Like just about everyone else stuck inside during this lockdown, I’ve fallen into a sort of cabin fever malaise that’s made work pretty difficult. In that vein, I also haven’t felt much like writing blog essays, and I haven’t been inspired enough in the kitchen to post recipes. I do have some thoughts: the performance of struggle and poverty that I see from a lot of people who are doing just fine, all while delivery workers are carrying the rest of us on their backs; experiments in scarcity cooking in an effort to keep things interesting while seemingly arbitrary ingredients disappear from stores (goodbye, flour!); and, of course, my dissertation.
Read MoreTag: writing
Dissertation writing (and writing, and writing)
One of the things that’s actually helpful about applying for funding to support me in my final year of dissertation writing is that it forces me to be reflective about the process of writing and take stock of where I am and where I still need to go. I just submitted what is likely my final application, my fifth since October, and I found myself adjusting my completion timeline yet again. As part of the application, most organizations require a timeline of the work you still need to do. I’ve used the same timeline for every application, organized by dissertation chapter, and tweaked it as time has gone on and I’ve actually checked some items off the list. But mostly, I’ve just kept pushing back the date that I’ll finish Chapter 2. My first version of this timeline, back in October, said that I would finish Chapter 2 in November. Now, here I am at the start of February and I just pushed the estimate to mid-February. Have I been kidding myself about how much work I still have to do?
Read MoreResearch Progress Notes: Week of July 1st
The end is near.
Long-term Goals and Teaching History that Matters
I’ve talked before about the biggest problem I see in my field – that we don’t know what History is and so we don’t know how to teach it. I’ve been thinking recently about how this also hurts the image of History as a field – it just doesn’t seem welcoming, useful, or enjoyable to most people. The first thing most people say to me when I tell them I’m a historian is either Oh I hated history in school, there were too many facts to memorize! or I love history, I’m great at remembering stuff! Isn’t it a huge problem that the popular conception of this field – memorizing facts – actually has nothing to do with it? Read More
Research Progress Notes – Week of November 26th
Last week I stayed home and did some editing. This week I read more medieval writings about urine. So, pretty mundane stuff. Read More
How to apply for grad school
Graduate school is a tightly-kept gate, and frankly it shouldn’t be that way. I’ve gathered some wisdom about how to succeed in making it past the gatekeepers from my own experiences as well as those of my friends in various fields. Read More
Robin Writes 