September, 2021 Research Update

Amici!  It is now October.

Classes are now in full swing, with midterms and papers coming in so I have been plenty busy.  Because of COVID, this is really the first in-person semester for both my freshmen and my sophomores, which leads to the feeling of having two classes of freshmen all struggling to figure out college classes.  That, alongside the difficulties of COVID-related quarantines and absences, has created more than its fair share of headaches, so this isn't quite yet a back-to-normal semester, though it is fairly close.

The long awaited TNI essay, which you may recall was trapped in editing hell for months, is now out both in the print edition for September/October but also on the website and for once not behind a paywall (note that it is in multiple pages).  That piece compares the Roman experience with shifting to a professional, all-volunteer military with the US experience so far with the All-Volunteer Force (AVF), concluding that there while professional, all-volunteer militaries have significant advantages, there are also strong signs that the US implementation shares many of the drawbacks of the Roman 'post-Marian' army.  Which is bad, because that army overthrew the state, multiple times.

Meanwhile the nomadic wanderings of the article on the impacts of the Roman adoption of mail armor continues.  The Journal of Roman Studies thought the article was too archaeological and so not broad enough, while the Journal of Roman Archaeology thought the article was too military-oriented.  This is an issue with military history topics in particular as 'generalist' journals and conferences are often uncomfortable with them to at least some degree (for foolish reasons I've discussed).  On the flip-side, military history journals (like the Journal of Military History) tend to be quite modern in their orientation and so can be an awkward fit for research that is fundamentally about the ancient world.  In this case, after talking the matter over with a few colleagues, I think it is still worth trying to get this article out in a Classics journal, so we're shifting targets over to the American Journal of Archaeology (the journal of the AIA) and we'll see how that goes.  The downside of all of this wandering is that each attempt has to be reformatted to the journal in question, which involves a day or two wasted changing around footnotes and section breaks and so on.

At the same time I have a number of other projects and things in the works.  I recorded a podcast with Adrian Bonenberger which should appear soon and I have another short essay in editing at Foreign Policy, this time thinking about why the United States is so bad at training auxiliary forces in 'high corruption' environments.

It occurs to me I haven't actually addressed my 'CV strategy' here at any point, so maybe we can talk about that and perhaps in later months we might go over the other sorts of documents that academics on the job market produce as part of that process.

First: What is a CV?  The academic CV or curriculum vitae (Latin, "the course of [my] life") is the rough academic equivalent of a resume, though the form is very different.  A CV (you can see a copy, now somewhat out of date, of my CV here to get a sense of what they look like) is essentially a long list of all of the scholarly activity the person in question has done.  Unlike a resume, a CV doesn't include any extra language describing anything but is instead a pure list (the supporting 'narrative' component of the job application ought to be carried by the Cover Letter).

The standard structure for a CV is for that listing to be divided by types of activity, which are presented in order of importance.  For nearly all academics this means that education comes first, followed by books, followed by journal articles.  My CV is structured in part to allay any fears that I might prioritize non-scholarly public communication over scholarly research, which is why I quite consciously put my 'Traditional Media Publications' and 'Public Engagement' towards the end.  If everything goes to planned, by the end of this month I'll have to add a new section for 'invited talks' but more on that one plans are firm.

It should tell you something about the values of most academic hiring committees that teaching, the thing we actually get paid to do, is almost always at the end of the CV and many senior academics will leave it off entirely (in part because as you may well imagine the CVs of academics who have been in the field for decades are often enormous).

It is generally expected that academics update their CVs regularly; I do so just about every month to reflect new activity.  So that is the document.  My 'strategy' with my CV is that I generally aim to add one major CV line and at least six minor CV lines per year.

Major CV lines are peer reviewed articles, book chapters and, once I write one, books.  Here I haven't always hit my goal, in part because publication schedules are long.  In practice I finished my PhD in 2018 and have three of these 'lines' (two articles and a chapter) so that fits.  On the other hand, only one of these is out, the other two are, as noted, still in process even though the great bulk of my work in them is done.  I am likely here in the next few months going to have to decide if I want to turn completely to getting my book ready to pitch to a publisher (which will put me further behind my major CV line goal) or if I should squeeze out another journal article.  Ironically, the lack of jobs is actually quite liberating here.

To clarify the schedule here, I wrote "Strategy and Cost" in 2019 (but it appeared in 2020), "Date and Adoption" in 2020 (but it isn't accepted anywhere yet) and the food chapter of course in 2021.  My planned 'short' 2022 project is a much deeper comparison of the Spartan agoge with modern systems for indoctrinating child soldiers.

Minor CV lines are invited talks, presented papers, book reviews, traditional media articles (non-peer reviewed) and podcasts.  Here I have hit my goals more successfully of late.

2021: 1 Conference Paper, 1(+1) Book Review, 3(+1) traditional media articles, 7 podcasts; 14 total lines, two of which are forthcoming.

2020: 1 conference paper, 3 traditional media articles, 1 podcast, 1 my-work-was-featured-in-the-Times-of-London; 6 total lines.

2019: 2 podcasts, plus starting the blog; 3 total lines.

So obviously I have come up to speed quite a bit in terms of the minor CV lines (when I came up with my 6-a-year plan, I still counted each course I taught as a 'minor' CV line, which I don't anymore because I suspect I long ago passed the point where more teaching experience was going to radically improve my CV's impressiveness.  I've taught 14 courses as instructor of record and my teaching evaluations are very good, so I assume anyone reading my CV knows, "oh, he can probably teach.").  That said, progress on the 'major' lines is not where I'd like it to be, though this is in some ways really still a result of me not having started the publication 'pipeline' before the completion of my PhD.

And that has been the month.  My plan a little later this month is to try to get both the next Referenda ad Senatum post out and to also put up the first topic poll for the patres et matres conscripti.  But for the time being, here is a picture of Oliver playing with a toy one of our friends gave us: