloss, as if the historian hadn’t already done that herself. When I reviewed that theory book a couple months ago, though, I had serious frustrations with it as a historian, but I came to realize as I read that although the author was writing about historical cultural products (mostly visual art), and sometimes situating them in historical context, he wasn’t trying to make a historical argument. Instead, in this case, it seemed to me that he was being profoundly ahistorical (part of his project was to reinvent the gay cultural canon, and canons are nothing if not in problematic relation to attempts to historicize them) and that was okay. There’s room for many different approaches, many different political and ideological perspectives—though it would be helpful if people who hold different perspectives were able to listen to and discuss them with each other.

Trinity Sunday

It is my fifth Trinity Sunday today, and so I was reading some of the things I wrote around the time that I learned what Trinity Sunday was, when I lived in Trinity College. I don’t know that they gave me much insight into the triune God, but they did make me feel tired, as if all the trips back and forth across the Atlantic had caught up with me. I’d completely forgotten how preoccupied I’d been with class guilt then. I thought that had only come later, when the romance of being in the same places as Symonds and reading Newman and Thomas Arnold and Jowett for the first time wore off, and I met more British historians who weren’t at Oxford. But it was there then, too, the culture shock mingling with a sense that I was becoming complicit in an exploitative system, not sure how to grapple with the fact that things which perpetuate class inequality can also sometimes be very fun.

The Church and me: to tell the story properly involves as many awkward phrasings and convoluted metaphors as your classic Trinity Sunday sermon. (There was the one I remember that involved the weird anecdote about ducks that didn’t make any sense. And then there was this morning’s, in which the preacher resorted to pointing out some of the church’s stained-glass windows which depict the different parts of the Trinity.) But I suppose the Church and me is a lot like the story of Oxford and me, a conflictual and confusing relationship in which I keep feeling a lot of painful, glukúpikron love despite all evidence to the contrary. Trinity term is named for Trinity Sunday, and it is impossible not to attain some measure of happiness in Trinity term, despite the knowledge that you ought to reject the institution in which Trinity term can be passed, reject all it stands for, reject especially the characteristic decadent trappings of Trinity term–like the end-of-the-year parties at any university, except turned up a class notch or five. Trinity Sunday is a very Oxford feast: attempts to explain it start out highly, abstractly intellectual and wind up in paradox and nonsense, there’s good music, and it seems very old–though actually not too old, more closely linked to its Cranmer collect than to Anglo-Saxon folk tradition. “Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity: We beseech thee, that thou wouldest keep us stedfast in this faith, and evermore defend us from all adversities, who livest and reignest, one God, world without end.” The American Episcopal Church doesn’t even use Trinity Sunday to count the weeks of long summer ordinary time: it sings to me thus of another place, another time in my life, another person that I am, another path my fortunes could have taken, if I had stayed there for my PhD. I am so glad for a thousand reasons that I didn’t, but having made that decision I wish I could leave Oxford behind, and not be yet another American thinking wistfully of her time in England, with no thought for the fact that class is real and that there is every reason to hate Oxford and what it represents.

Yet every day my mind is there, ranging across a landscape of past and present, conjuring up from my bedroom with its view of Butler Library another city, full of ghosts. I’m going back in two weeks, just for a short time, and my heart is full of longing and apprehension, pain and desire, faith and doubt.

A Short Essay Upon Submitting Grades

I submitted my grades yesterday, and so I am back to doing something I have not done in years, now, since the beginning of the Sidgwick project (and Christ, how different life looked then): writing up archival findings from scratch, making a first attempt to put them in a kind of order and add interpretation, trying to link that interpretation rigorously to the work of other scholars (that’s the part I’m worst at). I’ve written a little about some of the evidence already, but this is the first time I’m trying to do it on a large, PhD-scale canvas. And it feels great. It makes me happy to be alive. I’m all the more excited that this is the first piece of serious historical work I’ve done that has an explicitly feminist cast, and that seeks to make an intervention into the field of women’s history. Aside from the Sidgwick article MS this is the first thing I have written in a couple years that is not a historiographical essay. It’s like blood is flowing in my veins again.

The first year of teaching went well, all things considered. I have known all my life that a life of service to higher education is defined in terms of one’s teaching of undergraduates, and I began this academic year in terror that I would fail at this most central and morally freighted task. Happily, I found I have some modest natural aptitude for the work, and many things on which I hope to improve as I continue to TA and then begin to teach classes of my own. It is easy to teach at a place like Columbia: my students are universally intelligent, kind, motivated, respectful, and curious. Teaching is an intellectually and emotionally engaging kind of work. It is obvious that it is meaningful.

But I also admitted to myself a couple months ago that I am not sure that I would be as fulfilled in a job that did not afford me the opportunity to write and to work with words. Many of my mentors have told me that the thrill of the classroom gives them the strength to keep writing. I don’t want to say that for me it’s the other way round–aside from anything else, it’s too early to say. And I know that lecturing is a kind of writing, and I know that service to the university matters more than seeing one’s name on the cover of a book. But. When I think about what job I would do if I have to leave the academy, which usually involves having to make a choice between teaching and writing, I think I might choose writing (and editing) over adjuncting or teaching in a school. For one thing, teaching is hard, grindingly hard: hard enough this year with 22 students at a time (I know, fancy Ivy League); seemingly impossible with hundreds. For another, I am good at writing: good enough at it that when I do it I manage not to hate myself quite so very much.

Since I came to Columbia it has been necessary, in a way that it was not in the political climates of other institutions, to reckon with my privilege. The word is an unhelpful one—to some it says too much, to others too little—but for me it has meant two things: learning for the first time (I know) about whiteness and blackness in the United States, and that I am white and therefore my hands are stained with blood; and learning on a more mundane level that coming from an academic family gives me access to knowledge and points of view that many of my colleagues lack, and that have made my passage through graduate school markedly smoother thus far. There are predictable advantages: I have known that there is such a thing called a graduate student all my life; I am rarely intimidated to talk to faculty in a professional or a social context; I know what a provost is, and a hiring line, and how the tenure system works; if I am not sure how to handle an interaction with a colleague or a student crisis, there are two people whom I can call up at any time to ask for advice. And then there are less predictable ones: I know that this life is not easy, I know that everyone does not win the lottery, I know what it is like to work at a less elite institution than Columbia (or Princeton or Oxford), I know what it is like to have a high-status job and not very much money, I know that a life in universities is a life of service to a greater good without immediate personal reward, I know how lucky I am. I know what it looks like when someone has a vocation. It is hard, then, to admit, when one looks at who one is and what one wants, that one might imagine a career for oneself that doesn’t look exactly like that of one’s parents and one’s other teachers. One might have implausibly high aspirations in some areas, and more modest ones in others. And one might have to confess to oneself—this is truly difficult to write—that, knowing that the career only gets more difficult after the cushy Ivy League PhD, one craves a life of greater comfort, of greater space to think and to breathe and to love, than most academic jobs can provide. If teaching, and trying to make one’s institution run a bit better for everyone, is the tradeoff for summers of quiet, of ideas, of getting to know oneself and days spent in libraries or walking across southeast England not speaking to anyone, well—that’s probably the best tradeoff there is, at least as far as I’m concerned. But could I lose the summers? I suppose at some point I’ll have to, because probability suggests that one can’t sustain such a life of extraordinary good fortune as I have had for long. But at least I can admit to myself that I am fallen enough to need the summers—more, perhaps, than I need the classroom or my colleagues—in order to feel that life is worth living and that I am capable of doing good. For in the summers I am able to access a world in which I do not have to struggle—against intellectual history bros, against bureaucracy, against dogmatic leftists, against insecurity, against self-hatred, against dirty and crass Manhattan—and I am able to be at peace. How to do good and help others while maintaining that peace is, of course, the question yet to come. But today I am grateful not to have to set foot in the department for three months, and to have the gift of writing.

A sermon and a pep talk for the morning of Wednesday of 13th week

With tomorrow’s lesson on James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time in my head, Will Pooley’s evocative blog post as my text, and two more weeks of this crazy semester to go.

There is far to much anxiety and negativity among the apprentices in my trade, and it has an extraordinary capacity to feed off itself and grow.

People who know me well know that I am so anxious, that I am too quick to let my academic work define my self-worth, that I can so easily come up with excuses to hate myself for not working hard enough. I have been lying awake at night the last few weeks worrying because in mid-May I know I am going to hand in a term paper—my last term paper—that will fall short of the highest intellectual standard of which I am capable. But the reason I know I am going to do that is because the term paper actually isn’t important and I actually don’t care.

Instead it is important that the sun is shining and the weather is warmer; that I have wonderful students whom I am teaching an interesting book this week; that I have a roof over my head and a salary that allows me to live comfortably, to eat well, to give to charity, to travel; that I am going to the UK in just six weeks; that my house will be filled with old friends this weekend; that, no matter what happens on the job market in four or five years, I have so many structural advantages that I will have no difficulty landing on my feet in some sort of middle-class, professional employment that uses my skills.

There are things that one can do to make oneself a stronger candidate for an academic job: other competitions (for grants, for publications) that one can practice winning, hours that one can put in on one’s intellectual work as well as the other aspects of being a professional university teacher. There are also structural inequalities that make some people more likely to get academic jobs than others. I am sure I will carry to my grave the shame and sadness that by virtue of being born into an academic family (though not, it must be said, a particularly wealthy or elite one) and by virtue of the extraordinary post-secondary educational opportunities I have had, I have a greater chance at success than some. But I think there are ways to work constructively around that unavoidable problem: to do one’s duty, to be a responsible and hardworking holder of that place that one didn’t deserve, and to make at least modest efforts towards widening access for those who will come after.

I also think—and I know that I have said this to many of you—that there are countless ways in which all of us who are engaged in pursuing a fully-funded PhD at a top program are extraordinarily, jaw-droppingly lucky. I kind of cannot believe how extraordinary it is that I live in New York, that I make a decent living, that I get to teach bright, fun students, that I have access to such good library and information technology resources, that I live a life where going to Europe every summer is normal. I also, sometimes, get to think and to write, and despite how hard it is to be clever enough, I think I want to keep thinking and writing for a long time to come. I think I will be doing this even if I am not paid to do it, because I have been doing it all my life thus far, and in any case if I am fortunate enough to obtain an academic job what I will be paid to do is to instruct the young, anyway.

Will Pooley’s advice is right: we have to stop behaving as if our advisors are monstrous parental figures of one’s worst psychoanalytic nightmare, sitting in judgment on us. We have to have the confidence to live into being the scholars and teachers that we want to be, even if our efforts don’t have immediate external reward. We have to do the work that we are willing and able to do, and not the work that we are not. And we have to accept that all this may not be enough, or the right sort of thing, to get us the Oxbridge JRF or its moral equivalent—but if not, we have accrued a breathtaking quantity of advantages that others in the US or in our home countries do not have. We will be. just. fine.

What we need to do is to ensure we are advocating for our colleagues around the world who are not making a middle-class salary, to dispense the one good piece of advice—that in this day and age it is not worthwhile to do a PhD unless you are fully funded—to give other such pep talks where they are needed, to ourselves as much as others; and also to remember that the poor are always with us—that there are many in this country and around the world who do need our material and spiritual help, that we need to think about how we as humanities academics can find our ways of being a voice for the voiceless, whether as activists or, for those who do not feel called that way, as teachers of the western humanities tradition or other traditions, or simply with our financial donations or volunteering time.

For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required.

Some Things I Wish I Could Have Said in a Meeting Today; or, An Agnostic’s Sermon for Good Friday

It is Friday of 9th week (there are 16 weeks in our term), and I am exceedingly tired.

There are lots of ways that I could feel inadequate as a teacher, student, and colleague right now, and lots of things I have to do. But I cannot be strong and organized and involved every day, and right now I am going to do things for myself: make a pie, listen to Bach, start playing cut and paste on the bedroom floor while beginning a new manuscript (a dissertation chapter, even?).

My values—the things that make me feel whole and purposeful—may not be your values. In some ways it is unfortunate that the things that keep me going were forged in a childhood of suburban middle-class academic-brat privilege and a higher education at two of the more conservative and traditional elite universities in the Anglo world. It makes me sad, often, that this is the person that I am: that I am enough of a lily-livered liberal to identify as much with university faculty and administrators (the people who made me) than with the proletariat with which, as a graduate student, I am meant to identify.

In the past few weeks my teaching in American intellectual history has introduced my students to a range of topics—old topics, from Europe, rooted in the things I see when I look at the nineteenth century as a scholar. We’ve covered notions of democratic culture and education; we’ve covered Marx and marxisms; through quotation and paraphrase in twentieth-century American texts, some students heard about the Sermon on the Mount for the first time. I’ve done more talking in section than I would like the past few weeks, and I’ve not always been as flexible as I ought in indulging students’ desires to relate these texts to their present of racial, class, and regional conflict instead of to the past which I arguably too readily inhabit. But I left the present long ago, when I decided not to do another Washington internship or organize another LGBT protest; when I took the political buttons off my jacket and my bag.

It is so hard to put into words to those who weren’t there where I’ve come from: so hard to explain that the political resolve and personal self-confidence I needed to survive suburban San Diego in the years after 9/11 have transmuted into something quite different after eight years of higher education, a couple continents’ worth of passport stamps, hundreds of new friends, colleagues and acquaintances with radically different life experiences to my own. The farther I go, the less who or what I would vote for in an election has to do with what makes life worth living. It takes all my strength to do my duty to my vocation, my profession, and my university and then with what I have left to seek out some connection to loved ones, to the earth, to something spiritually greater than myself, against all the stresses and hurts of this city. Those who weren’t there can’t know, I think, what it meant then, those three times I did it, to live in a community that observed the rhythms of Lent, Holy Week, and Easter. You don’t have to believe anything about what might or might not have happened to Jesus to be less satisfied, when you come to the metropolis, by something that is lost when life does not stop to take account of the slow unfolding bounty of spring—to feel unmoored, to feel as if you have lost some assurances of what would constitute a good or moral life and how you might go about deciding it. As I said when I left Oxford (knowing I had made the right decision), there is something gravely perverted about philosophy that needs to posit the cocoon of high table and evensong and eight-week terms in order to evaluate ethical questions. But now there is something fantastically seductive in the knowledge that, 3,500 miles away, there is a paradise that for almost eight hundred years has existed with the stated purpose of learning with the intention of glorifying God. What I have found—as shameful as this may be—is that it is difficult to remain a committed American leftist when you know that such a place exists.

I think what I wind up concluding is that if we are to believe in self-care, in the dignity of work, in the place of universities and university teachers in modern Western intellectual and cultural life, that needs to encompass the possibility that university teachers will tell themselves a wide variety of stories in order to explain to themselves why they have taken on a job that has always been difficult, has always required some sacrifice of material comfort, less freedom than we might wish, and, of course, the constant presence of the young, which is both a delight and (particularly when they have midnight frat parties across the street from you) a burden. To survive Columbia, I tell myself a story that comes from Oxford and Princeton, from Arthur Sidgwick, Rose Sidgwick, Benjamin Jowett, T.H. Green, my teachers, my parents. My story is different to the ones my own teachers tell. It is very different to the ones my leftist colleagues tell. Maybe if I am fortunate enough to teach in a university for the next forty years, it will be rewritten over and over again.

I don’t wish to suggest that anyone else should adopt my story, my perspective. Sometimes I look someone in the eye and know that they understand what I mean when I say that it is my duty to serve the past, my students, my university, my professional community. More often than not, I realize that this perspective rests on having had what for me is the great fortune to have been raised with these values, and that what to me is the ultimate reason to carry on is to others simply a statement of their relative lack of advantages and opportunities. My perspective isn’t one about which it is possible to evangelize. But if I am to carry on in this line of work and way of life, I do think it is necessary to explain that it is as radical a statement against the neoliberalization of the university, or what have you, as any invocation of a class struggle.

This is a sermon for Good Friday because, this Easter weekend, many Christian faith leaders have said and will say something or other about the radicalism of Jesus’s message. I am sympathetic to the reading that (according to the story which may or may not have actually happened) Jesus died at the hands of an imperial authority and its collaborators because he spoke truth to power in a way that was seen as threatening to the stability of the regime. That that regime came ultimately to adopt some of the tenets of the faith his followers founded, that today in Manhattan people say together words that people in the Roman Empire were saying together almost a thousand years ago, is a jaw-dropping world-historical narrative, at which I think historians of all faiths and none ought to be astounded. But it’s also a story which is not completely assimilable to a narrative of anti-imperialism, struggles for social justice, organizing around political causes. Those who attended a Maundy Thursday service yesterday celebrated the night that Jesus, knowing that he was to be arrested for his sedition and immediately undergo an excruciating death, chose to observe the Passover seder with his closest friends (a group which, many scholars believe, included more women than the European Christian tradition has typically recognized) and to celebrate his love for and communion with them.

A couple weeks ago, I attended a spiritual retreat day in the Ignatian prayer tradition: looking for peace and space away from the city, and curious to learn more about a spiritual practice I had read about. In one exercise, we were asked to imagine ourselves as guests at the Last Supper. Reader, I don’t know what I think about Jesus or the Last Supper or his martyrdom or what he stands for, but I have been to many Passover seders. An image came into my head of Jesus saying the Hebrew blessing over the wine, and I burst into tears. That image left me emotionally raw for the rest of the weekend. At the time I was bewildered, but now, reflecting on it, I think I know why. The story is that Jesus was a brave, loving, charismatic figure who convinced many to follow him and who died for a cause of justice and equality—particularly for the poor—for which millions are still fighting. But it is also that, on the night before he was betrayed, Jesus not only sat at supper with his friends: he sat at supper in the observance of a holy ritual that, by then, his people had already been observing for centuries: a feast of thanksgiving for God’s deliverance, but also a set of customs rich in ritual meanings, conducted in a specific order, that are done simply because they must be done.

Even in the face of the greatest challenges for ourselves as workers, as Americans, as fellow humans, then, there is a place for the past, for tradition, for awareness of ourselves as belonging to a longer and grander human story. We might admire those who can both expel the money-changers from the Temple and preside over the ritual of a religious festival, but we can’t all be Jesus. But we can keep working as we are moved to work, keep loving as we are moved to love, and respect the most honest and heartfelt convictions of others as to what will build a better world as well as heal their own hurts and anxieties.