History
It’s a Postdoc’s Life
September, 2010 · By Justin Bengry
I’ve landed! I’m a Saskatooner, no, scratch that. I’m a Saskatoonian. Hmmm, not sure about that one either. I don’t know yet what we call ourselves here. But I’ve got an apartment and a local café. I know where to buy wine (critical) and how to find my office (essential). No more the uncertainty or instability of an unemployed academic for me. No thank you! I’m now officially a postdoctoral fellow in History at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. The “Paris of the Prairies”…my Lonely Planet guide tells me.
Blogging has taken a back seat for a couple weeks in favour finding an apartment, buying furniture, and getting to know my department. But now I’m back with a new focus on post-doctoral life, projects, and survival.
The first thing I’ve discovered as a postdoc is that you have to hit the ground running. The term only started a few days ago, but already I’m on track to give the first talk at the department’s research seminar in a few weeks. I’ve also been brought on as the Saskatchewan organizer of a yearly bi-university, multi-provincial graduate history conference. This in addition to giving a paper in Montreal next month, and submitting a journal article in November. No rest for the wicked!
The second thing is that no one knows quite where the postdoc fits in the academic pecking order, or what benefits the postdoc can derive from this unsure status. And of course it varies from department to department, university to university. With apologies to Britney Spears for the paraphrasing: I’m not a girl grad student, not yet a woman professor. So, neither student nor faculty, I’m still working on finding out who to ask for conference funding, or how much of my extended healthcare is covered.
But after 6 months of uncertainty and break from academia, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m thrilled to be back in an environment I know and thrive in, with kind and generous faculty support, and welcoming colleagues who have already made me feel at home in Saskatoon.
And Wikipedia tells me that I’m actually a Saskatonian now.
This post was originally published at History Compass Exchanges on
9 September 2010.
Does ‘Publish or Perish’ apply to graduate students?
August, 2010 · By Justin Bengry
Publish or perish has become a truism in academia where the pressure is always on to write the next article, get a contract for the next book, or edit a journal issue. But what about graduate students? Do they face the same pressure to publish or perish? Or do they perish if they publish…without planning?
The reasons to publish are obvious: to increase your academic profile, to put your work before your peers, to network with other scholars, and most of all to make yourself more competitive in this dire academic job market. Anything to set you apart from the hundreds of other under-employed scholars is critical.
But are there also dangers in publishing as a grad student?
Preparing an article for publication can help marshal your thoughts, offer new insights for your work, and motivate you to achieve deadlines that can also be applied to your dissertation. But it can also distract you away from your most important task as a graduate student – writing your thesis or dissertation. If writing articles and reviews allows you to procrastinate and avoid your primary task as a graduate student, they are more harmful than helpful. If your degree goes long, it costs both time and money that could be devoted to other tasks. And if you fail to proceed toward completion of your dissertation in a timely manner, it can be a black mark against you in scholarship competitions, and with postdoc and job committees evaluating you before completing your degree.
Another concern grad students must consider when publishing is the quality of the work they put out there. Your first publications will follow you for some time. It will be a matter of record, and you might not want your earliest work and ideas to define you too soon. I would tend to discount this argument, particularly if you publish in respected, peer-reviewed journals. These publications will vet your work with experts in your field who can give invaluable insights to shape your work and make it stronger. Used effectively, this not only gives you the opportunity to publish a superior article, but affords you the chance to make your dissertation even stronger as well.
In a related concern, one which has been expressed to me, is that committees are more willing to forgive errors or points they disagree with in a dissertation or manuscript under revision. If, however, they find fault with material in a published article, they are more likely to hold on to these criticisms and weigh them against you in postdoc and job determinations. Of course, strong publications position will position you well for the job market. As L.L. Wynn pragmatically noted at the Culture Matters blog:
When hiring committees are trying to narrow down a large pool into a short list, they’ve got to pick between a lot of bright young graduates with highly rated dissertations, enthusiastic referees, and clever ideas. So what distinguishes candidates? Often it comes down to bean-counting – grants, awards, publications. Publications really make you stand out, especially if you’re very junior.
Finally, as philosophy professor Gualtiero Piccinni has pointed out on a “Brains” blog post on graduate publishing, “Students should be aware that where they publish is at least as important as whether they do, especially if they aspire to a job in a research institution.” A well-written and researched article in a respected peer-reviewed journal will be worth more than a more quickly turned out piece in an online graduate journal. This isn’t to say that other or non-traditional publications are not valuable. But before publishing anything, you will need to consider how this publication will position you for your future aspirations and activities.
Ultimately, as long as it is well-placed, and doesn’t distract you from completing your degree, effective and planned publishing as a graduate student can only benefit you.
This post was originally published at History Compass Exchanges on
12 August 2010.
Memory, Identity and Politics in Sarajevo
July, 2010 · By Justin Bengry
As an historian I’ve probably gained more sympathy and understanding of the importance of my discipline from my travels and experiences outside the classroom. There are moments of sudden and profound understanding that have given me chills. I first experienced this on my first trip to Germany. Walking among the trees down the former East Berlin’s Unter den Linden I was overwhelmed by history, the power of space, and the profound social and cultural transformations that this street had seen and now represented.
With many more trips to Europe, and the experience of many more sites of historical unrest and change, I thought I had become dulled to such emotive responses to history. And then I took a week-long road trip across the Balkans in a rented Fiat.
There’s something about the immediacy of knowing this place was under siege so recently, experiencing war within the period of my own memory. It’s easy to assume that war ended in Europe in 1945, but throughout Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia war ravaged society not even a generation ago.
The stark reality of this hit when driving through towns that couldn’t afford to replace bombed out buildings and past farmhouses still pockmarked with bullet holes. After the relative wealth of Slovenia and parts of Croatia, the tell-tale signs of war in rural Croatia as we approached the Bosnian border were jarring. And later, in Mostar, the ruins of office buildings and apartment blocks in the downtown core was a stark reminder of what many around us had experienced so recently.
But the experience that stays with me is Sarajevo. Mostly recovered, you might not see many signs of war in its streets these days. Until you look down to the sidewalk and see the so-called Sarajevo Roses, small mortar shell craters filled with red cement, much of the city today seems largely unscathed, its scars mostly hidden from the public and from tourists.
And then I found the shell of the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina just around the corner from our hotel. An Ottoman style building on the banks of the Miljacka river, the library was a repository for the history of Bosnia, and as such became a deliberate target of Serb incendiary bombardment on 25 August 1992.
The fact that the Serbian army would destroy a repository of a nation’s written culture and history speaks to the power of history to define a people and their identity. Bosnia’s rebuilding of the library and recollection of materials lost in the subsequent inferno is equally telling of the need to assert a collective history and culture in an area fraught with competing identities. What I found most poignant, besides the hulking ruin itself, was a plaque mounted on its wall, even during the process of reconstruction:
On this place Serbian criminals in the night of 25th-26th August, 1992 set on fire National and University’s Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over 2 millions of books, periodicals and documents vanished in the flame.
Do not forget, Remember and Warn!
This plaque is striking. When I saw it, the building was under reconstruction, but the plaque remained. Its tone and identification of the perpetrators of the library’s destruction names names. It asks Bosnians never to forget the loss, but also never to forget who caused it. But, appearing in English, it is also a call for foreigners not to forget what happened on this site of twentieth-century history as well.
As an historical actor itself, the library remains a poignant voice on multiple levels of self-identification, memory, loss, and self-representation of a people to the rest of the world.
For more on the library, its history and destruction, and the move to rebuild its collections see:
Photo: National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Justin Bengry)
This post was originally published at History Compass Exchanges on
15 July 2010.
History Matters: The High Stakes (and Higher Value) of History
March, 2010 · By Justin Bengry
The Texas State Board of Education’s changes to the state’s social studies curriculum have highlighted the political motivations behind the histories that are taught in schools. In response to the board’s conservatism, the left wrings its hands in dismay, the right smiles with vindication, and centrists ask to restore some kind of balance. But we should be concerned about more than political allegiances. There is more at stake than “correct” or “balanced” or “fair” histories. We need to question not only the power of political factions to promote particular visions of history, but also the profit motives that have made some histories more saleable and therefore more powerful than others.
Many are decrying the board’s revisions for putting a “conservative stamp” on the state’s curricula. According to the New York Times, they endorse the superiority of American capitalism, question the history of secular government, and promote Republican political philosophies. Even just a cursory look over other recent commentary on the subject shows how high the stakes are and how strong the divide remains, even outside Texas. Famously conservative Phyllis Schlafly welcomes a turn away from the imposition of liberal “revisionist histories,” while on the other side Diane Ravitch accuses Texas of promoting ignorance. Other commentators worry about wider effects on education. If textbooks modeled on the Texas state curriculum are successful, they could enter classrooms throughout the country. Such is the power of a large state to influence how history is taught across the country.
Ok, how surprised should we be that history is a fraught and disputed subject? Of course it is. It’s invested with diverse meanings that inform personal beliefs and collective identities. We are heavily invested in history, and that shows up in the Texas textbook debates. Nor should we be surprised that groups on either side of the political divide are deeply concerned about what appears in textbooks, each accusing the other of promoting a particular agenda. Both sides, of course, are correct to question what appears in textbooks. We should constantly re-evaluate received knowledge, question “obvious” wisdom, and be prepared to refashion textbook histories. The point that critics and commentators alike miss in this debate, however, is the sale of history. Money over content.
I would like to be able to blame extremists for the bastardization of history. But I can’t, at least I can’t completely. Even those with whom I disagree, whose positions I abhor, are using an existing opportunity to put forward their values and beliefs. That isn’t the fundamental problem here. The content of textbooks is up for debate not because zealots have undermined history, but because publishers want or need to make a profit off of it, and worse still may be less concerned about content than contracts.
Textbooks will be rewritten because Texas represents an enormous market. And books that meet that market’s “needs” stand to gain enormous readerships, and perhaps lucrative ongoing contracts. Their potential influence and authority in schools and among pupils will not necessarily be based on their historical and intellectual rigor, but on their ability to sell to the Texas market. So, the problem might not be so much that history is politicized. That is, after all, why history is important. The problem is that politicized history is up for sale.
Further Reading:
For an overview to this issue see the History News Network roundup of coverage.
This blog was originally published at History Compass Exchanges on
26 March 2010.
Out in the Academy: Researching Queer Histories
February, 2010 · By Justin Bengry
February is LGBT History Month here in the UK, which focuses attention on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans issues in the present, and also the experiences of queer Britons in the past. This yearly program to promote diversity and LGBT histories reminds us just how rich queer history actually is. But it is still taken as a truism by many that the lives of gay men and lesbians remain absent in the archive, that their stories are “hidden from history.” While it is true that the stories of many gay men and lesbians cannot be found in the traditional archive, we are nonetheless discovering their footprints across the historical record.
Traditional archives have, in fact, been at the forefront of this work in the UK. The National Archives has actively participated in identifying LGBT sources across its collection. Together with the London Metropolitan Archives it is also creating guides to better access these histories in other collections. A number of specialist archives also record the histories of political action, legal reform, and campaigning; women’s and lesbian histories; as well as newspaper and media coverage of homosexuality in the twentieth century. But, even beyond these, researchers of queer history have at their disposal so much more.
As Jean Smith recently reminded us in another Compass posting, we need to look outside the traditional archive for fuller and richer histories of the past. Scholars of queer history in Britain are fortunate to have access to an enormous range of oral history collections, national survey testimony, and other repositories of gay and lesbian history. And in my own research, I have discovered film archives, theater collections, local archives, and personal collections teeming with possibilities after a little digging.
I write this post because I was almost dissuaded from undertaking dissertation research in queer history. This was not because of homophobia or reduced funding on account of my subject. I began graduate school believing, like many, that queer histories were largely marginal, inaccessible, and poorly recorded in the archive. But after arriving in the UK, exploring the archives, and jettisoning the entire PhD project I had initially proposed and the prospectus my committee had authorized (after many sleepless nights), I was able to embark upon the project I was passionate about and which became my dissertation. I had thought that an LGBT history project was not viable as a dissertation. I was wrong. And I hope that programs like LGBT History Month will remind other junior scholars of the range of research possibilities that are available to us, and also of the innumerable histories remaining in the archive but still untold.
This blog was originally published at History Compass Exchanges on
11 February 2010.
Out in the Academy: Why Teach Queer History?
January, 2010 · By Justin Bengry
Recent events at the American Historical Association’s annual conference in San Diego have raised questions about how we as historians consider homosexuality and LGBTQ issues, both in our own research and teaching as well as the professional as a whole. At the AHA, queer scholars, scholars of sexuality, allies, and other supporters expressed concerns about events taking place at the Manchester Grand Hyatt because of its association with Douglas Manchester, a prominent supporter of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California. Many observed a boycott of the hotel, finding accommodation elsewhere and avoiding panels at the Hyatt. Others participated in mini-conference sessions specifically addressing LGBTQ issues and histories.
This interest in contemporary gay and lesbian issues at our national conference also forces us to consider how we, as historians, address gay and lesbian histories on a smaller scale in our own work. After all, it is in the university with our students where many of us will have the greatest impact. This is not to say that we as historians should make it our mission to teach a particular politics in the classroom. Our students come from a wide variety of backgrounds, faiths, and political positions. We can respect these perspectives, and the positions of our students, even as we seek to explore questions of contemporary relevance that might be fraught with personal passions and politics.
At one AHA mini-conference session on Proposition 8, Jennifer Manion (Connecticut College) evaluated historians’ engagement with LGBTQ lives and histories. Even as queer history has grown as a subfield in the last two decades, and an increasing number of dissertations explore gay and lesbian questions, too often professors’ treatment of LGBTQ history is little more than neglect. Few textbooks incorporate more than a couple paragraphs on gay and lesbian lives. Arguably, for many professors, fitting queer topics into already full syllabi means dropping another subject in favor of what many colleagues, chairs, and tenure committees might see as only a relatively small, marginalized group. But, argues Manion, even ongoing interest in a few important or successful books like George Chauncey’s Gay New York has amounted to little more than tokenism, rather than a genuine reconceptualization of what and how we teach.
Which brings us back to the first question: Why teach queer history? Very often, history is in fact the study of the present. Our research and publications can inform heated questions that society must still deal with. Is this not also the case with same-sex marriage? And is it not incumbent upon us to include gay and lesbian histories in our courses, syllabi, and overall department catalogues? Opposition to issues like gay marriage might be based on personal values, faith, and other perspectives. It is not our job to “correct” these positions. But, opposition can also be based on false histories, lack of knowledge, and ahistorical arguments that deny the past. A reconceptualization of our teaching strategies that incorporates gay and lesbian histories into courses as part of the diversity of our nations and communities, rather than as a theme week or small graduate seminar, necessarily promotes understanding and sensitivity to difference in the past, and perhaps the present too.
For the AHA’s response see:
here and
For other responses to the AHA and the Hyatt boycott see:
http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/2009/11/status-of-american-historical.html
http://www.historiann.com/2010/01/09/historiann-exclusive-classy-claude-at-the-aha-in-san-diego/
http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/2010/01/guest-post-aha-blew-it.html
This blog was originally published at History Compass Exchanges on
28 January 2010.