Tag: Academia

how long is too long?

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I’m trying to finish up an article. I’ve been working with this text for most of the past four years (it’s one of four with which I am now familiar to the point of insanity). Writing it has now become, “Author X, yadda yadda yadda, blah, come on everyone knows this already, don’t they?”

I think I’m going to have to stick a poster up on the wall that reminds me that no, everyone has not been deconstructing this particular text for the past four years – in fact, most of them have been avoiding it since their Latin 101 course.  It’s just me who thinks this particular hat is older than my old school boater.

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: Academia
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paper writing…

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So, I’ve moved. I now live just outside Geneva (on the edge of Cologny, a ridiculously swish suburb overlooking the lake) at a research institute which has very generously given me an early career scholarship to be here for two months. I get an en-suite room and full board in a mansion (seriously) that has a view of Mont Blanc from the garden and a galleried library in what I think is the old stable block (or a Very Grand summerhouse). It’s nice not to be living in a city any more, despite the fact that it’s going to be more inconvenient if I do suddenly need something although there is (as I think is mandatory in places where people have more money than sense) an American Food Shop in Cologny, which also sells English stuff – so if I get a craving for kettle chips and marmite, I’m all set. It’s also nice to be working on something new for a change. My Sallust article is making its way round my lovely friends for comment before I send it higher up the academic chain, and I’m quickly knocking out a paper for a workshop I’m going to in Newcastle in May before getting down to the article I’m going to write on Pompeius’ eastern commands. And I am actually going quickly. It’s great. And it’s not like there’s no distractions out here – I mean, I still have the internet 24-7, and there’s actually people to talk with – my French comprehension is getting a good work-out – plus, I’m still working on stuff related to my doctorate, so there’s still a large amount of over-familiarity with the  material and copy-and-pasting-and-editing going on.  But it’s a different topic – hurrah! And it’s for a presented paper rather than a publishable article, which is making a difference to how I write – I don’t have to worry so much about being a little colloquial and so on, because I get to speak, and it’s a small workshop so I’m feeling less pressure on it than on my first article, and also, I get to do something I’ve been wanting to do in an academic environment for a while, which is to start to think about why Classics/Ancient History and Political Thought is useful nowadays by looking at comparing Cicero’s rhetoric to some of the political rhetoric being flung around now (yes, yes, I am looking to get academic credit for being snarky about Sarah Palin… but also some other things, I hope).   Anyway I’ve been at it for two days, and I have 4,500 words. Which needs to become 3-3500 words, so off I go to do some more editing.    For the bizarrely-over interested (or googling Classics departments… you never do know), this is the abstract.  Read more...

: Academia
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Not in Kansas Anymore

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Yesterday I finally met my new supervisor and got introduced to the department by some of his students. Yay for people to talk to who aren’t inside my head!

New boss-man is vaguely suggestive of portly series one Blackadder, but with more brains. He is very busy and likes to refer to himself as Francis Cornford’s Young Man in a Hurry. Who I now have to google. This means I won’t really have to talk work to him for amonth, which is good as it gives me time to do some. He also wants us to only speak German from December. Man the panic stations.

So I now have a desk to work at in the department library in the Philogium (which, btw, is an arcitectural gem featuring permanently broken escalators rising up its core). However, the library doesn’t open till 10am. Which I failed to check because I am so used to the libraries I use opening at 8.30 or being locked with keys of which I possess a copy. So instead of writing job applications/reading Sallust/doing German prep, I’m in the cafe drinking some truly awful espresso, spinning out my time online.

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: Academia,Life in Koeln
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From the THES…

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“American academics attend conferences in best bib and tucker, they are on time, they ask intelligent questions, they are polite, they have beautiful teeth and they are disappointingly sober. Now, all this could be construed as professionalism – particularly when compared with the drunken, late-night antics of the flip-flop-wearing, unshaven and almost always sunburnt Limeys whose most pressing questions are “where’s the bar?” and “does anyone remember my room number?” – but, I assure you, it is arrogance. Make no mistake: their reverence for the subject, thoroughgoing knowledge of its intricacies, prolific capacities to produce research of the highest standard … what unspeakable arrogance!”

(“Arrogance” by Peter J. Smith)

It is particularly true of the postgraduates… Though in their case it is probably more out of fear than out of arrogance. What that says about the character of their professors…

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: Academia
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I be Done.

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So, I finished my PhD thesis. Three weeks ago now, actually. It’s deeply odd – especially now I’ve stopped being quite so maniacally busy and actually get to sleep in and do nothing in the mornings. I’m trying really hard not to get lazy, but to get up and do stuff – even if it’s only reading through the really large pile of novels I want to read out in the garden with a pot of coffee.

I think I’m happy with it, the thesis I mean. It’s not quite the thesis I wanted to have written, I think; and it’s certainly not the thesis I proposed to write four years ago (which was going to cover constitutional evolution from Sulla downwards, in 80,000 words. ahahahahaa), but I think it should pass, and I’m mostly proud of it. I could have spent another month or two refining it, but you know what – I would have gone stark staring bonkers. So I let it go. I think by the time I viva I’ll be ready to go back in and really shiny it up. I *am* proud of the theory and I’m 99.99% sure it works – it’s just the expressing it in the discussion of the texts where the problems come, because there are two major-very-interlinking strands, and it all gets a bit complicated writing-wise.  Read more...

: Academia,Musings
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Woe is Me

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I am having a rubbish day. Pah. Rationally I know that I have three weeks left and that it will all be ok as long as I don’t just go to the Edinburgh Festivals for the next three weeks (let’s not talk about how tempting that is, ok). But it has been a fairly rubbish thesising afternoon. So I’m giving up till Monday.

The morning was ok. Yes tired and headachey and grouchy about working on Saturday morning (and can I please not get sick now, k. No being ill for the next three weeks), but I got through the revision of the Cicero chapter and I think the argument now works. I hope. Then I sent the thesis off to the secondary supervisor to give him enough time to get his comments back and do something with them (a bit of me thinks that still won’t happen) – and off course now I am absolutely bricking it. He’s not read anything of mine in ten months, and I’m not convinced he knows what my thesis is trying to be about any more. So it’s effectively a test run for my examiners looking at it, and OMG what if he hates it? So, mildly panicking, and I’ll probably reach the point of hiding under my desk when I next get an email from him.  Read more...

: Academia,Musings
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The Thesis is Being Edited.

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Nearly there. Only about five or six weeks to go. In fact, I shall be on a train to Cologne in exactly two months time, so it’d damn well better be done in five or six weeks!

No, it will be – I have a full draft, bar the conclusion, which I am going to construct once I have finished this particular once-over of the full draft – this being the once-over that tries to make the argument cohere across 70000 words of thesis. This is a particularly bitch-laden processes, as I attempt to work out if I am, in the core of the thesis, in fact arguing what I have said in my introduction that I will be arguing. I *think* I am – or at least, I’m getting there, shaping and pruning and signposting, and anyone who says that writing history isn’t subjective or guided by ideas about narrative is a Big Fat Liar who has clearly never written a doctoral thesis.

I am currently working stupid hours in the office, getting sore elbows leaning on the desk, trying to plug my way through it. I am pretty soon going to be on 12 hour days, just to allow me enough procrastination and donut eating time. In order to make life easier I have ordered the new laptop I was going to need before going to Cologne in advance, as mine is off to the wacky races pretty much. Also the excitment of NEW TOY! should be good to get me typing away like a fiend for at least three days. I am also listening to all the BBC Proms to keep me company, which, yay for listen again.  Read more...

: Academia
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career re-think

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I have signally failed to land any of the year-long overseas fellowships for next year. Now I have no clue what I’m going to be doing next academic year, especially since I have no desire to take up a teaching monkey fellowship for the year, even if I could get one.
The research grant runs out in September, and I need to not live in St Andrews next year if I’m not to go clinically insane, although if I *did* stay, there’d be a bunch of undergraduate tutorials available, since half the department seems to be going on research leave, and all the PGs are wrapping up.
I’m also not entirely sure that I want to stay in academia either – and the conference I’m just back from didn’t do anything to erase that feeling.

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
I’m going home to Cornwall tomorrow to pretend the world doesn’t exist.

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: Academia
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help!

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I have just written the following sentence: “The form of the Philippics both dictates and encourages the the rhetorical creation of such a semantic vacuum.”

Clearly I need saving from myself.

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: Academia
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