http://www.nassrgrads.com/

Please add this to your bookmarks and visit us there from now on. Thank you and happy new year!

CFP: “Romanticism and Independence”

The NASSR 2011 Organizing Committee invites proposals for papers and special sessions on “Romanticism and Independence.”  The conference theme is capacious, and we encourage submissions that engage any of its many possible inflections: literary, aesthetic, political, social, cultural, scientific.  Proposals from disciplinary perspectives beyond literature and the arts are particularly welcome.  Please submit proposals of 500 words to nassr.utah@gmail.com by January 15, 2011.

In addition to paper proposals, we also invite the submission of proposals for complete special sessions on the conference theme.  Special sessions should consist of three presenters and a moderator (who may also be a presenter); please submit separate proposals for each paper and a brief description of the session.  In the event that a proposed special session cannot be accommodated, individual paper proposals will be considered separately.

Topics for papers and special sessions might include:

• Generic and Formal Innovations
• Imagination
• Sublimity
• Impartiality and Disinterestedness
• Individualism
• Liberty
• Sovereignty
• Feminism
• Religious Freedom
• Libertinism
• Declarations of Independence
• Romantic Nationalism
• Atlantic Revolutions
• Transatlantic Independence Movements
• Counter-Enlightenment
• Philhellenism
• Romanticism and the American West
• “Indie Romanticism”
• Romanticism and Film
• Romanticism and Contemporary Culture

Please note that the availability of audio-visual equipment will be limited and will be allocated by application after papers have been accepted.

What I did well:

1. I used my summer to crank! Though I started prepping a year before the exam, the timeline didn’t hit home until the summer semester. I had little scheduled in the summer but odd jobs and a one-month teaching gig, so I decided to put a huge dent in my list. Boy, did this pay off as the exam deadline approached! I read my whole author list twice (Ann Radcliffe’s corpus and all the criticism), took copious notes, and memorized. Boom! This was a huge confidence boost that paid off in both my written and oral exams.

2. I took time to enjoy the reading. Discovering works that excited me was one of the most rewarding things about the studying process. Among these were Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Byron’s De Monfort, Shelley’s The Cenci, and Radcliffe’s unpublished narrative poems. And rereading works that I knew I loved, like Austen’s Persuasion and Burney’s Evelina, was also wonderful. Through taking the time to enjoy the reading, I started to see the list with less fear and more enjoyment.

3. I took two sets of notes. The first set of notes for each work was long, copious, and detailed. It included notes about my interests in the work, related history and politics, and patterns that I noticed. I typed these out and each work has its own file with a naming convention [author_title]. That way, these notes are searchable for future writing projects. My second set of notes is an abbreviated set that I put together when I finished my reading list completely, in the last 3 weeks before my exam. I made just 1 file and allowed myself only 1 page of notes for each work: title, author, pub date, major characters, and 2-3 important quotes or points about the work. Sometimes I cheated and had to put these notes in 11 pt font to make them fit, but the exercise of limiting myself to one page helped me memorize the important bits for the Big Day.

4. I practiced for my oral exam with my advisor and on my own. I am lucky to have an advisor (shout-out to Jill Heydt-Stevenson) who looked forward to helping me prepare for my oral exam. We met every Wednesday night for months, Jill asked me questions about what I had read on my list, and I learned how to answer tough questions under pressure. It wasn’t always pretty, and I regularly needed a glass of wine when I got home, but the work really paid off in my oral exam and no doubt will serve me in job interviews. Thank you, Jill!

5. I prioritized my reading: primary sources first, secondaries second. This way, I knew what I thought about the primaries — and had taken notes — before I let the secondaries affect my opinions.

6. I strategically organized my teaching around my study schedule and exams. This could be a whole blog post, but in brief, I made sure that I didn’t have too much prep to do the week of my oral or written exam, and I taught texts that I had already taught at least once to minimize prep stress. I was lucky to be teaching Shakespeare for Non-majors yet again, and to have a Tues/Thurs teaching schedule, but I did have 70 students. So to save time for studying, I used a similar syllabus to one I used in a previous semester and used the same plays. It was fun to reread them, I didn’t have to learn new texts to teach, and I already had lesson plans in my files for how to teach each text. Though my teaching lacked innovation this semester, it bought me more study time.

7. I exercised frequently, got 6-7 hours of sleep every night, and ate really well. (Okay, eating well has never been a problem for me.) And when I did get sick — which for me is inevitable during such a stressful semester — I tried to relax and let my body heal as much as I could while still reading. In the past I have been too type-A to be sane about being healthy during the semester, but I’m getting better at this with age. I also limited my nannying schedule to just one day per week rather than two – though this meant a leaner budget, I appreciated those few extra hours.

8. My fellow graddies and I studied together fairly regularly, exchanged notes, and were there when I needed someone to complain to or lean on. Thanks, guys! It would have been in a lonely pressure cooker without you.

9. I felt really comfortable with every member of my committee and love working with them. Though it never sounds fun to gather a group of experts on a topic and have them quiz you for two hours in a small room, my respect for and comfort with my committee made the oral interrogation less terrifying and more productive.

10. My peers gave me a helpful mock oral. My exam was scheduled for a Wednesday morning, so the Friday prior to the exam, I invited my fellow Romanticist and 18th c. graddies over to my apartment to give me a two-hour mock exam. Of course I stocked beverages and snacks for all, but we got down to business and it was helpful to have so many different questions tossed my way and to practice having the agility to answer them all well. The mock oral exam is somewhat of a tradition among CU-Boulder grad students and I found it incredibly useful, a confidence booster that reminded me I was ready for my exam, and a great way to connect with my super-smart peeps before going into battle.

My mistakes – what I should have done differently:

1. I took too long in getting my committee to approve my list. I thought I started early enough (a semester and a half before the exam), but it took a lot of time to get all hands on deck and in agreement. The earlier you can get this done, the better.

2. I took a lot of notes by hand in notebooks; all notes should have been taken on my laptop in electronic files to save time. I moved from my laptop to notebooks because I had a hard time stopping reading, putting my book down, and then putting both hands on the keyboard to take notes. I know this sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. It was easier to keep a notebook and pen by my side and take notes in pen with one hand with the book still open in the other. Now, I did not explore tablet technology that might enable one to write on a screen and have OCR turn handwriting into digital text. But you can bet I will be looking into that for a possible birthday present! (My birthday is coming up in February … What I did to compensate for the fact that notebooks are not searchable is I indexed them (all 3 of them) and put the index of notes on the notebook cover, so I knew what notes were in each notebook: a patch for a major note-taking problem. Then in the final weeks before the exam, I typed out these notes as a studying exercise. Not the most efficient process, but it worked out in the end.

3. I didn’t time my grading days well. My students had a final paper due late in the semester — I thought this timing would grant me time earlier in the semester to finish my list. It did, though I was unable to take the time to thoroughly grade student writing portfolios at the end of the semester as I usually would and return them promptly. I still feel guilty about this, but did the best I could under the circumstances. I did a great job teaching in the classroom while studying, but was frustrated with grading and paper feedback and all the administrative tasks that I wanted to spend lots more time on and just couldn’t afford to. Aaargh.

4. I scheduled my exam perhaps too late in the semester. I took my written exam (48 hours long, 15-20 pages) before Thanksgiving break and my oral during the last week of the semester. This left me almost no time to recover after the exam: I had a huge proposal due, essay corrections, and 70 grades to submit within the next week. I was relieved to be done with my exam, but needed a fews days to be a couch potato and just didn’t have the time to wind-down properly.

5. I was so afraid of the exam that I had a hard time starting to study at the outset. The best thing I did for my motivation was to talk to other students who passed recently and learn from their experiences, and to set the exam dates. Having the dates on my calendar and on the official English Dept. calendar inspired me to follow my study schedule to the best of my ability.

6. Reading schedule blues: My reading schedule kept slipping a little here and there due to teaching commitments and this really gave me the blues.I felt like I was constantly failing to meet my own deadlines when I was actually adjusting fairly well and always making steady progress. This was a huge challenge during the entire studying process. However, I scheduled the end-date for reading my list about a month before my exam, so a week or so of slippage was okay. I would encourage others to do the same.

7. Adamantly insist that you only have the minimum number of works on your list — it will be long enough. You have the rest of your career to read these works — you don’t have to be tested on them *right now*. Unless you’re into self-torture; in that case, list away! Use strategies like substitution to add recommended texts to your list without the number growing exponentially; just be sure that you’re substituting in a way that your committee will be okay with (or won’t notice). I tried to keep the number down to the minimum and was unable to — it would have decreased my stress a bit if I’d pulled it off. Instead, where I was asked to add works, I suggested works I’d already read that fit the criteria.

8. During my oral exam, after a professor critiqued my perception of performativity, I lost confidence in what I knew about that theory. I started second-guessing all the reading and notes I learned about that for my exam, though I continued to handle questions just fine, according to my advisor’s review of my performance. If this happens to you — if your ideas about a something that is important to you get critiqued during the oral — try to separate the critique from what you know and the knowledge you can demonstrate! This rattled me a bit and was a good learning experience.

That’s all I can think of right now. If you have questions about my comps experience, please feel free to email me or reply to this post and I’d be happy to share with you kirstyn.leuner@colorado.edu

I was supposed to post more than a week ago, but it’s been one of the more hectic Decembers in recent memory; something that definitely affects the subject matter here.  If you’ve ever seen the fabulous Disney movie Meet the Robinsons, there’s a recurring line: “I’m just not sure how well this plan was thought through.”  Well, no matter how well I feel I have planned my semester and prepared for every contingency, there are always a few snags that bring that line to mind!  Thankfully, those snags generally balance out with a few pleasant surprises I hope to repeat.  So here, in no particular order, follow my top ten.  May you avoid my mistakes, and have a few pleasant surprises of your own!

1)    I need to explain what I mean by “revision.” How could I have forgotten, after my years teaching composition, that most students consider “revision” a slightly more involved form of spell-check?  Foolish Kelli.   Also, when I allow revisions, I need to specify that previously incurred late penalties still apply.

2)    I need to be careful about what I assume is “basic knowledge.” I taught a freshmen-level course this semester, and simply assumed that most of my students would be familiar with various literary terms and forms, like I was by the end of high school.  Not so!  Most of my students had never discussed the characteristics of epic poetry, or written anything in iambic pentameter…not even a sonnet.  Some students had, and they could help the others, but I was surprised more than a few times into backtracking.  I didn’t mind doing this; it just showed me that I need to question my assumptions.  Or perhaps I should do a little survey at the beginning of the semester to determine what “gaps” I need to fill.

3)    I like giving final exams (not merely final papers).  Tried it for the first time, and I think it exercises the brain differently, and involves a healthy fear-factor. Students actually study for finals, whereas papers usually get written at the last minute.  Plus, my end-of-semester grading goes faster—that is, it would have, if I had finished the essays students gave me after Thanksgiving….see #s 4, 5, and 6.

4)    I must consider how assignments I give to students translate into MY workload. This is my first semester teaching this many classes and trying to get my own work done—at least since 2006—and I did not achieve balance.  All those assignments I designed sounded SO awesome when I put them on my syllabus!  And I do think they facilitated some good learning…but they swamped me with grading!  Though it’s part of my job as a teacher to accept the responsibility of grading and offering helpful feedback and critique, I’ve resolved to consider my own time and abilities as well.  Time, energy, and mental stability are factors that must be respected.

5)    I should automatically double the amount of time I think it’s going to take me to grade assignments.  I should also never make promises about what day papers will be returned.  And, I should become a better time manager, and faster essay grader, so as to hand papers back before students start asking about them…but that’s the top of the mountain, and I’m still in the foothills.  Baby steps.

6)    I will never again specifically ASK for papers to be emailed.  Electronic documents are convenient in many ways, but hey DO NOT save time!!  Just opening all the darn attachments takes at least as long as grading half the paper—and then finding all the right tools to leave comments in the way I want to is a huge time-sucker as well.  Then emailing back the new file with comments means more filing on my computer desktop, and taking the time to find all their email addresses and write individual “here you go!” notes is another time sucker.  Never again.

7)    I love teaching texts I’m encountering for the first time. Teaching familiar texts certainly has a  lot of advantages, but teaching fresh, unfamiliar ones is exciting and invigorating!  I just have to be careful not to monopolize discussion.

8)    I really like pairing texts, both for in-class study and for assignments. This semester I paired Wordsworth’s The Prelude with The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano.  It led to some great discoveries about how similar subject matter (autobiography) can be treated completely differently through use of different forms (poetry and prose), and how those forms might link to the author’s audiences and agendas.  I had students choose a passage from each text, and “translate” it into the form used by the other author—and I was so pleased with the results!  I did learn that The Prelude is incredibly challenging for students, and probably needs close study on its own, rather than in conjunction with something else.  Next time I get to teach this particular course, I will pair Frances Burney’s Evelina with The Interesting Narrative, since they represent completely different social and geographical perspectives, but still contain stories from roughly equivalent time periods of how relatively powerless people learn to navigate and succeed in their worlds.  Sound cool?  I think so.

9)    I need to figure out how to be tougher.  I think I’m a pretty tough grader and I don’t go easy on student essays, but I also give a lot of points for attendance, and I accept late papers for partial credit.  Maybe I should stop doing that, since I ended up with a LOT of As and Bs, and still got an email from a student (a week after the final) asking if there was anything he could do bump up his grade to an A, because he felt he had worked hard enough to deserve one.   Aargh.  I’m a sympathetic softie by nature, but would like to have a flinty enough form of authority that I don’t get questions like that.  Still pondering how to achieve this.

10) I still genuinely enjoy teaching. Yep, it’s always a relief to discover that fact, especially in the stressful crunch at the end of the semester, when my patience and sense of humor run out WAY quicker than usual, and I randomly burst into tears when looking at my stacks of ungraded finals and piles of dirty dishes (in separate rooms, of course).   Those are rough days.  Yet when the grading is all done and my house is clean again, and it’s Christmas Eve, and I’m looking forward to a new semester and a new course to create, I think I’m pretty lucky to get to do this for a living!  It’s not glamorous, but it’s creative and challenging and interesting.  Most of all, it helps me grow, which is what this little inventory is all about.  Thanks for indulging me.

Happy Holidays, Everyone!

-Kelli

The major change:  make them all 1 credit classes.  Every undergraduate student would be required to take at least 3 literature courses.  These courses would focus attention squarely on reading, interpreting, and discussing rather than on quizzes/exams, presentations, and writing.  The grade would be based solely on attendance and participation.  Motivation would become more intrinsic and less extrinsic.  The content of these classes would be wide-ranging and completely open to the instructor’s judgment.  There would be single author courses, genre courses, surveys, theme-based courses, period-based courses, and any other organizing principle that the instructor might imagine.  If a student leaves college without ever having read Wordsworth, Blake, Austen, Bronte, Thackeray, Sterne, etc., then he or she is probably never going to encounter them.  Furthermore, having more courses will allow English teachers to (borrowing some folksy wisdom) teach the student how to fish, so that he or she will be able to eat for a lifetime.  The basic skills of reading poetry, drama, and novels are something that the majority of undergraduates do not possess.  Of course, this plan would never work in the current university, but I believe that it would be the best way to inspire undergraduates with a lifelong love of reading and learning, regardless of their future career plans.

Since the talks, I’ve been thinking about these and other presentations I’ve enjoyed, mulling over what it is, in particular, that makes for a good academic talk.  So much of our classroom experience, both as teachers and as students, is oriented around discussion, where we can riff, where an inchoate idea satisfies to propel a discussion towards completeness, where continuity is not always necessary nor even desirable; as such, the prospect of giving a talk, of owning the floor for fifteen to twenty minutes, uninterrupted, to present ideas for which we are solely responsible, can be daunting.  Certainly, it must help to watch the presentations of others with an eye for the specific stratagems they employ, not only in constructing an argument, but in effectively engaging an audience. 

In a series of posts, I thought I might offer observations about what kinds of techniques seem to make for an engaging talk.  By no means do I consider myself an expert; indeed, I’m only just beginning to develop my own presentation style.  Most of the strategies I mention will likely have been culled from presentations I’ve seen, and which I’d like to adapt for my own purposes.  But I believe there is something to be gained from careful observation and thorough consideration.  This first post will put forward some of my thoughts on the use of technology in presentation.

Using Presentation Technology Effectively

As it does in the classroom, digital technology offers a number of presentational advantages, not only in imparting information to an audience (especially where such visual productions as painting, sculpture and film are concerned), but also in matters of pacing and the spatial orientation of an audience.  Clearly, the ability to display works of visual culture, and to draw cognitive links between the art and sculpture of a period and its textual productions, makes for a much more nuanced understanding of a given culture, and for a more variously inflected reading of its literature.  But a presentation that employs technology can gain in ways less directly related to the content of the argument, and more to its form.  For instance, the incorporation of video can insert a pause into the midst of a talk, a kind of mental breathing space wherein the audience may recollect and process information.  It can drastically and momentarily shift the tone of a presentation, generating interest in relative novelty.  Projected images (still or moving) can establish the presentation space as a multidimensional one.  They serve as secondary focus points, and an effective speaker will place him or herself far enough away from the image to split audience focus, directing the audience’s attention to image or speaker as necessary.  So the audience members are forced into activity, more aware of the presentations itself as they follow the speaker, shifting their focus around the room.  The greatest temptation of any audience is surely the tendency to lapse into complacency or half-focus; technology can serve as a preventative to such lapsing.

Furthermore, presentation technology demands collective focus.  This is opposed to a handout which, while generally helpful, and sometimes necessary, always effects the fragmentation of an audience.  When a speaker directs my attention to the pieces of paper in my hands, he or she is not only directing me to the handout, but to my handout.  I am suddenly not part of an audience, but one among a crowd.  Perhaps, as I consider the lines of poetry printed on the sheet, my mind begins to wander; I think about what, in these lines, strikes me as interesting, or about how I might like to read them myself.  Maybe I get so caught up that I start to reread those lines later in the presentation, diverting my attention at times when I am not supposed to, when the distraction will detract from my understanding of the presentation itself.  Soon a cacophony of rustling fills my ears, and I drift alone amidst the dull whispers of fidgeting.  Surely, this cognitive isolation may be seen in a more positive light.  Perhaps, a handout opens an audience to the individual preoccupations and distractions of its members, leading to question-and-answer sessions made more full and complex by the interaction of individually-oriented thought processes.  But from the standpoint of speaker, such distraction takes skill to corral.  I must fight against my own handout, and if I am to best it, I must be a master of other techniques.  I must be able to command the audience to return its attention (reformed as collective now) to me.  By contrast, technology directs all eyes in the room to a common mobile point, and away from restless hands.

But technology should not be considered easy to use.  It must be very deliberately implemented.  It can be painfully obvious when technology is being used as a crutch, or as a replacement for full and proper practice.  As I noted above, the projected image, quotations, or video should serve as a second point of focus.  Gestures toward the image, text, or video should be deliberate, purposeful, and limited.  When the technology gains control of the presentation, when it is the only point of focus, it very quickly eclipses the speaker, and soon enough distracts from the argument itself.  A speaker who follows presentation slides too fastidiously eventually fades away, becoming an incorporeal echo of the text on the screen.  Image clicks.  Voice repeats.  The contours of the argument are laid out in advance and the voice follows up by repeating what everyone in the audience already knows.  The audience rebels from the argument because, rather than cogently moving through its evidence towards a conclusion, this presentation makes every single point it has to make twice.

I’d like to suggest a couple of examples of what I perceive to be the effective use of technology in a presentation.  The first example comes from Michael Macovski’s talk on book history Monday night.  Though his presentation was focused on laying out the ways in which a material history of the book was to be conducted, and though it was primarily interested in the circulation of texts, his presentation demonstrated the ways in which that circulation would necessarily partake of multiple mediums.  For example, he directed our attention to an image from the period that depicted a circulating library.  He led us in reading the image, inviting us to surmise about the social function of the library as both restricting gateway and distribution center for knowledge.  Later he displayed a passage from Don Juan and pointed out the ways in which texts by Pope, Creech and Horace were circulating within Byron’s poem.  On the one hand, this variability of mediums—image against text against speaker—created interest through variety, all the while demonstrating Macovski’s central point, that circulation figures prominently in Romantic period texts, even as it must, by necessity, inform the praxis of the modern book historian.

Another example of effective technology use comes from a presentation I saw Paul Youngquist give at ICR in 2009.  He opened the presentation, a discussion of the use of Bloodhounds to put down Maroon uprisings in eighteenth-century Jamaica, with a clip from the movie Cujo.  There is, of course, a significant disjunction here, between eighteenth-century Jamaica and the 1983 adaptation of a Stephen King novel, but this discrepancy only served to intensify the novelty effect that the incorporation of multiple mediums (aural, visual, textual) generally produces.  At once Cujo alienated the audience from the primary context of the argument, and invited speculation as to how the St. Bernard was to be reconciled to the Bloodhound.  Eventually, Cujo came to serve a larger point about the bloody ways in which the animal (in this case military dogs) came to police the boundaries of humanity in service of the state.  But the film clip also offered to the presentation other productive advantages.  Professor Youngquist repeated one particular line from the film several times throughout his presentation, and it began to take on an incantatory quality, at once drawing attention back to the opening video clip, and punctuating the historical analysis of the Maroon Wars, embedding in the past a vision of the present and reminding the audience of the continued relevance and resonances of pastness itself.

In both of these instances, technology was used with purpose.  It was the specialized tool of a craftsman or an artist, made to work to very particular ends.  Of course, technology is one tool among many.  Both of the talks I’ve mentioned above, in addition to Michael Gamer’s talk, and many other talks I have been fortunate enough to attend, have had to draw upon additional strategies in order to be as effective and compelling as they were.  In my next several posts I’d like to continue to look at the strategies of presentation.  In particular I anticipate contemplating the following topics: The Uses of Reading, Forming Effective Arguments for Presentation, Persona, and Energy, among others.  Please feel free to comment on and react to my thoughts as you see fit.  I will reiterate, I have watched these presentations with a careful, but a jealous eye and am by no means yet practiced enough to replicate their most impressive successes.  As much as these posts will be meant to offer helpful suggestions to others, I intend to learn from them myself.

Thank you so much for your attention.

So, I promised in my past post that I’d deliver something practical—and here it is!  At the Rocky Mountain MLA conference in Albuquerque last month, I attended an incredibly useful panel on advice for students entering the job market.  It proceeded in Q&A format, but I’ve rearranged and edited the information to consolidate major themes.  No matter what level you’re at, this is really good stuff!  If after you’ve read it you’re hungry for more, check out the recommendations on the MLA website!  Lots of good, detailed advice there too.

But back to the RMMLA.  Our panel of experts included four distinguished folks:

Ingrid Ranum – Gonzaga University

Catherine Perry – Notre Dame

Anthony Cardenas-Rotunno.– University of New Mexico

David Laurence – director of research and ADE for MLA

I’m sorry I haven’t kept track of exactly who gave what advice…but their messages were fairly unified.  I just hope they won’t object to being mooshed all together!  Anyway, without further ado, on to the good stuff!  

Finding the right job to apply for:

Remember: when a department writes up a job description, they make it very specific!  SO…make sure you really ARE a good fit for the job description!  If you don’t meet the minimum requirements, your application will not be successful.

It can be tempting to try to “bend” yourself or your research to fit the job description.  Nobody can trim themselves to fit the market exactly, since certain bandwagons go in and out of style, and we aren’t always on the current ones!  However, it IS good practice to be aware of what topics are on the radar, and how you define your relationship to them—that is, why you’re doing what you do, when the crowd is going the other way.  You want to be both in the field, and creating what it isn’t yet.  Maintain a sense of openness and curiosity, of general knowledgeability, but also of your own self in the midst of possibilities.

Tips on the Cover Letter

According to David Laurence, your cover letter is the most important piece of writing you will EVER do.  You must both meet the conventional expectations, and also stand out. There are many things that put you in the “no” pile.  There are only a few that get you into the “yes” pile.  So here are a few things to keep in mind for success:

PERSONA

One challenge of writing the letter stems from the problem of trying on different personae:  You’re at the stage where you don’t yet know what kind of institution you’ll fit with, and in your letters, you must try on aspects of your different potential selves and project them into the future.  You’re after VOICE, more than details.  You must find the thing that makes you you, and nobody else.

Think about different registers of vocabulary and diction.  You should be writing something that should speak widely across specialties.  Show that you’ll be able to speak to both undergraduates, other professors, and to all kinds of people who aren’t just like you.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE.

When you’re applying for positions, it is vital that you tailor your cover letter to the university.  Show that you know something about that university—what they do, what they emphasize, etc.  Read their mission statements from their websites.  Recognize that there is a difference between small, liberal-arts, or teaching-intense colleges, versus Research-1 institutions.

Do some research into the current teaching specialties of faculty, and recognize (and mention) what gaps you might fill.  Also look at the smaller related organizations within the university or department (such as a Center for British and Irish Studies) where your expertise could be useful.  Show that you will be a team player, helping move forward the business and endeavors of the department.

SHOW YOU CAN TEACH.

No matter the university, everybody hires for teaching!!  At least in the beginning of your career, you will be hired for your intellectual liveliness and ability to teach effectively. Universities might give tenure for research, but you’re hired for teaching.

Obviously, then, you should highlight your teaching in your letter and CV.  Show that you have designed courses, developed interesting assignments, and written syllabi.

SHOW YOU CAN HANDLE THE TENURE PROCESS.

In discussing your research, emphasize not only your current interests and accomplishments, but also your long-term potential.  Universities want to see evidence that you’ll be able to make it through the rigors of the tenure process—because if you fail at the tenure process, it’s a blow for the university and everyone involved.  They want to make a long-term investment in you, so show them they can do so in good faith.

PROOFREAD!!

Remember – your letter is the ONLY piece of YOU that a hiring committee sees! Your letter must be PERFECT.  Thus, please use spell-check.    Remove EVERY flaw.

Before you send something to a committee, send it to yourself!  Avoid that awful moment of finding flaws after you’ve sent it.

Tips on building and presenting your CV

According to these experts, The CV is not a list; it’s a narrative.  The things you choose to include and the order in which you place them provide hooks for the reader to understand the story you’re telling about yourself, your work, and your trajectory. What you privilege in your CV will send messages about you.  Consider what’s important to the institution, but also what’s important to you.  There should be a sense of how different pieces relate to each other, and perhaps a central inquiry that comes through the titles of your papers and publications.

Never “pad” your CV.  It will be spotted a mile away.  DO, however, show that you’ve at least sent things out for publication, even if they haven’t been accepted yet.  Remember, they want to see that you might be able to get tenure someday.

Be judicious about including things that aren’t directly related.  Perhaps summarize your somewhat-related accomplishments.  Consider carefully what you list under “scholarly activity” and keep it fairly official.  (*note: In this Q&A, someone asked about whether professional blogs and eJournals are considered valid forms of scholarly activity. The response was that older faculty members might have a hard time seeing the merit of these.  Blogs are a sort of “drafting in public.” they’re not necessarily polished, or finished.  Faculty want to know what parts of your work are finished to the point that you really stand behind them.)

Letters of Recommendation:

It is vital that your letters of recommendation give you good reviews, and there are a few things you can do (in addition to doing well in classes, teaching, presenting at conferences, and publishing) to ensure that this happens.

The main one is to get to know your professors, so that they can get to know you!  Volunteer for committees where you can serve with them or under their direction.  Invite them to come watch you teach so that they can give an informed review of your teaching skills.

Seek letters of recommendation from those professors who know you most recently.  If you’re in a PhD program, don’t seek letters from professors you worked with only as an MA  or BA.  Letters from earlier advisors beg the question about why you don’t have more recent recommendations., and therefore can cast doubt on your current abilities.

Other documents you might be asked for:

Occasionally you might be asked for random additional documents, such as undergrad transcripts, teaching portfolios, teaching statements, etc.   Usually these are the result of some strange past occurrence where the university got “burned” by past applicants.  Provide the requested materials, and do your best on them.  Consider them just one more opportunity to put your best foot forward (or, if those undergrad transcripts were dismal, an opportunity to share how you triumphed against the odds).  It’s nice to keep a teaching portfolio and teaching statement on hand anyway; chances are you’ll be asked about teaching philosophies in an interview anyway.  These can be your “accordion” documents. You might want to have various lengths prepared (one paragraph to a page, probably).

Acing the interviews:

Be aware that a phone/video interview is VERY different than a face-to-face interview, and you need to prepare yourself appropriately for both.

PHONE/VIDEO INTERVIEWS

These are definitely more awkward and painful than in-person interviews. Most departments are still figuring out how to conduct phone/video interviews, so you might need to help them!

Try to find a way to get/give cues, when you don’t have visual cues.

For example, keep all your answers under three minutes; preferably WAY under.  Use a lot of phrases like “does that answer your question, or would you like me to expand on that?”  Give them the opportunity to give you cues.

In video interviews, think about how you set up the backdrop.  In these situations, everything is a message.

IN-PERSON INTERVIEWS

By the time you make it to campus, they already think you’re qualified…so a lot of what happens at this phase is finding out how you teach (so be prepared with a great teaching presentation), and if you’re the kind of person they might want hanging with them in the office for the next 20 years, and someone they can trust to help carry their load.  A LOT of committee work has to get done by a small number of people, so they want to know that you’re willing to put in your share of the work.  Show your enthusiasm about ALL parts of the job you’re going to be asked to do. Be your best self.  Be personable and warm.

From the moment you first arrive at a campus, to the moment you leave, and with every person you talk to, you are ON.  Every move you make will be observed and analyzed.  There is no moment when you can let down your hair.  Never criticize your host.  Be watchful, aware, and alert.

There is an aspect of this where you’re interviewing them.  The one piece of into you should try to get: what contribution is this department looking for from the candidate they’re trying to hire?  What are they really trying to accomplish through this hire?  Figure it out, and then communicate how you can help them do it!

Ask questions!  Show that you’re paying attention, and that you’re interested.  Ask different members of the department the same questions, and compare their answers.  If they argue in front of you, pay attention to how they argue.  Is this a cohesive faculty?  Also, be aware that different people will ask YOU the same questions, and compare your answers!  Be prepared to be consistent.

If a candidate has several job offers, how should they choose?

Of course we all hope this happens, but it’s unlikely that you’ll ever have several offers that seem equally good.  If, however, you’re having a tough time choosing, consider how each job might prepare you for some future job search, should you need it.

Just how tough is it to get a job in this field?  Are universities even hiring?

It’s simply a truth of the field that there are at least two times the amount of applicants as jobs.  You will have stiff competition!  But don’t see your rejection as a failure; check the MLA website for other job openings.

Also, keep things in perspective: Adjuncting is better than starving.  Teaching at a private school is better than starving.  Continue going to conferences and publishing, though!   Make the rounds, meet the people. and don’t give up.

What are some alternate jobs we might consider, and where can we find them?

You might feel that your options have gotten narrower when you graduate.  This is not true! Remember that you have a highly-trained mind as a result of your education – and that you have more education than the vast majority of people in this country.  You likely have the skills for a wide variety of jobs.

It’s plain and simple good advice to keep a real sense of your plans B, C, D, etc.  Keep lines of communication open with all kinds of people outside the academic world, so that the possibility of those livelihoods stays real to you!  The non-academic job search works very differently than the academic one, so keep that in mind as well, and learn the skills of navigating it.

A few professional areas to think about:

Public governmental policy positions.

State humanities councils.

Jobs connected to academia that aren’t professorial.

Jobs that interface academia and the public.

What is the one thing that grad students should start working on right now?

Since this advice was given at a  conference, the panelists simply advised everyone to go out and make friends!  Go out to dinner together, and have a good time!  Learn to be extroverted.  Keep in touch with your undergrad and MA professors.  Keep going to conferences, make yourself talk to people, find common interests, even those who have interests that are in different.  Build good relationships with everyone you encounter.

And one last piece of advice from the experts:

Think about the 5 things that “stuck” from this discussion.  Write them down, stick them in a drawer for a week, then take them out again and see what you take away then.

Trust that something good will happen – and if it doesn’t, don’t despair.    Expect the best!

I wonder if students don’t perceive the system to be one of alienating and frustrating stagnation.  We assure them that a community of scholars is actively debating literary form and history.  We make reference to documents that circulate within this system.  Yes, we exhort, the system is mostly closed, but it is dynamic, robust, and actively creative.  On occasion, the values and knowledge that it generates seep mysteriously into the broader cultural consciousness.  But the documents our students create do not circulate.  And the insulated walls of the classroom deaden the words of their collaborative literary-critical hymn.  Their access to the true dynamism of the system is limited to what they glean from its clerisy; their belief in that dynamism must be largely dependent on faith in the system itself.  This lack of access to the productive turmoil of the system surely calls into question the communicability, from within to without, of any generated value.  In the humanities, as is evidenced by the perpetual hand-wringing over the crises in the discipline, we are sometimes troubled to identify our product, the useful exportable value to be associated with our brand.  Sometimes we satisfy ourselves with intangibles: we teach critical thinking and reading skills; we preserve a sense of cultural heritage, however singular or multifaceted; our model leads not towards a product, but is based on a series of incremental recalibrations.  We are producing more well-rounded students, it is said, with a rich moral life and a more complex understanding of society and its histories.  Our product is not the knowledge, but the student.

Of course, to the student considering the value of a literature class and its accompanying textual productions, this explanation of the transmutation of value must seem so arcane as to be alchemical (or perhaps sacramental).  It is practically impossible to measure the contribution of a student’s work within a literature class to the process of his or her formation as a well-adjusted human being.  It probably appears somewhat presumptuous, as well, especially to those students not already committed to humanistic contemplation, when literature professors take credit for their critical thinking skills.  In the end, regardless of whether this explanation of the value of the English department is accurate, we probably have not done enough as a discipline to combat the perception that the literature class is isolated, a mystical enclave that gives up its deepest secrets only to the initiated.  True, there are ways in which the boundaries of the classroom have been rendered more porous by recent critical and pedagogical trends.  Discussion-based classrooms obviously do more to invite the student to import extra-literary concerns into the system.  The expansion of the canon and the onset of interdisciplinarity may also serve as figures for an inward breach of the system’s boundaries.  And classrooms that effectively integrate digital technology symbolically open the system to a torrent of information.  These techniques, if reasonably implemented, are all to the good.  But we should not rest at the establishment of the literature class as an all-consuming vacuum: boundaries penetrable from without, but rigid from within.  If I am not mistaken, what is necessary is a literature class which facilitates the student’s ability to transfer value directly and freely across those boundaries.

To this end I have been considering modifying my introductory Shakespeare for Non-Majors course.  The subtitle of the new course would be “Putting Shakespeare to Work.”  On the one hand, this course would continue to satisfy some of the expectations of a single-author survey.  We would read a variety of plays representative of diverse genres.  We would discuss issues of literary form and history.  And students would be assigned at least one short paper during the semester whose aim would be a close-reading of one of the plays.  The skills that our hermetic system demands are not without value; we just don’t always facilitate their egress into other contexts.  In order to more actively encourage an externalizing transfer of knowledge, the second focus of the class, put broadly, would be on the lingering value of the Shakespeare brand, and its exploitation for rhetorical and cultural gain.  Some of the plays would be coupled with modern film adaptations, from which we, as a class, would develop a number of ideas about the diverse cultural valuations of the idea of Shakespeare in our own time.  Accompanying our attention to films, we would read, for each play in the course, a text, taken from a non-literary or popular discourse community, which made use of some part of that particular play.  We would discuss the use of Shakespeare within that text, the rhetorical or textual work that he was doing, and evaluate its effectiveness.  As a final project, the students would not produce a typical research paper, or an extended close-reading; rather, they would be expected to produce a text that introduced Shakespeare into what might usually be considered a foreign context.  It might be something relevant to their chosen major; it might be an article for a trade or popular magazine they enjoyed; it might be a polemic or a letter to the editor; it might be a lab report; they would choose the context, but regardless of the chosen venue, the aim would be to render Shakespeare the texture for, and not the content of, the text that they produced.   The idea, finally, would be to encourage the use of Shakespeare, to push students to find ways to set him contiguous to a number of contemporary concerns, to carry him out into the “real world” and set him to circulating more broadly and doing good works.  I cannot export the value of the English department by myself, but my students could do much for the cause.  As a matter of fact, perhaps a more appropriate subtitle for the course might be “Putting Students to Work.”

I welcome in the comments below any suggestions about the practical implementation of such a course.  I’m currently looking for texts from non-literary discourses that make use of specific plays, so any suggestions towards such pairings posted into the comments would be much appreciated.  To my mind, the more diverse the texts the better: legal, political, journalistic, popular uses of Shakespeare are all welcome and needed.  Also, and this is somewhat in-line with Scott’s post from 10/6, any thoughts on how we might more effectively transfer the produce of the English department (or train our students to transfer the fruits of their in-class labors) are welcome as well.

I had never heard Drucker talk before, and knew only generally about her work and her most recent book, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing, but that was enough information to charm me to the presentation. Her presentation attracted a somewhat-diverse humanities crowd: I saw several of my peeps from the English department (among them a Chaucerian who also studies comics; a Renaissance scholar; a new media scholar; a postmodernist; and a poet), and detected groups also from the visual arts, history, education, media studies, and librarians and archivists. Individuals ranged from professors to grad students to elderly members of the public to sub-ten-year-old children accompanying their parent. One little girl came with a mini suitcase of organized markers and paper, and colored quietly and diligently for the entire talk.

The little girl coloring seemed to have her marker-smudged fingers on the pulse of Drucker’s talk, as did the Young Scholars’ Night crowd I accidentally joined. Though the speaker’s material presented a very serious look at the history of the book and used that information to make a prediction about its future (or rather how we humanists can shape its future), her style was playful and, in fact, provided a serious message of the importance of “play” to the evolution of authorship, readers, and texts.

Drucker folded examples of play, humor, entertainment, and recreation into her talk with a subtlety that seemed not to phase the scholarly vibe of the majority of the audience.

The first slide showed Keanu Reeves in The Matrix–in order to illustrate the fantasy of a disembodied virtual utopia. Juxtaposing the intelligent virtual and Keanu drew chuckles round the house, and Drucker was just getting started. She also showed slides of e-readers in different shapes, including the form of newspaper pages large enough to shield the privates of a guy on the john. She then addressed the history of print and dove backward in time to Gutenberg’s press and figures like Tyndale, where she made the requisite “he had a lot at stake” joke. We then saw slides of early playing cards and learned how printers were asked by the church to stop producing them, as the populace took too easily to gambling. After other examples, she ended with a vision of the way a “novel” of the future might work: Drucker describes a narrative that seems folded into news in realtime that reaches you through mobile devices and that changes as you make decisions about how to interact with the narrative. It is multimedia, multi-player, and multi-platform. It sounded a bit like the Michael Douglas movie The Game, and also a little bit like Stranger Than Fiction. Serious play, in which our concepts of fiction and real life blend and disrupt each other in new ways.

Maybe I’ve just been studying for comps for too long and neglecting proper recreation, but I couldn’t help but find the message of seriously play–or “adult swim”–in Drucker’s talk about the future of the book. Her presentation suggested to me that the meaning of play, play-ers, play media, and conversely the definition of “work” (noun and verb), have a giant impact on the way we treat reading technologies now and will treat new reading and authoring technologies in the future.

But what shall I be?  What an agonizing decision this can be for us self-fashioners.  We cannot merely decide what we will seem like on Halloween, we also must decide what we will be.  We decide upon the costume based on what it says about the submerged identity.  I find myself torn between several possibilities.  First, the Sublime.  In this costume I dress as normal, except I wear a cap with a lime glued to the bill.  I am sub-lime.  But who am I sub-sublime?  Clearly I’m intellectual: I’ve dressed as a concept for Halloween.  But I’m also flippant—I’ve reduced a complex philosophical idea about the limits of perception and expression to a fruit pun.  Don’t worry about me; I don’t take things too seriously.  It appears I have a wry sense of humor.  And there’s more than a little exclusion to this costume; depending on what Halloween party I’m going to, I must expect that there will be some who don’t get the joke.  But I’m comfortable with that; in fact, I wouldn’t mind having to explain the joke.  Perhaps this costume also says: “I’m fairly casual when it comes to Halloween.  You’ll not confuse me for a Halloween enthusiast.”

Or there’s Jareth, the goblin-king, from the movie Labyrinth.  This one’s primarily nostalgic and a bit more earnest; it gazes fondly on the same childhood that engendered my love for the holiday.  It took some assembling and, unlike the sublime, is not dismissive of the festivities.  With its revealing tights it’s also a bit more daring—a flamboyant statement of personal bodily comfort.  Or there’s Bill Compton from True Blood: pop-culture savvy, less exclusive than the sublime and less nostalgic than the goblin-king.  This one announces, “I participate in my own cultural moment.  I am not too cloistered to Pop.”  There is also a whole host of possibilities already discarded for the undesirable personas (undesirable at the present time) they manifest.  The perennial dead celebrity costume is too callous and may gesture towards an unoriginal sense of humor.  Ditto, the ironic disaster costume.  And while historical, literary, or political personas are not off the table for Halloweens in perpetuity, each would announce affiliations I don’t currently feel compelled to own.

This year the problem is complicated by the fact that I’ve invited my Shakespeare class to attend on Thursday in a Shakespeare-themed costume.  I’ve devoted some time at the beginning of the period to having a costume contest, judged on cleverness and creativity.  And I should probably participate, for what kind of person wears no costume.  Now I must fit the costume to a new context: the classroom.  It will not merely generate an identity, but an identity-as-instructor.  The possibilities repeat themselves: do I go as a character (perhaps Malvolio cross-gartered), an absurd detail (Titus Andronicus’s disembodied hand), a genre (comedy).  So many possibilities.  How will I ever settle upon one?  Have I properly considered the pedagogical repercussions of each?  Beset by such a plethora of identities, how could I not despair?

Except, it occurs to me, I have already worn costumes to teach because, in some degree, this is what the “teaching persona” always is.  And as assiduously as we focus on the “seems” of the persona, we take for granted the “is” that we are constantly constructing.  Underlying each in-class tic and foible is an out-of-class phantom identity.  Have you ever gone to class dressed as the “wise fool”?  This persona is often characterized by a self-deprecating humor that never spills over into buffoonery.  The fool’s prerogative is the juxtaposition of gravest truth and levity, and as such the fool often pitches its voice into mock gravity when reading, or transports high literature into foreign contexts to absurd effect.  This persona announces an identity capable of unserious engagement.  It attempts to bridge the various gaps between students and instructors by transmuting all concepts into their least-threatening forms.  The out-of-class fool must be approachable (because harmless), lighthearted, jovial, a committed ironist.  At the same time this persona secures its self-assuredness by asserting, in a move surely crafted to anticipate the myriad ego-battering dangers of teaching, “you cannot make light of me, for I have already made light of myself.”

A related but distinct persona is the “comedian.”  Also operating by humor, but relying less on the diminishment of seriousness and more on a carefully crafted comic timing, the comedian is more charismatic than the fool.  Then there is the “lover of literature.”  In class this persona will sometimes be overcome by the course texts, even to the point of being (strategically) unable to articulate how impressive or important the text really is.  Sometimes too this persona allows the effects of textual sentiment to play upon its countenance.  All of this is a calculated performance to establish the passion of the out-of class identity, as well as its seriousness.  Also worth considering is the “authoritarian,” who makes much, in class, of the rules and expectations of the course.  Conspicuous about the authoritarian is that, rather than communicating an out-of-class identity, this persona assures the students that such an identity exists, but that they will have no access to it.  Another fairly common persona is the “molder of minds” who demonstrates a strategic disregard for the stuffy conceptual detritus that accompanies literary formalism.  This persona communicates to the students that it is less interested in filling their minds with literary facts and more interested in activating their potential.  As such, in-class conversations wax philosophical or broadly cultural.  As with each other instance, this persona creates its corresponding identity: one approachable for its worldliness, for its broad range of ideas, for its commitment to spilling outside of the boundaries of the traditional.  In each case, the implied identity serves as the truth-of-personality that allows for today’s student to identify with an instructor he or she knows almost nothing about.

No doubt, I have not exhausted the list of possible personas.  And I suspect that very rarely does an instructor or professor pass even an entire week dressed solely in one or another pedagogical costume.  Where Halloween lasts only one evening, teaching is most often a lifetime commitment.  It may be tempting to presume that the personas we adopt in-class arise from our innermost personal convictions, but it is far more advantageous to consider that the identity comes after the persona, a means of backstopping the complex of rhetorical and pedagogical decisions that we make every day.  One class may respond better to the assured confidence of the comedian, while another warms to the affable stumbling of the fool.  In a moment of weakness any class (and perhaps many instructors and professors) may need the alienating distance of the authoritarian.  Considering these personas, and even the communicated identities underlying, as so many interchangeable strategies helps to keep us from being entranced by our own costumery.  It is, after all, when we believe that the failures of any given persona to connect in the classroom arise from an inborn character flaw, rather than a rhetorical or performative misstep, that we fall into pedagogical despair.  It is when we assume that a persona has blossomed from some incontrovertible aspect of our stable selves that we are deprived of the fluidity necessary to good teaching.

Such a mistake would be tantamount to imagining that my Halloween costume reflected who I was, rather than who I had decided, for the evening, to be.   That would in turn mean dressing in the same costume year-in and year-out.  And while I have, in bygone busy years, over-relied on the at hand ease of the cowboy costume, I would hate to be doomed to the poncho and Stetson for all eternity.