Something Shiny! » Research

The bloody show

emily — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:27:49 +0000

No, still no baby. But I had a meeting with my dissertation committee yesterday afternoon and, I don’t know, the title seemed to fit. (Not that it was bad, you understand– just something that had to be gotten through before my dissertation could be properly… birthed? This metaphor has taken a weird turn.) This was a meeting for which I was eminently prepared and, having turned in the draft near the beginning of June, one which was a long time coming. I won’t say that I was particularly nervous about it, just that I had some trepidation about one committee member in particular who can be a bit of a challenge. In the days leading up to it, I wondered in which hand I should hold the olive branch (and in which hand, the arrows). Ultimately, it went smoothly and it was quite productive. I’ve now got an inordinate number of helpful suggestions that I’ll sift through, using some and discarding others, to make the final product more… final product-y. In the meantime, we continue to await news on Nikki’s baby, who seems to have decided he needs to cook a bit longer before making his grand entrance. (This kid is clearly going to be a handful.)

Victory is mine!

emily — Tue, 11 May 2010 12:15:46 +0000

I turned in my dissertation to my advisor last night. No, wait. Let me rephrase that: I turned in my dissertation to my advisor last night, holy cow! Victory is mine! I drink from the keg of glory! Keg of glory references aside, I’m not really sure how to feel about it. For a project that’s been in the works for four years (see above, re: holy cow), I expected more fanfare when I turned it in. I was singularly underwhelmed by the lack of fireworks or applause, I tell you. Next time I’ll have to be sure to rent a band ahead of time, I think. In any case: huzzah! The dissertation, she is done. Now I get to relax for two weeks while my advisor reads it in its entirety. If you’ll excuse me, I have a keg of glory waiting for me.

Rampant love

emily — Tue, 04 May 2010 23:47:56 +0000

I spent nine hours straight editing chapter three of my dissertation today. Nine. Hours. Straight. Rather than bore you with the details of that (like how, in a moment of desperation, I used the phrase “rampant love”– but don’t worry! I deleted it in favor of something more academically acceptable), I thought I’d tell you all about how I washed my iPod shuffle the other day. … ….. … Except, now that I think of it, that’s pretty much all there is to say about that. I washed my iPod shuffle. I let it sit in the sun. It’s fine now, except when it decides that it’s not. At that point, I have to employ the tough love method (maybe even the rampant tough love method!) The end. And how are things with you?

Spring Break, Florida style

emily — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:21:21 +0000

So! [claps hands] Where were we? After Friday’s debacle, I’m pretty relieved to be on Spring Break right now. Spring Break as a grad student is so very, very different from Spring Break as an undergrad. To wit: I’m on Spring Break Day Two and there’s nary a beach in sight. I’m in Florida, sure, but that’s about it. (My brother called the other night and, choking back laughter, asked if I was going to Florida for Spring Break. Har har har.) So what am I doing with my time, you ask? I’m catching some sun! I’m sleeping in late! I’m enjoying the beautiful weather! I’m… completely lying: in fact, I’m working on my dissertation. While I could pretend to be bummed about that, I’m actually totally jazzed. I’m so jazzed that I just used the word “jazzed.” It’s been since last summer that I had this kind of time to devote to my own research and I honestly couldn’t be happier. I only interrupted my work twice today: once for lunch and once to update my Facebook page about the Lohan-a-holic brouhaha. Because, seriously, could she be more crazy? Milk-a-whaaat? Good stuff. Here’s to Spring Break 2010! Come on down, the weather’s fine!

Newsflash

emily — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:22:52 +0000

I think the hardest thing about writing a dissertation is that it takes so damn long. I know, right? After six and a half years of graduate school, that’s my great revelation: writing a dissertation takes a long time. I’ll be accepting my Nobel Prize any minute now for this great contribution to knowledge. But yeah, it takes an awful long time, it’s hard work, and it’s so personal– I don’t think people on the outside, as it were, can quite fathom the process. From the outside, I’d guess, all that’s obvious is the sheer amount of time the whole thing is taking. From the inside, of course, there’s never enough time. There’s not enough time to conquer all the edits and all the tweaks and all the, well, writing. And on top of that, there are other things: applying for grants, applying for jobs, teaching, writing articles and presenting papers (so that you can get a job), oh and: eating, sleeping, living. For a number of reasons, none of which is that I haven’t been working “hard enough,” I’ve had to push my graduation date from May to August this year. Three months. Not a big deal, in the broad scheme of things. It’ll mean seven full years of graduate school, start to finish, which includes my MA. Which isn’t exactly a record, you know. The average PhD in history, including an MA, takes a full decade. And it’s not as if I’ve got a job waiting for me after August. (Heck, I’ll still be living in Gainesville for another year after graduation.) In fact, the job market is so bad that most professors here are advising PhD candidates to just postpone graduation indefinitely, until there’s a job offer. Because once you graduate, you’re stamped with an expiration date, as it were. You start to go stale unless you’re one of the lucky few who can land a job. And I know all of that. The logical part of my brain gets that. But even though I know that, part of me– the part with senioritis– wonders what’s taking so damn long.

NaBloPoMo: Oneida

emily — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:30:50 +0000

So I’ve been researching the Oneida community for my dissertation and WOW, was that some weird shit! I mean, I know as historians we’re trained to be impartial and to not make value judgments, but WHOA. WHOA is what I have to say about that. I’m currently reading My Father’s House: An Oneida Boyhood at the same time that I’m reading Desire and Duty at Oneida: Tirzah Miller’s Intimate Memoir. As the titles might suggest, they represent two very different perspectives of the Oneida experience (one being childlike and innocent and the other being more… uh… experienced and graphic). I’m always telling my students that people in the past were really very different from us. Contrary to what The Flintstones or even The Patriot would have us believe, they weren’t just like us only in different clothing. Therefore, we need to take them on their own terms. We won’t always be able to understand or come to grips with the things they did. And rather than bore you with the details of my research, I’ll just say that I’m having a bit of a hard time doing that with the Oneida folks. Interesting reading, for sure, but hard to bend my mind around.

Something’s gotta give

emily — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:04:01 +0000

Whenever people gush over how organized I am, I can’t help but think about my office. Here’s half of my workspace these days:

Sometimes it goes into hiding

emily — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:50:54 +0000

Me: “I’m going to put my headphones in, to try and find my inner muse.”
John, not missing a beat: “Okay! Have fun looking!”

NaBloPoMo: Insanity is hereditary

emily — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 02:29:00 +0000

My advisor was in Michigan recently, and she came back with a present for me. It’s a notepad that I can keep by my bedside for those 2 am strokes of dissertation genius. It was so nice of her to think of me, and even nicer that the notepad has something to do with my research:

It says, “Insanity is hereditary. You can get it from your children.”

Wheel of fire

emily — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:44:34 +0000

I realized last night that a dissertation is a lot like the One Ring, the ring of power from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Bear with me for a minute. At the beginning of the trilogy, the ring of power hasn’t quite taken a hold of Frodo yet. He’s near it constantly and yet he’s separate from it, still his own person. But as the story goes on, his life becomes inseparable from that of the ring. He cannot wear it without enduring physical and psychological pain, nor without seeing the burning eye of the Dark Lord. The ring itself gradually takes power over him. It becomes heavier and heavier to bear. In the third book, as Frodo’s strength has been sapped by the ring, he says to his friend Sam, “there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades.” It’s the same with a dissertation, really. Like the ring, a dissertation is with you at all times. In the beginning, as you’re just getting underway, you’re free to think about other things. Thoughts of your dissertation don’t grip you at all hours. But as time goes on, and you get deeper and deeper into the process, you find that you can no longer give your full attention to other things. You eat, sleep, and breathe your dissertation. And suddenly, your life is no longer your own. The dissertation of power has taken hold. (Though, admittedly, I’m not sure what to do with the metaphor when it comes to casting the ring into the fires of Mount Doom, to be destroyed. I guess it depends on how good or bad the dissertation is? Or maybe the dissertation defense is Mount Doom? Hard to say.) I suppose the only thing to do is to continue on, chipping away at deadlines and goals, until the project is finished. Hopefully there’ll be a job waiting on the other end of the dissertation of power, but I’ll come up with a metaphor for that when the time comes.