Historiann

A frightful story from the Historiann.com mailbag!  Readers, get ready for a shock:

At a ( very small, international humanities) conference recently, I was in the audience at a panel on my research interests, and I was aghast to hear the panel organizer deliver a paper that appeared to be directly lifted from a journal article I published nearly two years ago.  The author of the paper mentioned my book, but never referenced the article I wrote on the very same highly specific topic with the same highly specific argument that she presented in the first half of her conference paper.  (And yes, I’m pretty sure she saw me sitting there in the audience!)  The second part of her paper brought in another case study that I haven’t written about, but she again used the same argument to frame that evidence.

I wasn’t sure what the appropriate response would have been, so I remained silent.  Did I do the right thing?  How does one respond when one’s work is being plagiarized in real time before one’s eyes?  What does your vast and learned audience think I should have done in this case?

I should add, the person who “borrowed” my work was in correspondence with me about this very subject three years ago and knew I was working on it, although my work was published before anything of hers was, and in a prominent journal.  Furthermore, my article won a prize.  She is basically a peer, although she is not tenured at her institution and she is not hugely influential in her field.  We both have published books, and I am tenured.

I am considering writing her an e-mail to let her know that I recognized my work in her paper without being necessarily confrontational.  What can I do at this point? 

Gentle readers, has this ever happened to you?  How did you handle the situation?  (Please tell me that cheaters never prosper!)  I guess my main question is, given that both of the above scholars have encountered each other before at this same very small, international conference in a very specific field in the humanities, what kind of idiot would try to steal Wendy’s research in public like that?  Even if Wendy didn’t attend the conference this year, other scholars in their very small field would probably have noticed this scholarly faux pas too.  What should Wendy do now?

26 Comments »

I’m leaving the country–and rest assured, it has nothing to do with the election results!  I’m slipping over the border on a top-secret mission to a walled city in l’Amerique Septentrionale, and will return this weekend.  Play nice.  No gloating if your candidates won, and no whining if your candidates lost.  (Well, not too much, anyway.)  Nous sommes tous Americains Septentrionales!

9 Comments »

Do you still have your old 45 of this one?

A few weeks ago, I posted a question from Busted Barry in Bakersfield about whether to announce in his job application letter that he had no plans to go to the American Historical Association’s annual conference, which traditionally hosts screening interviews for faculty job aspirants.  A telephone interview would be the obvious substitute, so the question for today, dear readers, is:  are phone interviews an adequate substitute for in-person interviews at large conventions like the AHA or the Modern Language Association?

My sense is that telephone interviews are inferior to the real thing, because no department I’ve ever been a part of has brought someone who had a telephone interview to campus as a job finalist when we also conducted conference interviews.  That may be because the people at the conference were truly the best candidates, but I wonder if the disembodied voice over the speakerphone just doesn’t establish one’s energy or presence in the same way that in-person interviews can.  But, Commenter JJO disagreed (somewhat), offered some good advice, and raised an interesting point in his comment on the Busted Barry post given the price of jet fuel these days:

[M]any departments might be looking to save money by finding alternative interview arrangements this year.

I’ve had both good and bad experiences on the interviewee end of phone interviews (be very upfront if you can’t hear everyone or need something repeated or clarified — I know from experience that faking it doesn’t work well; the confusion comes through). But in my department we’ve had excellent luck bringing people in through phone interviews and videoconferencing (usually for postdoctoral positions; we still do AHA for tenure-track jobs, but the positive experiences we’ve had in these other formats might actually change that, particularly given the funding cuts that are already being implemented.)

I think JJO makes great points, but I’d suggest that parity is perhaps the key here:  if some people get in-person convention interviews, and other people get phone or videoconference interviews, then inequitable treatment may be the result.  But, if everyone gets a phone interview or a videoconference interview, that would seem to level the playing field, provided that you have no candidates with hearing loss or other disabilities that might make telecommunications difficult.

So, dear readers, what do you think?  Are phone interviews an acceptable substitute, or do they doom candidates?  Have you heard of any moves afoot in your college or university to go the telephone or videoconference route in these hard times?

14 Comments »

Prince...Diana Prince

Just go read GayProf’s musings on academic conference sex:  the pros and (mostly) cons.  I must be the most clueless person in the world, but I have never been aware of anything like this happening at a conference.  I mean no offense, but honestly, the only thing less appetizing than contemplating the boot-knocking that might be happening at an academic conference is knocking boots at an academic conference.  (Click here–you can always say you visited for the Wonder Woman photos.)

6 Comments »

UPDATED BELOW

We get letters about all kinds of strange and remarkable providences here at Historiann HQ:  guarantees for the biggest “male package” are popular, as are letters from a Nigerian prince in exile with eccentric syntax who brings the wonderful news that we can share in his inheritance if only…well, you get the picture.

Today’s letter comes from Barry in Bakersfield, who’s teaching in a thankless term position that pays a part-time salary for a full-time (4-4) load.  He writes,

Please ask your readers what they think about my choice to wrap up my job letter with the following: “At present, I do not plan to attend the AHA convention; to be frank, I do not believe I can afford to do so on my current salary.” I follow it up with a suggestion for an alternative interview possibility, then a normal “closing” section. Am I shooting myself in the foot?  Do you think phone interviews are an advantage or a disadvantage?

As you historians know, the American Historical Association’s annual conference this year is in New York–a cross-country trip for Barry.  That’s quite a trip, with jet fuel going for what it does these days.  There are other reasons why some of you might want to avoid the whole convention interview scene–perhaps you’re only applying to a select few jobs, or perhaps you’re applying to an institution that’s local, so it seems wasteful of time, money, and petroleum to fly to another city for a 30-minute interview.  (Well, quite frankly, it is wasteful.  Convention interviews make sense only if you’ve got several lined up.)

My instinct is for Barry say nothing in his letter unless and until he hears from the search committee that they want to meet with him.  Up to that point, when you’re just a CV and a letter of application, the only thing you want to stand out in people’s minds is your awesome qualifications, extensive and impressive publications, and your deep and meaningful commitment to teaching–not your assessment of your personal bank balance.  Search committee members may be inclined to think, “well pal, everybody else is doin’ it, including unemployed ABDs, so cry me a river.”

If you hear from the search committee, you might propose a phone interview or local interview then, but I’ve never seen someone for whom we did phone interviews make it onto our list of finalists.  (I know of one instance when a locally-arranged screening interview yielded an invitation for an all-day on-campus interview, but in the end, no job offer.  Sample size N=1 here, so I don’t think we can draw any conclusions yet.)  My guess is that it’s better to advance through the interview process along with all of the other candidates.  If they’re setting this job up to have screening interviews at the AHA convention, then that’s their vision for how the process will work.  If that’s impossible, and you get the sense that the search committee is interested in you and willing to accomodate you, then an in-person interview would be better than a phone interview. 

Et vous, cher Readers?  Barry’s application is due any time now!  Most of you urged caution for Tenured Tammy last month, and talked me out of my advice to Tammy urging total honesty.  What do you think Barry should do?

UPDATE, 10/17/08:  Barry wrote me this morning to say the following:  “I was totally persuaded that I shouldn’t mention either my finances or my plans not to attend the convention.  I just wrapped up by saying ‘I hope to hear from you as you work your way through the search process.’  Totally bland and non-commital–let them be interested in me before even worrying about the next step of the process.”  Well done, readers!  Thanks for steering Barry to a happy resolution of his question.

13 Comments »

Famille Historiann is off on a working mini-break to Tucson, for the annual meeting of the Front Range Early American Consortium at the University of Arizona.  (Teh Srsly Awesumm Greatest Depression Evah may mean that this is our last trip for a while–so let up, OK?)  The FREAC as it is affectionately known is one of those regional gems with a very friendly and smart cast of regulars.  Many thanks to Jack Marietta for hosting us.

So, no posting this weekend–only rigorous interrogations of scholarship, while sitting by the pool drinking Cactus Blossom margaritas.  Historiann is taking ideas for an essay on “Gender and Sexuality in the North American Borderlands” out for a ride.  Giddyap!

UPDATE, 10/12/08:  Home again, and it’s 45 degrees F and damp in Potterville!  Those 90-degree days around the pool sure felt good.  Oh, and the conference was great, too–I learned a lot, and where else can one tell stupid jokes about Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine?  (I mean, who else would appreciate them?  Thanks, FREACs!  See you in Boulder next year.)

2 Comments »

More than one person has googled that question in the past few weeks, and it led those people to Historiann.com.  In the spirit of service to all humankind that is Historiann’s raison d’être, let’s give the people what they want, shall we?

• WHEN:  Sometime in June 2011.  The date will be announced probably sometime later next fall or winter.
• WHERE:  Undecided, although the consensus at the business meeting on Sunday morning three weeks ago was that it probably should move to the east again, after California in 2005 and Minnesota last weekend.  My prediction is that it will be held in a central portion of a state that begins with “M,” although another great idea was to hold it in a major city that has the first initial ”P.”
• These decisions are the major order of business for the Little Berks meeting, October 3-5, at Interlaken, Connecticut.  Anyone is free to attend–show up and lobby for your favorite east coast location!  (Bonus points for being willing to host the conference at your university!)  Ordinarily, the Little Berks meeting is in the spring, except in years when we’ve had a Big Berks meeting, and then it’s in the fall.  (Please review Tenured Radical’s definitions and explanations of the Little Berks and the Big Berks, if you’re unclear on the distinctions.)
• TIME LINE:  Please review the letter posted at Blogenspiel last month–that’s about what our timeline was for the 2008 conference.  Please note that proposals will probably be DUE IN WINTER 2010, just eighteen months from now, and about eighteen months ahead of the next conference.  (We’re an all-volunteer organization, without the paid staff like the AHA and OAH have to put on our massive conference, with 1,100+ people on the program.  Automating our applications with a web submissions system helped make it easier to circulate proposals to our sub-committee members, but didn’t save us enough time to move the deadline for proposals back.  So much work for the program happened throughout last summer after our Program Committee meeting, and I can’t imagine having to teach while managing all of the details about panels falling apart and other sesions still being assembled!)
• In the end, however the 2011 Program Committee co-Chairs are sovereign, so they’ll set their own deadlines.  You can look here for more information about the 2011 conference as it becomes available.

2 Comments »

As we here in Potterville pull on our boots and get ready for the big rodeo and ”western celebration” coming to town, I’m happy to report that a few of you are getting out of your towns to attend conferences and conduct some research.  Here are some interesting museums featured on a few blogs I read regularly:

• Anxious Black Woman is just back from the National Women’s Studies Association annual meeting in Cincinnati, and gives us a great report on the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, a new museum there.  I’m particularly grateful for her review, because Historiann lived in southwestern Ohio when this museum was being planned a decade ago, and she was a little skeptical of the concept.  (White people in and around Cincinnati are really into the Underground Railroad, and every little town has at least two or three mythological sites or houses that people commemorate as alleged stops on the UGRR.  Historiann was always suspicious that this was a means for white people to re-write the history of slavery and to cast their ancestors in heroic roles as slavery resisters, rather than in the much more likely role of slavery enablers, especially because African Americans were enslaved in southwestern Ohio, contrary to the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.  I lived in a town near the Ohio-Indiana border I’ll call “Boxford,” which likes to pretend that its proximity to the authentic Quaker town of Richmond, Indiana somehow retroactively turns all nineteenth-century Boxfordians into abolitionists.)  ABW’s verdict on the museum?  Disappointing in its interest more in masters than enslaved people and in its erasure of women, although the introductory movie was good.  (But go read her more thorough treatment yourself!)  The good news is that the NWSA itself was a great experience–I’m envious that I wasn’t there!
• If your summer travel plans take you to Cincinnati, the Cincinnati area has all kinds of new museums–for example, the Creation Museum of Hebron, Kentucky, just a few exits down the road from the Cincinnati airport, is another museum that was just under construction when Historiann lived nearby.  It’s a creationist extravaganza of imaginary natural history–tell them Bing McGhandi sent you!  Here’s a reality-based review of the CM.
• Professor Zero is in Lima (Peru, not Ohio!), and went to the Museo de Pedro Osma, which sounds like an interesting palace filled with colonial as well as twentieth-century art.
• Do any of you have recommendations for interesting fine arts, history, or other museums in your home towns (or that you’ve encountered on your travels) for summer vacationers? 
• Finally, for those of you in the academy who are public historians, or work with public historians, what’s your sense of public history’s relationship to non-public history (frequently referred to somewhat condescendingly as “academic history,” as though public history is an inferior intellectual pursuit)?  My sense is that there used to be more conflict or resentment among “academic” historians, but that these distinctions (well, snobberies, actually) are fading.  Is Historiann (who is not a public Historiann) overly optimistic?

14 Comments »

The image at left is from our friends, the LOLcats.  Everyone needs a feminist cat buddy to keep your friends honest, right?

At the Berkshire Conference, everyone was given a name tag on a string by default, which seems to be the overwhelming preference of women scholars at any conference.  (We don’t wear jackets all the time any more, and certainly not at a summer conference, so tags on strings are so much more practical.)  The only thing is that everyone winds up scanning everyone else’s diaphragm-to-navel region, instead of the mid-chest region, when they’re working the room.

Maybe conferences should just buy 1,500 or so Burger King crowns, and ask conference goers to write their names on the crowns with Sharpies.  That would lend an air prankish self-deprecation to the festivities.  How seriously could Professor Famousname take herself when delivering a paper while wearing a cardboard crown?  (Which eminent scholar would you like to see dressed like she had just hosted a birthday party at Burger King for seven year-olds?  Don’t forget the cheezburgers!)

12 Comments »

As in other history subfields, there is a great deal of contemporary interest in biography among women’s historians.  At the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women this year, we have two panels, a workshop, and a seminar on women’s biography and feminist autobiography, with a total of 32 scholars presenting their work or commenting on the proceedings (program available here).  When we announced that a seminar on women’s history and biography would be led by Judith Zinsser, co-author (with Bonnie Anderson) of the two-volume foundational work in European women’s history, A History of Their Own (1988, rev. 2000), and most recently the author of La Dame d’Esprit:  A Biography of the Marquise du Chatelet (Viking/Penguin, 2006), we were deluged with applications.  So, clearly biography is hot, and I expect that these sessions will attract throngs of other women’s historians who are working on biographies of their own.

But, are women’s history and biography compatable genres?  After all, biography is a genre of history that argues implicitly, if not explicitly, that men of action and vision are the great actors on history’s stage.  (See for example this thread over at Edge of the American West asking for names of heretofore obscure people who have changed American history.  When Historiann wrote in with women’s names, her suggestions were greeted by…a chorus of chirping crickets!  There were other women’s names tossed in later, but all of them–Lucy Stone, Margaret Sanger, Rachel Carson, the Grimke sisters–have had at least one biographer, and their places are assured in the women’s history cannon.)  So historians, who are prisoners of the text anyway, end up writing biographies of elite men who enjoyed the privilege of literacy, the time to record their thoughts in journals and letters, and the means to ensure that their papers didn’t end up lining shoes or at the bottom of a privy after their deaths.  (This is especially true of biographies of people who lived before 1800, when the politics of American literacy guaranteed that very few female, brown, and/or working-class people had either the education or the time for writing.) 

Zinsser is a pathbreaking scholar who has written frankly and compellingly about the challenges of feminist biography, and how the subjectivity of the author and her times inevitably and unavoidably influence her scholarship.  She was a guest blogger over at the Penguin Group blog last month–click here to read her reflections on her life and the life of Emilie du Chatelet, the great mathematician, Enlightenment salonniere, and the translator of the authoritative French version of Newton’s Principia.  (Zinsser’s book is now available in paperback as Emilie du Chatelet:  Daring Genius of the Enlightenment, shown here.)  Let us–Judith Zinsser and Historiann–know what you think in the comments.  Does women’s history demand a reconceptualization of biography?  Is there a difference between feminist biography and women’s biography?  What are some of the best women’s biographies that you have read, and why do you think they were successful?  If you are contemplating or writing a biography of a woman now, what are your challenges?  How do literacy politics and power play into the period and region of the world you work in, and how do they shape your agenda as a scholar?

15 Comments »