Arrrrrrrrrgh! I hate hate hate applying for postdocs! Stupid postdocs and their persnickety requirements and themes that require you to revamp all your job materials to match their stupid ideas! And the themes! Arrrrgh! Why yes, I do find the study of earwigs to be fascinating! In fact, my current project all about 18th century nosepicking exactly matches your fascinating theme: Earwigs of Tomorrow --- at least it will once I rewrite all my job materials to highlight a different set of keywords and write a research proposal that situates my work at the intersection of nosepicking and earwigs. What the hell can I make up within a few days that will make the appropriate crossover? How about Enlightenment Orifices: Transgressing the Boundaries of Body and Nation? No? Ok, um, how about Exquisite Filth: Rational Hygiene and the Diseased Other in Eighteenth-Century Culture?
Ok, now to change around all my keywords and highlight different strands of my argument than I usually do and ... wait, what? Check the what? Oh, check the MLA bib to see if someone has already written this book/argument or used this title? Ok. ... What the..? Has everyone written on this already? Fuck. Fuck! FUCK!
Fucking postdocs. How bout this as a statement of future research: Dear Postdoc People: I am poor. Give me lots of money now or you will never see your cat fluffy again! Fund me already! Fuckin'A.
10 comments:
i heart this post.
Won't you pleeeez write Enligtenment Orifices?!! PLEEEEZ!
Ugh, those themes! They always seem specially selected by committees for the exclusion of normal medievalists. I've often wondered - maybe somebody who's won a themed fellowship can tell us - do those themes ever result in productive interdisciplinary scholarly endeavor, or to people just show up for the year and work on what they were going to work on anyway?
No! Not Fluffy! (I'm sorry about the postdoc angst. Here's to hoping you won't even need to go there.)
omg I agree!!! poor fluffy, hang in there
Sucks, but stick with it. The act of making someone *think* that you really really love their topic and you've been salivating over it for years is precisely why they will want to hire you.
Those titles sound discomfortingly familiar...
Enlightenment Orifices has real potential, as does Exquisite Filth...
May I propose: "Enlightenment Orifices and the People Who Loved Them."
Now that's a project I'd fund myself.
I, too, would read 'Enlightenment Orifices'. Sounds like a terribly frustrating process. Perhaps more beer is in order?
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