Category Archives: graduate students

February 29, 2012, 1:24 pm

Radical But Not Tenured: Reflections from an Unemployed ABD

By “Sam Concord”

Today’s guest blogger is a pseudonymous graduate student from a major research university and a future tenured radical. Super-qualified, unemployed, and nearly finished with his degree, Sam reflects on his six years in graduate school and how he has practiced the art of failure.

I am crawling to the finish line of graduate school with six publications, one mostly-finished dissertation, two major teaching awards, and no job. As I wait to go on the market again next year, I’m doing my best to embrace what Jack Halberstam calls the new ways of being opened up by failure. These benefits include the time and space to figure out what I’ve been doing for the past six years.

In this spirit, I offer you four versions of this story: Superhero Sam, Naked Sam, Terrorist Sam, and CV Sam.

Superhero Sam. One highlight of graduate school was not dying when a driver …

August 2, 2011, 9:50 am

It’s Tuesday, It’s Hot: You Need Shorts

By Claire Potter

For those of you who are new to Tenured Radical, you should know that people send us stuff all the time. Little stuff, big stuff, stuff that goes viral as a featured post and other stuff that we just save and kick out every once in a while with other stuff we like. So without further ado, today’s stuffed shorts are:

Moonlight, Magnolias and Marriage Myths. In today’s Grey Lady, Princeton historian Tera Hunter has a superb op-ed about the ways in which Republican right-wingers are re-writing the history of slavery to suit modern political agendas. The excising of the 3/5th clause in the Constitution during a Republican reading of that document on the House Floor, and the outrageous assertion in a document authored by Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum “that ‘a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than…

July 22, 2010, 4:04 pm

She’ll Always Be A Player On The Ballfield Of My Heart: Tenured Radical And Historiann Wrap Up Their Conversation About The Professor

By Claire Potter

This is the Part III, and the conclusion, of a discussion between Tenured Radical and Historiann of Terry Castle’s “The Professor and Other Writings” (HarperCollins, 2010 — if you are new to the party, you may wish to begin with Part I.) Yesterday, at Historiann, we discussed the themes of desire and longing that suffuse Castle’s narrative about her emergence as an intellectual who has to cross class lines to chart her own path to become an adult, a feminist, a lesbian, an artist, and a deeply original and critical thinker.

Today’s post consists of a single exchange in which we historicize the role of suffering in this story. We end with the question of whether, in a day and age in which sexual relations between students and teachers are widely perceived as harmful (and often proscribed by universities), whether the suffering of graduate students has been ameliorated, or it has just…

June 4, 2010, 4:51 pm

Oh, The Joy Of Political History! Day 2 at Policy History Conference

By Claire Potter

Why do we go to conferences? Most of us end up asking this question, perhaps as we are finishing up a paper or a comment later than we wanted to, or packing hastily the night before a flight that is too early. I was certainly asking myself why I ever leave home for any reason as I contemplated the fact that, for the second morning in a row, I had no hot water at the Holiday Inn. Fortunately it is summer, and becoming chilled first thing has no lasting effects; my spirits were raised even further by unexpectedly locating a branch of Au Bon Pain a block and a half away where I could have a nicer breakfast than I had had yesterday. (“Do you know that the graduate students at Harvard refer to your chain as A Big Pain?” I overheard a senior scholar who was trying to arrange a table for twenty ask the manager conversationally. “No, I didn’t!” the cheerful Midwesterner replied, as if my…

July 27, 2009, 3:35 pm

A Meditation on Recent History, Belonging and Endurance

By Claire Potter

I was trying to think of something clever to add to Historiann’s list of things to pack as you prepare to take off for graduate school. Medical marijuana? Nicotine patches (especially if you do not already smoke)? Extra courage?

And then I remembered this. In a collection of lectures entitled Writing in an Age of Silence (New York: Verso, 2007), crime novelist Sara Paretsky writes about entering the University of Chicago’s Ph.D. program in history:

When I started my doctoral work, the head of the European field committee told entering students that women could memorize and parrot things back, but that we weren’t capable of producing original work. In his history of Western Civilization, he included no accomplishments by women.

Thirteen women started the US history program with me in the fall of 1968. I was the only one who returned our second year, and that wasn’t because I was a be…

July 7, 2009, 1:21 pm

More Annals of the Great Depression: Whither The Conference Interview?

By Claire Potter

In my opinion? It’s on its way out. For what Zenith spent on searches this year, we could have hired a bunch of visitors, or two tenure-track faculty. Or we could have given the faculty we have a weenie little raise. Just a weenie one, but a raise all the same. Or not cut the library budget. Or….or…..

Budget cutting is no reason to end a tradition permanently if it is valuable, but I predict that budget cutting will jolt universities to some useful reforms. Replacing the conference interview with the phone interview is one of them. We had this conversation in my department recently, and I have had it with a Zenith administrator on two separate occasions. Perhaps I have fallen out of love with the conference interview because I am finishing a book on the early years of the historical profession. I know, for example, that the origins of the conference interview are exactly the …

April 7, 2009, 2:32 pm

Puff The Magic Sociologist: Sudhir Venkatesh, Gang Leader For A Day, A Rogue Sociologist Takes To The Streets

By Claire Potter

Longtime followers of this blog know that it is my deepest wish to write a book that will be sold one day in airports. Why airports? Well, some time ago a clever capitalist figured out that among the lay audience who passes through airports a certain percentage will want to read something of greater intellectual substance than a Jodi Picoult novel (of course, many academics see travel as a perfect excuse to read romance novels.) Because of the captive audience airports represent, travel has become an opportunity to sell more good books, as well as magazines that offer ten helpful hints to keep a husband sexually content. Some of these volumes are easy to sell in real life (anything about the Civil War, memoirs of addiction); and others may be harder to sell in real life (excellent non-fiction and, well, academic books) than they are to sell in the airport.

I often buy serious books…

January 4, 2009, 8:35 pm

AHA Day 3: A Cautionary Tale

By Claire Potter

Helpful advice to graduate students: stop going to sessions about the job market. My sense is that it is simply making people unnecessarily hysterical. Yes, the job market this year is very, very bad. But whether it will be next year no one knows. I repeat no one knows.

So please, stop going to these sessions. Go home and write instead.