Tag: job market

Posted on

Blog Posts in the Graduate Classroom: Part 2, Pragmatic Considerations

Part 1 of this blog entry presented the rationale behind using the Medieval Studies Research Blog (MSRB) as a pedagogical tool. Part 2 dives into the practical side of graduate-level blog post assignments specifically tailored to the MSRB’s interdisciplinary mission.

Precedent has already been set for bringing the MSRB into the graduate classroom. In fact, the MSRB originally emerged out of Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s manuscript studies course, and her students continue to contribute exceptional work. During the fall 2017 semester, for instance, Kerby-Fulton’s class, “Introduction to Medieval English Manuscript Studies,” worked on the following assignment, for which I recently gave a guest lecture on “How to Write a Successful Blog Post:”

Workshop Assignment: The Workshop Assignment will be the creation of a blog post of about 500 words. Dr. Karrie Fuller (Medieval Institute’s Medieval Studies Research Blog webmaster and Lecturer, St. Mary’s College) will explain the format for this, and both she and I will be happy to help as well to advise on content. It should be delivered on the workshop day; note that your oral presentation of your post should not exceed 5 - 10 minutes, not counting questions afterwards). This assignment is an excellent preparation for conference roundtables and panels.

When constructing a blog assignment for this site, the only restrictions are that the subject matter should somehow relate to the medieval period, and contributions should be written in a style appropriate to the academic blog. Otherwise, the possibilities remain wide open. As in the example just provided, many traditional forms of academic writing and oral presentation can be adapted to fit the blog format, whether as one component of a larger project, or on its own. There is also plenty of room for experimentation with multimedia, tone, creative responses to or reflection on course content. Furthermore, because the site’s interdisciplinary coverage reflects the full range of scholarly activity performed at Notre Dame, instructors from all disciplines should feel welcome to participate.

For additional support with these assignments, the Medieval Institute has recently approved a new classroom visit program. These visits are by no means required for instructors assigning blog posts for this site, but are available for anyone wanting a little extra help preparing students for the task. Visits consist of a twenty-minute guest lecture about how to put together a successful blog post and set it up on WordPress. The graduate students in attendance for my first class visit earlier this semester responded positively to the experience, and will know exactly what to expect when it comes time to prepare their work for publication. Anyone interested in scheduling a class visit can contact me directly (email address listed below).

Moreover, helping graduate students at an early stage of their training to see the benefits of contributing posts will, ideally, encourage them to continue submitting their work as they advance beyond coursework. Becoming a regular, or even an occasional contributor will be even more effective than publishing a single entry as it will demonstrate a more sustained involvement with a large-scale digital project. Because curating an online presence is now a necessity for scholars, this form of professionalization can help graduate students manage their online profiles, making them more memorable, as Battershill suggests, “It is a good idea, in other words, for each grad student to take the time to craft an online presence that is what they want it to be—that is, intentional, professional, and memorable. Students should know what comes up when search committees or journal editors Google their names, and ideally they should try to make sure that the search results on the first few pages include some indication of their academic work.”[1] This site’s university affiliation means that it will show up first in Google searches, and its short article format means that it will add new content to the CVs and publication lists already present on their academia.edu and LinkedIn pages. Contributions are also circulated via Twitter and Facebook to expand their online visibility.

Ultimately, using this site as the basis for course assignments benefits everybody involved. Students and instructors gain DH experience, the Medieval Institute continues to build a strong online research profile, and audiences outside the academy gain greater access to knowledge they would otherwise never receive.

For questions, posting schedules, or class visit sign-ups, feel free to contact me at kfuller2@alumni.nd.edu.

Karrie Fuller, Ph.D.
University of Notre Dame/St. Mary’s College

Update 5/4/18: Here is sample assignment that could be adapted easily for graduate students.

Select Bibliography of Introductions to DH and DH Pedagogy

Battershill, Claire and Shawna Ross. Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp. Digital_Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

Gardner, Eileen and Ronald G. Musto. The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Gold, Matt K., and Lauren Klein, eds. Debates in Digital Humanities 2016. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Hirsch, Brett D., ed. Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012.

Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemans, and John Unsworth, eds. A New Companion to Digital Humanities. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Chicester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016.

 

[1] Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross, Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017): 158-159.

Posted on

Blog Posts in the Graduate Classroom: Part 1, The Rationale

A few weeks ago I wrote a post introducing the Medieval Institute’s new Medieval Undergraduate Research website (now the “Undergrad Wednesdays” series on this site) and encouraging instructors to use it for course assignments that will boost their students’ Digital Humanities (DH) experience. Because DH experience has been crucial to the success of recent medievalist PhDs on the job market, this two-part follow-up post will focus on the value of DH work for them so that they can collaborate with faculty mentors to expand their online presence using this site, the Medieval Institute’s Medieval Studies Research Blog (MSRB). Whereas part 1 makes the case that more faculty should take advantage of this site’s pedagogical potential, part 2 offers specific ideas for incorporating this already active scholarly platform into graduate-level pedagogy.

For many reasons, involvement in DH is no longer optional for rising scholars specializing in the Middle Ages. Tenure-track job ads these days regularly mention DH as a desired subspecialty if not a major component of candidates’ professional profiles. As students increasingly pursue other career options, DH skills become even more important. Publishers, libraries, museums, non-profits, and university administrations rely heavily on technology, necessitating, to extend Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair’s point about DH degree programs, a newer, broader approach to professional acculturation.[1] There is, in fact, a legitimate sense of urgency behind many graduate students’ desires to pursue DH work matched by an equal level of responsibility demanded of humanities programs to support their efforts. While not all graduate students seeking DH experience intend to (or even need to) specialize in the field, they nevertheless could benefit profoundly from at least some exposure to and hands-on experience with projects that merge technology and humanities research.[2] This site offers one step in that direction, providing a digital platform backed by a major research institution that graduate students can integrate into their training from early on in their program, even at the coursework stage.

The pressures coming from the academic and non-academic job markets stem, in large part, from a growing demand for humanistic work to become more public and more accessible. Nicole Eddy, this site’s original administrator and the new Managing Editor of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series, points out that “academics are called on more and more to be not just scholars but Public Humanists, making a case for the significance of their work outside the academy and in new and creative ways. It is no longer sufficient to confine scholarly activity to the classroom or the academic journal, but to instead show the ability to engage with a diverse audience in creative ways.”[3] She also notes that because dissertations tend to be written for specialist audiences, contributing to projects such as this site can expand the reach and impact of our work.

In a broader sense, then, the digital humanities matter because they can deliver our work to a public audience in order to serve a wider community beyond the walls of the academy. Indeed, multiple DH practitioners have commented on the field’s ability to return us to the original spirit of humanism: “the digital humanities might yet again be set to embrace the methods and outlooks that the very first Renaissance humanists took up: to use modern communication skills–digital iterations of rhetoric and grammar–supplemented by the creative arts of the imagination and the reflective wisdom of the historical outlook to reach contemporary audiences with interpretations of what it is to be human and what it is to be a responsible citizen.”[4] With its ability to reach readers both within and without the academy, this site treats public writing as a core function of humanities work, making the relevance and value of our research more transparent.

But, what, exactly, is the Medieval Studies Research Blog (MSRB)? As our “About Us” page suggests, it is an active scholarly platform for scholars at any stage of their careers. What this means is that graduate students who write posts for a course assignment contribute to a DH project that will attract immediate readers. Rather than performing a practice, or exploratory exercise, this particular professional development experience leaves students with an online publication they can list on their CV and a greater confidence in their capacity to bring research to life.

Students posting to this site share company with advanced scholars, such as Maidie Hilmo, whose groundbreaking work on the Pearl-Gawain manuscript is documented here. To our benefit, many of our visiting scholars have contributed their voices, including Richard Cole and Katherine Oswald, with even more scheduled for the coming months. Most of our posts relate to the authors’ current or recent research, written to stake a claim on a certain topic, gain a wider audience for recent publications, or develop an idea they could not fit into their last article. Others write on original topics better suited to the blog format than the academic journal, such as Andrea Castonguay’s contribution on interdisciplinarity, or to take advantage of the genre’s multimedia possibilities as in Richard Fahey’s post on South Bend. Still others write with the goal of creating supplementary background readings that undergraduates could read in their courses. Thus far, we have also created two special series– one on “Working in the Archives” and another on the “North Seas”–as well as a growing and evolving translation and recitation project. Graduate students contributing posts (or translations) to the MSRB, therefore, participate in the project as and alongside other scholars.

Depending on how instructors frame their assignments, thoughtful implementation of the MSRB in the classroom could meet multiple learning outcomes at once. The MSRB could be used to naturally integrate digital genres into our graduate students’ training in a way that helps them to craft a public as well as academic voice. By giving them the opportunity to maintain their digital presence and write for new audiences, this project can enhance their work as researchers, as instructors, as collaborators, and as public servants.[5]

For questions, posting schedules, or class visit sign-ups, feel free to contact me at kfuller2@alumni.nd.edu. Also, follow us on Twitter: @MedievalNDblog.

Part 2 of this post can be found here.

Karrie Fuller, Ph.D.
University of Notre Dame/St. Mary’s College

[1] Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair, “Acculturation and the Digital Humanities Community,” Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, Politics, ed. by Brett Hirsch (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012): 177-211.

[2] Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross, Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017): see esp. 147-48.

[3] Private correspondence. Quoted with permission.

[4] Eileen Gardner and Ronald G. Musto, The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 13. For a similar statement, see Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, et al., Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012): 25-26.

[5] Many thanks to Erica Machulak for her detailed feedback on this post.

Posted on

“Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg:” Finishing a Medievalist Dissertation under the New Graduate School Paradigm

As I was re-reading earlier Chequered Board posts by my colleagues and friends both here at ND and abroad, looking for inspiration and guidance on how exactly one does this “blog” thing, I found myself distracted by the dates attached to each post. Each one reminded me of an important upcoming date: 31 May, 2017.

It’s not a date of excitement or performance anxiety. It’s a date of uncertainty and dread.

11 weeks left. That’s approximately how long until my final student stipend paycheck from the University of Notre Dame. My health insurance – to the best of my knowledge – continues until mid-August. Although I have three more years of tuition waiver, my institution will provide no further stipendiary assistance because I am reaching the end of my sixth year here.

It’s been an amazing six years. My first year in the Medieval Institute passed in a blur of fascinating courses taught by brilliant professors and the mandatory “Orientation to Medieval Studies,” which threw us into bibliographies of nearly every medieval topic under the sun with diverse faculty personalities. The Latin Exam haunted me, but also led to some of my closest grad student friendships here at ND with people who actually know Latin instead of hiding from it. The myriad lectures (attendance obligatory but never begrudged) exposed me to Gothic Architecture, French Romances, Paleography, Carolingian history, and more. The following year, dominated by the now-defunct 2nd Year Project, provided me with a new advisor and the glory of not being a first-year student. In my third year, I served as MI student representative and learned exactly how *not* to study for your comprehensive exams, while navigating the loss of our director, Remie Constable, whose sudden, premature death rocked our community. Afterwards in my fourth year, I began mucking around in the swamps of my medieval wetlands dissertation, and last year I was on a Fulbright student research scholarship in Uppsala, Sweden, learning the landscape of environmental humanities from a network of European scholars.

During these years, I’ve had the pleasure of being part of a robust medievalist community. Each time someone presented at a conference, published an article, received a grant, defended a dissertation or found a job, we all celebrated. New faces – faculty, staff, students, and visitors – have taken the place of those who once seemed bastions of the MI, but the medievalist community survives. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Only some things have significantly changed. The academic job market, though not nearly as bad as it was, has never and will never recover to its previous levels. The shift to adjunct faculty has radically altered the landscape; short-term postdoctoral fellowships and Visiting Assistant Professorships have replaced the tenure-track Assistant Professor positions on the job boards in ways that seem exploitative of a large pool of qualified candidates.

The expectations for grad students have also increased. ABD students and newly-minted PhDs need at least two articles to be considered seriously as job or fellowship candidates (I’ve even heard as high as four!). We must maintain a social media presence, have solid teaching records in our fields, and demonstrate involvement in non-academic outreach and planning. Even winning a widely recognized grant like the Fulbright or DAAD is not enough to merit a second look at your CV. Regardless of job market uncertainty, universities are pressuring students to finish faster (The University of Notre Dame, for example, began a new 5+1 program in 2016 with the help of the Arthur W. Mellon Foundation).

This poor state of affairs is exacerbated by the political state of affairs. Whatever your political leanings, it must be acknowledged that the current administration is anti-intellectual, and the new Secretary of Education isn’t invested in spending more on higher education systems she considers over-regulated and her approach to the massive student-loan debt problem is vague at best.

“How do we get through this?” I wonder almost daily. Not just for myself but for the peers who have shaped my graduate education perhaps even more than any individual faculty member. The refrain from the Anglo-Saxon poem Deor seems apropos, that “Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg” (“that was overcome, so may this be”).[1] The poet, who gives his name as Deor, wrote six strophes that allude to individual or collective suffering that was eventually overcome, even if the denouement was not all sunshine and roses. Deor relates his own misery in the final stanza, that he has lost the coveted position of scop, a type of court bard that provided joy in the hall.[2] Parallels to the medieval graduate student experience include the traditional role of learning and reconstructing the stories of the past (as the Beowulf-poet says, wordum wrixlan, l.874a) combined with the collegiality of the academic environment; this makes it easy to relate to his sense of loss when Deor is no longer welcome in that hall. Our modern hallowed halls are no longer able to embrace and welcome the PhD graduates, who would be delighted to continue in the academic tradition.

The horizon has changed for the humanities and a consolatio refrain like Deor’s will not help us. We have convinced ourselves that a self-perpetuating cycle of academic mentoring of future academics was our highest goal, yet this approach has left us isolated in an ivory tower and our graduates ill-equipped to transition to non-academic positions. Recent initiatives such as the Mellon/ACLS Public Fellows program attempt to provide firsthand experience for recent PhDs in alt-academic positions. Despite this we still create hierarchies of success based on the proximity of our post-graduate-school life to the academic world. This does a great disservice to essential humanistic emphasis on understanding ourselves and our place in this world.

A close friend recently suggested that the core of the new humanistic engagement is retheorizing ourselves as academics regardless of where our pathways lead. The whirlwind meanderings under my professors’ rigorous watch during the last six years have provided me the necessary skills to continue in an academic career, should that prove feasible. As that eleven-week deadline marches closer, I continue applying to academic positions, but also university administrative positions, local off-campus positions that allow me to stay near my academic and social community, and cultural-engagement positions that would utilize my “extra-curricular” skills: project management, library sciences, professional development training, event planning, database management, community outreach, and cultural diplomacy. All of these so-called alternatives are not failures; instead they embody the essence of the humanities.

We humanists do ourselves a great disservice when we fail to maintain our own value. The humanities has the most to offer in the face of anti-intellectualism and resistance to human rights. If we are like Deor, lamenting a lost place in the king’s favor, we have missed the point. Our songs and stories, our research and engagement, our inquiry and curiosity are the most valuable things we have. External realities are outside of our control. Engaging in exploitative labor as an adjunct or full-time instructor is not justified by a love of our subject, commitment to students, or access to the scraps under the university table. We must recognize the equal validity of academic and alt-academic positions and reorganize our graduate programs to prepare students for a broader range of career pathways through service obligations, internships, or even dissertation alternatives that integrate the project management skills that employers seek.[3]

Although I initially intended to write about my current research project on medieval Icelandic water laws and contemporary debates on US state, regional, and federal jurisdictions, this post represents instead the opportunity to articulate what more often frames my discussions with my colleagues who are finishing or recently finished their dissertations: the economic and career uncertainty that encapsulates our lives. We can overcome the challenge individually, but our field will continue to suffer until we decentralize the post-baccalaureate training model from the ideal of a tenure-track position.

Mae Kilker
University of Notre Dame

[1] For an overview myriad attempts for translating this line, see Alfred Bammesberger, “The Old English Poem Deor: Its Structural Units and the Grammatical Analysis of Its Refrain,” Anglia 133.2(2015):322-26.

[2] “Sum sceal mid hearpan æt his hlafordes / fotum sittan, feoh þicgan, / ond a snellice snere wræstan, / lætan scralletan sceacol, se þe hleapeð, / nægl neomegende; biþ him neod micel.” (Fortunes of Men, l. 80-84)

[3] On the disconnect between skills employers seek and graduate school training across disciplines, see Denecke et al., Professional Development: Shaping Effective Programs for STEM Graduate Students. Washington, DC: Council of Graduate Schools.