November, 2021 Research Update

Amicii!  It is now December.

November (and early December) is always a busy month as the semester comes to a close, assignments come due and have to be graded.  It is also the crescendo of the job market process.  It cannot have been difficult to notice from the blog's publication schedule that I have been more than a little busy!

Nevertheless, there has been some progress to report.  On Nov. 4, I gave a talk virtually to the Yale Veterans Association on "The History Students Bring With Them," discussing the classroom effects of the sort of historical frames in games like EUIV that I've discussed on the blog.  I also made some podcast appearances on the topic, both with the crew at Three Moves Ahead (https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes/the-state-with-bret-devereaux) and with Adrian Bonenberger at The Wrath-Bearing Tree (https://soundcloud.com/user-449758953/when-might-makes-right-practicing-history-through-games-and-movies).  And I also made another guest appearance on the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, this time discussing Dune (https://boiledleatheraudiohour.tumblr.com/post/668309518485176320/blah-142-the-fremen-mirage-the-myth-of-the).  Many, many podcasts!  Finally, as I am writing this, an essay I wrote on the concerning lessons ancient Greek tyranny has for understanding the continued political tensions in the United States which appeared in The Bulwark just yesterday (https://www.thebulwark.com/ancient-insurrections-and-ours/).

Meanwhile, on the scholarship front, I am a bit behind, but I've settled on a strategy for our nomadic Article II of targeting the (English-language) German journal Chiron.  Given the journal's publication schedule, that would mean, assuming the submission is successful, the article would likely appear next December (roughly a year from now), but that should be fine (job market-wise, as long as I can list it as 'forthcoming' next fall, that's all I need).  it's also pretty high profile, which is important; I am really quite proud of Article II, despite its travails, so I want to make sure it ends up somewhere with good visibility.  That said this means I have both reformatting on Article II and revisions to the Logistics Chapter that both need to be done, which is probably what I'll be doing for most of December.

Finally, on the job market front, as you may recall from 2020's August update on the schedule of the job market, we are now in the stage where most applications are in (although there have been an unusually high proportion of late-posting jobs this year) and we're moving to the interviews and campus visit phase.  That doesn't mean the work is done though, because one has to prepare for those interviews and visits (assuming you are lucky enough to get that far in the process), which makes this a good time to talk about the job talk.

Again, to briefly recap, these days an academic job posting in the humanities will often get something like 100 to 200 applications.  The hiring committee will then prune down that list to a short-list of interview candidates (sometimes this is a two-stage process with a 'long-short-list' getting to shorter interviews before the short-short-list of perhaps 10 candidates goes for longer ones).  Typically there are around ten candidates or so selected for interviews.  Generally then the hiring committee will select three of those ten to do the 'campus visit.'

The traditional campus visit is an all-day (sometimes all-multi-day) interview in which literally everything is an interview, including (especially) parts that are specifically not interviews.  The department will then typically make an offer to the one of the three applicants brought on campus they liked the best.  Because COVID still makes a lot of universities gunshy about lots of travel, these days the campus visit is sometimes done via zoom, as a compressed series of interviews (this is dropping off back to the normal standard of in-person campus visits, but isn't all the way there yet).

The cornerstone of the campus visit is the job talk.  There are other components; key interviews with university administrators, dinners with department faculty which are actually disguised interviews, maybe a lunch with some senior undergraduates majoring in the field which are actually disguised interviews, being driven to and from airports by faculty members which are actually disguised interviews and possibly a teaching demonstration which is also an undisguised interview, but the job talk is the main attraction.

The job talk is in its standard form typically occupies about an hour, balanced between the talk itself and a Q&A; different departments will split that differently, anywhere from a 45 minute talk and 15 minutes of Q&A to a 15-20 minute talk and 40 minutes of Q&A.  Naturally, as the job candidate, you do what the department wants you to (although it is always better to run short than long.  Leaving more time for Q&A is generally pretty welcome, but running over is a great way to blow your chance at being the pick).

The 'talk' part of the job talk is a lecture that presents a portion of your primary research (almost always this is your book project).  Because time is short, candidates are going to be focused on a smaller slice of their work in one way or another.  The presentation is also tricky because unlike a conference paper or even an invited talk, you often cannot assume the entire department is familiar with your subfield, meaning that you need to provide context so that, say, a Latin philologist or a scholar of 1970s France can understand your highly technical argument about fifth century Merovingian taxation or what have you.

And of course the job talk is high stakes - it is the line separating the two candidates who beat out 97% of applicants for a job but get absolutely nothing and the one candidate who gets a permanent, tenure-track academic post.  No prizes for second place.

Consequently, in the humanities at least, standard practice is to script, rather than outline, the job talk.  For comparison, when I lecture to a class, I lecture from an outline which is usually 3-5 pages for an hour long class lecture.  For a job talk you are writing a script of every word you are going to say; rule of thumb is that it takes about 2 minutes to speak one double-spaced, 12pt font page, so a 40-minute talk is 20 pages.  The reason you script is so you can have a fluid delivery (you then practice this script so you aren't just lamely reading it) without pauses or confusion and so that you can choose your words and framing very carefully and deliberately.

Of course that means that to prepare a job talk, one has to essentially write something at the length of an academic article (although you don't ever hand them the script, so you don't need footnotes; you do need to be prepared for a potentially hostile Q&A).  Naturally, every academic on the job market ought to already have a job talk written and ready to go, but the first bit of advice everyone gets is that the talk needs to be tailored to the job being offered (so giving a talk on Roman farming for a military history job or a talk purely on Roman armor for a Roman-prose-and-history job in a classics department is a bad idea) and of course it needs to be tailored to the time allotted, which means some significant level of bespoke revision is required each time.

Interestingly, while faculty and graduate students in a department are often acutely aware of ongoing searches, especially the job talk phase (graduate students are often expressly sent to attend job talks so that they can then weigh in later on which candidate ought to get chosen), for undergraduates, job talks are often indistinguishable from the normal 'invited talk' where an academic from some other university is invited to come and give a lecture on their research generally (to the point that there is often debate as to if one should list job talks as 'invited talks' on one's CV; in format they are almost identical).

And as you may have guessed, I have this in mind because I am spending this week preparing to deliver a job talk (alas, via zoom) at the end of it.  That may end up delaying Fortifications Part III (again!).  I hope not, but it may be unavoidable; I had about a week and a half's worth of warning for the job talk and while I am really excited about the position, the nature of it required extensive retooling of my normal 'stock' job talk (of course at the same time classes are ending with all of the work that implies).

And that's the month!  Very busy running into December, but if Fortifications Part III isn't this week, it will be next week.