" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

There are only 3 weeks left, not that I’m count­ing, and any momen­tum from my June progress has slowed to a gasp­ing, shud­der­ing, crawl. So here I sit, star­ing at my words on the page, suf­fer­ing from dis­ser­ta­tion amne­sia after 4 days of inactivity.

Here’s what I have so far:

• 20 decent pages;
• bits and pieces of other chapters;
• 45 pages notes;
• a hand­cramp;
• too few work­able hours in the day;
• an out­line that I keep changing;
• no real deadline;
• an awe­some dis­ser­ta­tion topic;
• a real shit dis­ser­ta­tion topic;
• pos­si­ble symp­toms of dis­so­cia­tive iden­tity disorder;
• a list.

I’m not sure what the goal is here, I just wanted to write some­thing today. I have many leads, but I’m feel­ing par­a­lyzed about going after them. What if I don’t find any­thing, or worse, I find that my idea sucks and it isn’t replaced by a bet­ter idea.

Okay, I’m going to take a deep breath, turn off the Pan­dora Sum­mer Hits of the 90s sta­tion (after this song), and do some research into 1790s Eng­lish Radicalism.

The things, you say, Your pur­ple prose just gives you away The things, you say, You’re unbe­liev­able!

Ira Glass on Sto­ry­telling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

The fam­ily unit went to Los Ange­les late last month and I spent a few days in the Hunt­ing­ton Research Library. For any of you British and Amer­i­can his­to­ri­ans out there who look at the past 1000 years of his­tory, you should check out the Hunt­ing­ton. Their man­u­script and rare books col­lec­tion is impres­sive, to say the least.

My work looks at eigh­teenth to nine­teenth cen­tury car­i­ca­ture and race. For my first chap­ter, I dis­cuss the link between phys­iog­nomy, race, and pol­i­tics and how polit­i­cal life was racial­ized as a result of ques­tions about con­tin­u­ing the slave trade, the influx of black poor into Lon­don, and the Hait­ian Rev­o­lu­tion. Diana Don­ald, author of the fan­tas­ti­cally com­pre­hen­sive 1996 mono­graph The Age of Car­i­ca­ture, dis­cusses the role of phys­iog­nomy, the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of a person’s bod­ily and facial fea­tures, ges­tures, and expres­sions as a means to mea­sure their per­son­al­ity traits and moral for­ti­tude, on early “how-to” guides to car­i­ca­ture. I wanted to see these guides for myself and much to my sur­prise, the first guide, *An His­tor­i­cal Sketch of the Art of Car­i­ca­tur­ing with Graphic Illus­tra­tions” (1813) by James Peller Mal­colm, opens with a dis­cus­sion of race, inher­i­tance, and the sub­lime beauty of Quakers.

For Mal­colm, graphic car­i­ca­ture was a truth-seeking exer­cise. That the most beau­ti­ful fea­tures demon­strate sup­pressed feel­ings and that women, in par­tic­u­lar, should “not mix in the usual amuse­ments of the world [so as not to be] liable to those acci­dents which would cause car­i­ca­tured lin­ea­ments in their off­spring.” (empha­sis added) This quote made me stop in my tracks. Malcolm’s car­i­ca­ture is about deco­rum and the dan­gers of a kind of moral mis­ce­gena­tion as a result of “mix­ing” emo­tion with deco­rum. He goes on to warn par­ents that “fre­quent and exces­sive laugh­ter must con­tribute to derange the fea­tures” so they should be wary of pro­duc­ing in their chil­dren an exag­ger­a­tion of their own worst, but sup­pressed attributes.

What led to this tweet exchange was Malcolm’s dis­cus­sion of the “sav­age car­i­ca­tur­ist.” He described “sav­age” peo­ples from the South Seas who can only cre­ate grotesque car­i­ca­ture art because they are, “car­i­ca­tures in nature.” Their art­work is a result of their own “dis­or­dered imag­i­na­tion” and the British car­i­ca­ture artist can learn from this innate sav­agery. He goes on to talk about the “despised and offen­sive hot­ten­tot” and how even if she had the “favoured pro­por­tions” of the Euro­pean, her com­plex­ion lends her to be a nat­u­rally occur­ring caricature.

I still haven’t gen­er­ated the link to the slave trade pre­cisely, but I feel so close to a break­through that it’s prob­a­bly star­ing me right in the face.

Our sit­ter is on vaca­tion this month, so I’m on full-time mama duty and it’s been amaz­ing. If you’re a grad­u­ate stu­dent or an adjunct, com­mon wis­dom says you can kiss your career good­bye once you repro­duce. My advi­sor sug­gested I fol­low in her foot­steps and wait until I have a lav­ish tenured posi­tion at an elite uni­ver­sity before the big breed. But since I didn’t go “straight through” (doc­toral pro­gram imme­di­ately after col­lege), I’m not 27, and can’t afford to wait until like, never, for a tenure track posi­tion I hurled my well-laid plans into the wood­chip­per and got preg­nant. Fast-forward eigh­teen months and I have a kinetic tod­dler and I’m still work­ing on my first chap­ter. But have I aban­doned all hope in this month of full-time tod­dler care? Am I out of the aca­d­e­mic game for­ever because now I change dia­pers and chop hot dogs into tiny lit­tle Triv­ial Pur­suit pie-sized pieces? The short answer is: sur­pris­ingly, … no.

The past three weeks have been my most pro­duc­tive all year. The mas­sive time-suck that over­shad­ows my work and fam­ily life isn’t the kiddo, it’s the TA-ing. My pro­gram offered me a 6th year teach­ing fel­low­ship so I had to TA. I put the kid in day­care because I thought it would afford me the time to teach and write, but my teach­ing pit­tance paid for day­care which only gave me time to pre­pare for teach­ing. This daily ouroboros left me with over­whelm­ing teach­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties, a stag­nant dis­ser­ta­tion, and guilt about pay­ing for day­care despite my uneven pro­duc­tiv­ity. But since my teach­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties ended, I’ve felt free to do my own work. And know­ing that I have t-minus 2.5 hours and count­ing, I get straight to work and don’t stop until the baby wakes up. I did this 5-days a week for three weeks and made amaz­ing progress.

But it wasn’t just the free­dom from teach­ing, I also changed my process. After this dis­cus­sion on #PhD­Chat, I decided to set my lap­top aside and return to hand­writ­ing my notes. I used to write this way and then decided to try and type every­thing on my com­puter. I thought I was skip­ping an unnec­es­sary step since my process looks like this:

1. Hand­write notes
2. Tran­scribe onto lap­top into a draft
3. Print draft and revise
4. Repeat step 3 until sat­is­fied with final draft

I thought if I skipped step 1, I’d save time, but instead I inter­rupted my nat­ural way of writ­ing. Return­ing to hand­writ­ing allows me to own my words. I imbue typed words, yes, even my own, with some mag­i­cal author­ity and I have a hard time return­ing to my typed notes. Hence, I have over 40,000 words and not a chap­ter to speak of.

While I haven’t com­pleted my chap­ter draft, I’m feel­ing opti­mistic about fin­ish­ing — moreso than I felt all year. Let’s just hope my 6-week sum­mer class doesn’t dis­perse my momentum.

tl:dr: teach­ing can be a big­ger time suck than par­ent­hood. So long as you work on your dis­ser­ta­tion every day, you’ll get it done.