Historiann

Last night at the University of Northern Colorado, I attended a screening of The Line,a film by Nancy Schwartzman about rape and the line of consensual versus nonconsensual sex.  In it, she tells the story of her rape several years ago by a man she had gone to bed with–a fact that attorneys and anti-rape advocates explain would have made her case very difficult, if not impossible, to prosecute.  She had engaged in consensual sex–but she did not consent to anal rape, and she cried and screamed throughout the attack.  The climax of the film is an interview with her rapist recorded via a hidden camera–his face is obscured, but it’s fascinating to watch him squirm and writhe and desperately trying to convince her that everything that happened that night was consensual, and that they had “hot sex.”

The part of the film I found most disturbing was when Schwartzman told her friends what happened–and her friends told her that it happens to everyone.  What else did she expect?  That’s just the way it is, and she really should get over it because that’s how it happens sometimes.  After all, she consented to some sex acts.  In other words, they told her that rape is clearly on the continuum of how heterosexuality operates.  They read her actions as complicit with the rapist–whereas there was never any ambiguity for Schwartzman.  As she related in the Q and A session after the movie, she cried and screamed and repeatedly begged the rapist to stop during the rape, and then went home and wrote in her journal “I was raped last night.”  When even her friends told her that what had happened to her wasn’t rape, she bottled it up and tried to forget it. Continue Reading »

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An anonymous correspondent wrote in last week:

I had an experience the other day which I’m still puzzling over.  I serve on a major university committee, and I have known for some time that a colleague’s daughter is not at home, but in residential care in Big City more than a hundred miles away, and has been in and out of hospital.   The other day I asked how her daughter was doing, and she started talking.  It turns out her daughter’s problems (and a suicide attempt) are related to two rapes in school, which the young woman didn’t tell anyone about until recently.  Suddenly my colleague stopped, and said  “I’ve just told you more than I’ve told anyone else, and more than I should have.”  It turns out they have been told that because of their daughter’s privacy rights they can’t talk about what is happening to her, so that (for instance) if I meet my colleague’s daughter some time down the road, I don’t look at her and say, “Oh, you’re the girl who was raped”.   From other things my colleague said, it sounds as if her town HS has a culture of athletic impunity – ie. The athletes can do whatever they want. 

This exchange has troubled me as a feminist on multiple levels:  Continue Reading »

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Today we have in a letter from the mailbag at Historiann HQ some interesting questions about finding appropriate publication outlets for interdisciplinary work.  We all say we support interdisciplinarity and admire it–and yet, scholars whose work is truly interdisciplinary have a damnably hard time finding jobs and appropriate outlets for their publication.  Here, a young scholar wonders about the politics of attempting to publish an article in one field when she’ll one day be looking for a job in another discipline

Hi Historiann,

I’m a long time reader and lurker.  I’m a history grad student with one toe in [a Closely Related Discipline, or CRD for short].  I did an intensive study of an unpublished collection [in CRD], which my committee is suggesting I publish separately from the dissertation because it’s heavy on details appreciated more by practitioners of CRD than history, and because getting an article out in grad school looks good. 

The problem is, while “interdisciplinarity” is all the rage, I don’t know where to publish.  I wanted to throw this out to someone outside my department and committee, because they’re starting to sound like an echo chamber.  CRD journals seem like a good fit, but I’m worried that history department hiring committees won’t know what to make of an article that’s not published in a history journal.  What kind of audience should a first article be aimed at?  Do interdisciplinary journals really live up to their goals?  Would it be better to go with a full on CRD journal and hope some historians read it, or try to pitch it to a history journal with interdisciplinary aspirations?  How does one measure the “prestige” of the journal and their readership?  (This is something my committee keeps telling me to keep in mind, but I have no idea what it means!)  How does interdisciplinary work look to hiring committees?  Will publishing in a CRD journal mark me as a bad fit for a history department hire, even if I have history conference CV lines? 

Thanks for your help,

Interdisciplinary Eileen

Dear Eileen,

First of all, congratulations on having written something that your committee believes should be published.  That is quite an achievement for a graduate student, and you should feel proud of your committee’s confidence in your work.  Secondly, I think you’re worrying yourself unnecessarily about hypothetical problems.  Continue Reading »

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h/t GayProf at Center of Gravitas

Go read Squadratomagico’s post from last night, “A Rant about Entitled Slackers.”  (After Radio Silence, three posts in three days!)  She also has a nice memorial to Alexander McQueen, who sadly was found dead at age 40 by his own hand in London this morning, just days after his mother’s death.  But–I digress.  Back to slackers.

The slacker-dude she writes about in part one of her post is such a familiar character.  (Aren’t they always the special pleaders?  Funny how they never seem to have an A- or B-average.)  That’s the kind of person who really pissed me off even as a student–because I thought that ze might be getting away with it!  It infuriated me that professors seemed so blithely clueless about the scam artists they were dealing with.  Were the honest plodders like me working too hard, when we could be on easy street?  It just didn’t seem fair. 

Well, having made the leap to the other side of the lecture podium nearly 15 years ago, one of the most satisfying things I’ve learned as a Professor is Continue Reading »

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UPDATED BELOW

Yes, I know:  what a predictable headline.  But, it was irresistable!  Today’s blog post is a letter to all of the single college ladies, especially those of the heterosexualist persuasion.  Thanks to reader Indyanna and Tenured Radical for alerting me to this, and asking me to weigh in!

Dear undergraduate women,

You may have heard all of the buzz about the “new math” on college campuses where women undergraduates outnumber the men.  I’m here to tell you that this is a manufactured “problem.”  I went to a women’s college, where undergraduate men were outnumbered by 100%.  Even if you include the co-ed college with which we had a cooperative relationship, the numbers were approximately 70 to 75 percent women to 30 or 25 percent men.  And yet, this “imbalance” rarely came up as a topic of conversation.  There were women who always had boyfriends.  There were a lot of women who had girlfriends.  (Some had both boyfriends and girlfriends.)  And yet, most people–male and female alike, bi and gay as well as straight–were unattached:  interested in romance, but more interested in the other things that we did in college.  Some of those things were intellectual–but only some were.  Other things were artistic and creative, others were journalistic or political, and of course, a lot were just plain silly.  (For example:  menthol cigarettes, diet Dr. Pepper mixed with rum, streaking on the green or skinny dipping in the tiny fountain in the cloisters, and reading Walt Whitman and Radclyffe Hall, just to name a few examples.) Continue Reading »

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Hi, kids–I’m deep into a juicy new book in my field all day today and finishing prep for my seminar tomorrow, but if you’re looking for diversions, I’ve got a few for you:

• What if Holden Caufield grew up and turned into Howard Zinn?  Hilobrow gives us the hillarious results.  This is the smartest and funniest thing I’ve read all week on the deaths of both historian Zinn and creepy recluse J.D.Salinger on Wednesday.  Via Old is the New New.
• Dopey Educrat Arne Duncan says about New Orleans:  ”we had to destroy the village to save the village.”  Now, all we need are 9,999 more hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes to take out the rest of school districts across the U.S.!  Never mind the loss of life–what about the children?  Hey, “progressives”:  how many of you would be jumping up and down and screaming if Margaret Spellings said “I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster, and it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that ‘we have to do better,’”  hmmm?  (How long do you think it will be before we start reading the “after a promising fresh start, New Orleans schools have underperformed since being rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina” stories?  Three years?  Five?)
• Here’s an idea:  how’sabout we find a U.S. Secretary of Education who has spent at least 10 years teaching in an elementary or high school classroom?  Continue Reading »

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A stranger's just a friend you haven't met!

Because of Homostorian Americanist’s recent correspondence with a silly high-schooler who was fishing for someone to do her homework, reader Nervous Ned writes in to ask, “ What is the appropriate way to contact another professional historian and ask hir to participate in a panel as a chair or commenter?”  This is a great question–it’s something that lots of us are doing these days, because of all of the calls for papers that emphasize transnational this and comparative that.  The odds are that crafting a panel these days will require reaching far beyond one’s sub-field.  Ned explains his problem:

I have been working with a couple of other people to assemble a comparative, modern history panel for the next American Historical Association annual meeting. Myself and another panelist are junior faculty at distinctly un-prestigious state schools. The third panelist is a grad student.  We did not personally know any prominent scholars with a reputation for working on [the nominal topic of the panel], so we decided to e-mail scholars whose work we admired and thought would be able to critique our papers. The Grad Student offered to email a couple people because she had met them tangentially at a conference. These did not pan out, so I emailed a scholar I admired who had written about [this field] in [my area of geographical expertise].  But after reading your post on student XXXX and hir insistent e-mail pestering I realized that we may have acted inappropriately, by emailing senior faculty and associate professors out of the blue.  

Is there a good way to go about talking to scholars you are not acquainted with and asking them to help you out with your panel or work, especially for someone like a grad student or junior faculty member who is not really well connected? More importantly, I have not heard from the person I emailed.  I probably should have worked the grapevine and gotten some sort of introduction, but its a little late now. Should I apologize? 

Signed, 

Nervous Ned 

Dear Ned, 

Apologize???  For doing your job and also helping to mentor a graduate student?  Continue Reading »

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I’m sure many of you get random e-mails from students in grades 5-12 asking you to enlighten them about a particular research topic.  These all have appeared to me to be fishing expeditions to see if I’ll do someone’s homework for hir.  (The “pilgrims” of Plymouth Plantation fame are big in the fall with elementary school students, and women’s history projects are popular in the winter and early spring with high school students, in my experience.)  Homostorian Americanist e-mailed me the following exchange from this weekend:

Hello,My name is XXXX XXXXXXX and I am a student at Redacted High School. I am doing a Project on Women’s Right’s / Women’s History, for National History Day. I saw that you teach a lot about Women’s History, and I was wondering if you could tell me anything you know about women in the U.S? How did women’s right’s come about?  Who was involved?  Were there any organizations for and/or against women’s rights? What is you opinion on women in politics today? Do you know anything about women’s rights in [my state]? Anything else would be very helpful.
Thank you for your time.
XXXX

Either the student wasn’t instructed properly how to ask more specific questions, or ze decided that ze didn’t need to make even a feint at asking for guidance in doing research, rather than filling in the blanks.  Homostorian Americanist and I disagree slightly:  ze thinks that secondary school teachers encourage students randomly to e-mail us, whereas I think that even if that’s the case, they get better coaching than this letter would indicate.  (Googling “expert in women’s rights/women’s history in [my state]” is as much research as this student did, I bet.)  As we all know, our students regularly fail to follow our carefully laid out, patiently and thoroughly explained instructions–we can’t blame the teacher for this.  (Probably.)

So, H.A. replied quite kindly: Continue Reading »

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Go read this post at Female Science Professor.  She writes:

Years ago, a friend of mine had a highly unsuccessful interview for a faculty position. According to the legend, the department chair, who had had the same adviser as the candidate, was upset that their mutual adviser had written in the reference letter that the candidate was the best graduate student he had ever advised. This was humiliating for the not-best professor and he did not support hiring the candidate.

Perhaps I am naive, but I don’t believe that the wounded ego of one professor would be enough to sink someone’s chances at a job if there weren’t other reasons for other faculty to not prefer this particular candidate. The reasons might be good ones or bad ones, but I think there must have been other reasons. I also think in this case that it was true that the candidate was indeed the best graduate student of that adviser; the years since the fateful interview have demonstrated this well.

It’s likely that the adviser sent the same letter to every institution to which the candidate applied and did not modify it out of consideration for his former student who was on the faculty at one of these places. Should the adviser have worded the letter in a different way for that particular institution? Or was he was correct to state his frank opinion, which was surely accurate and not a case in which every one of his students was the best?

We’re thick in the middle of hiring season–and by “we,” I mean not my department, but maybe some of you lucky duckies work in departments that have money to spend on recruiting a new colleague.  Some of you are or were recently on search committees, and have had the opportunity to read hundreds of letters from graduate advisors and colleagues recommending people for a job in your departments.  I think Female Science Professor is right–but I suspect that that fateful letter of recommendation for her friend might also have been a product of laziness and hyperbole, rather than an honest evaluation of the job candidate in question.  Continue Reading »

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Did anyone else hear this interview with Louis Menand on All Things Considered last night?  On the one hand, he gave some important context for understanding that the academic job crisis in the humanities is nothing new–like Historiann, he sees it as directly linked to the halt of the massive institutional expansion of higher education after the 1950s and 1960s.  But then he beats (once again!) on the dead horse of the years-to-degree for most humanities Ph.D.s, and says something astonishingly stupid:

[Prof. MENAND:]  The other piece of it, which is even more amazing to me, is that the time it takes to get the PhD has been increasing steadily since the 1970s so that the median time to get a PhD in a humanities discipline, like philosophy, English, art history, is nine years. Half of people who get PhDs…

[Host Robert] SIEGEL: Mm-hmm.

Prof. MENAND: …in those fields take more than nine years to get the degree.

Now, if you think that you can get a law degree and argue a case before the Supreme Court in three years, get a medical degree and cut somebody open in four years, why should it take nine years to teach poetry to college freshmen? Continue Reading »

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