"I'm a Collector of Other People's Lives..."
There is so much happening in the blogosphere right now, and so much in my head when I'm away from the computer. But there's some stuff I've wanted to get down for a couple of days. This post is inspired first by Collin's posts that then led to Paul's posts, all about our processes of academic writing as done by professors and graduate students. Let me make clear from the outset that I love these particular posts and felt really energized by them. I really like Collin's distinction between "publications" and the act of "publishing," and the idea of creating a collection of ideas really rings true for me. I want to write this post partly to get these links here so I can go back later and think more deeply about them.

In addition to a certain sense of excitement, though, I also feel frustration. Paul and Collin write about how it gets easier to "read everything" in your field and "map" connections between texts. I think that's true for, what, ninety-eight percent of academics? But I get back to points I've made before about how I don't even know what my field is.

While working on my MAs in Women's Studies and Comparative Studies (both interdisciplinary degrees), I took classes in the following departments: women's studies, history, English, comparative studies, art history, education. I even enrolled in a law class open to others, but felt really out of place being the only one outside the program in the room, so I dropped. While working on my PhD in English, I took classes in English, education, and architecture. And all those English classes included work in film, literature, and rhet/comp. Plus, I think I have to include all the hours I spent in the medical school on my assistantship, not taking classes but doing a lot of reading and writing as an editor for Literature and Medicine. My candidacy exams involved four somewhat divergent areas: composition theory and practice, film theory, autobiographies and memoirs of illness and disability, and visual rhetoric. Those may not sound as divergent as I think, but I remember being told by my committee that my lists included a wider range of texts than some of them had seen before, especially for visual rhetoric.

I love my eclectic background. I can go into all of the psychological issues that have always led me to embrace a certain kind of border identity as an ethos all the way back to elementary school, not quite on the inside but not out of it, either. Most of the time, it's a part of my identity that I fully embrace.

But there are moments.

No one will be surprised to find that my anxiety has increased because of the research time I have this year. I'm very, very lucky, I know, to have the greatest number of course releases any junior faculty member at my university can have this year. Only two of us on the entire campus get this opportunity. And it's because it's such a precious gift that I am trying so hard to figure out how to get it right.

There are so, so many possibilities for my research agenda. I have had long, long lists of article ideas for years. An online friend of mine added to this by sending me a great idea for a book I could write based on the article I had published earlier this year (seriously, he sent me a seven chapter outline that makes a lot of sense). I get excited way too easily, I guess. Or, another way to look at it, I embrace so many possibilities.

Actually, writing this (as blogging does) makes me realize a bit more what I need to do. I applied for this grant to work on a particular book project, and I should focus primarily on that. I got thrown later last year when several people told me that I need to get articles done. Yes, the articles can lead to the book, but then I think of building on previous work where there's already a foundation of a conference presentation or something I wrote in grad school year ago that still sounds compelling today. So many possibilities, and so many expectations.

But for now, time to shift to teaching mode and get to campus, still thinking about this as I always do.
- posted by Nels @ 3:06 PM | | | Link |