Tag: graduate school

On the Pleasures of Slow Reading

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Like many prospective historians, I was drawn to history because of my love of reading. As a child I spent countless hours reading at home and at the school library. I remember being enchanted by the Scholastic book fair and thrilled at the notion that I would be given – GIVEN – a book just for attending. As I grew older reading remained a sanctuary. In high school and in college, I always had a long reading list and stack of books beside my bed, which I would often read instead of spending time studying assigned coursework. Longer or more difficult books would hang around. I’d pick them up and get sidetracked only to return to them weeks or months later.

Becoming a historian seemed like the perfect career path to take my love of reading from hobby to profession. This was (obviously) before I knew what being a historian actually entailed. I learned a little bit about archival research in one of my undergraduate courses, but saw it as supplemental to secondary source reading. I also didn’t understand how difficult the path would be – both through graduate school and finding a career as a historian after graduation.

Still, what shook me most in graduate school was its approach to reading. The sheer pace of the exercise was exhausting; books were mutilated (“just read the intro and a review” was the common refrain) into content that needed to be crammed for classes and comprehensives. Graduate school reading was nothing like any reading I had done before. It was a marathon that felt like a sprint.

So, also like many graduate students in the humanities, my love of reading waned. I didn’t read for pleasure very often and when I did it was either for circumstantial (places with no internet) or social (book clubs) reasons. I lost touch with why books had mattered to me.

Choosing not to pursue an academic career was traumatic, but a silver lining has been that my passion for reading has been reignited. No longer taking part in the information-gathering arms race that is graduate school has allowed me to not only read slower, but also pause and reflect on what I’ve read.

It’s wonderful to really live with a book, to let it sit with you and accompany you. This has held true for fiction and non-fiction. I’ve been reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for about three months, slowly chipping away at it in chunks often to twenty pages. Since it’s in many ways a novel about how time passes,this approach has made me appreciate how Mann structured the novel in a way that flows in the uneven ebbs and flows that subjective time does. It has been similarly rewarding as I’ve read Jill Lepore’s These Truths. Like Mann, Lepore is a pleasure to read and her prose and organization rewards close reading. It’s also refreshing to read a longue durée history from beginning to end and not feel the pressure to skip around or mine for argument.

Obviously, this approach is made possible by the privilege of working routine hours and having a low-stress, low-responsibility home life.At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if I would have learned better –maybe not more, but more deeply – without the pressures to consume as much information as possible. I also wonder if this type of churn disadvantages certain types of students who would benefit from more time to read and reflection each item.

As anyone who has written a dissertation (or any long document) knows well, it takes time to write. So too, to read. Even though there are many days that I yearn for the intellectual engagement and debate of my graduate school years, the solace of slow reading tempers my nostalgia for those days and reminds me of the promises life after graduate school hold for intellectual growth. 

This time of year can be full of holiday- and project-related bustle. Looming end of year deadlines can further heighten an already acute anxiety about not working fast enough. But if you can, resist the urge to rush, take some time to sit down, and read slow. 

I Defended My Dissertation – What Do I Do Next?

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I defended my dissertation this past December. In the defense’s afterglow, I started to wonder – what’s next? I knew I wanted to turn it into a book, but I had no idea where to start. Should I contact publishers? Start writing a book proposal? My advisor suggested stepping away from the project to gain perspective. Still, I was skeptical. I didn’t have a job and thought the only way to get a job (or even a post-doc) was to have, at the very least, the book under contract.

After taking some time to think through this, I did what any good millennial would do: took to Twitter. I received a staggering number of replies from professors, publishers, and graduate students offering advice or commiserating about the opacity of the publishing process. I am distilling the substance of the discussion into five points, in the hope that in the future they can guide graduate students wrestling with the same questions.

1. Take a break. Writing a monograph-length dissertation is a long and, oftentimes, arduous process. In so doing, it is easy to lose perspective. In my case, I had largely stopped reading books outside my narrow subdiscipline and immersed myself in the project’s archival and primary sources. Most Twitter respondents recommended putting the manuscript aside, focusing on other projects (an article, teaching a class, etc.), and returning to it with fresh eyes after between six months and one year. By then, the hope is that you can bring a new perspective to the project.

2. Read other things. Fresh perspective cannot be attained through idleness, however. When taking a break from the manuscript, respondents’ advised that you delve into books outside your disciplinary niche. Many recommended reading fiction, since its emphasis on narrative and readability are two qualities lacking in many manuscripts. Others recommended reading prize-winning books. These could act as models for a book proposal or provide insight into how to best frame arguments. For Twitter respondents the message was nearly universal: the best writing begins with omnivorous reading.

3. Network. Like any other employment opportunity, finding a publisher for your manuscript is easiest achieved through networking. The best place to find these networking opportunities is at academic conferences. Respondents in the publishing industry shared that they meet many first-time academic authors at conferences. Larger academic conferences (AHA, OAH, MLA, etc.) usually have the greatest number of publishers, but smaller conferences can present greater opportunities to meet and have sustained discussions with publisher representatives. If conferences are too expensive (and for many graduate students they are), rely on your existing social network. Ask your advisor, faculty in your department, or alumni if there is anyone at their publisher you could speak to about your manuscript.

4. Write your dissertation as a book. If you have not yet completed your dissertation or are in the beginning stages of your graduate career, you may want to think about your dissertation as a book. This is a polarizing approach and one that will need to be worked out with your advisor. There are at least two ways of thinking about a dissertation. First, the dissertation-as-certification approach, which sees the dissertation as a document proving your abilities as a scholar. This generally means lengthy forays into historiography, rigorous citation using mostly archival sources, and favoring argument over narrative. Scholars advocating this approach see the dissertation as a showcase for all the skills you have learned as a graduate student and the defense of the project as certification that you belong in company of other professional academic historians. Second, the dissertation-as-book believers argue that since the real disciplinary standard is a publishable manuscript emphasis should be placed on those traits publishers find desirable – narrative, clear argument, and a clear writing style – over skill demonstration. While there is disagreement over which approach is best, writing the dissertation as a book has obvious benefits in the transition from manuscript to published book.

5. Write a different book. The most surprising suggestion I received was not to transform the manuscript into a book at all. Instead, these respondents suggested to think of the book as a totally different project than the dissertation. On the surface this seems ridiculous. I just spent five, six, seven years writing a dissertation and now you’re telling me to scrap it and start over! What a waste of time! Yet, when you think more deeply about divergences in form and audience, thinking about the book as a new project makes more sense (particularly if you took the dissertation-as-certification approach, as I did). One respondent put it particularly succinctly, “You don’t revise your dissertation; you steal from your dissertation while you’re writing your first book.” Thinking about your manuscript as a second project can free you to think more capaciously about your manuscript topic than trying to revise a dissertation project intended for a narrower audience and with more limited objectives.

These five points are heuristics for the manuscript-into-book transformation that I intend to follow over the next six months. I’m sure there will be disagreement and all of these points are subject to debate (and if you have further questions or comments feel free to post below). Thank you to everyone who responded and I hope this short memo will help graduate students feel a little less lost after they defend.

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