It's been another nearly six months of absence from this blog, which brings me nearly a month past my daughter's first birthday. I've learned a lot this year--about myself, about being a working mother, about what I really need out of my work life to feel I can give my best to Madeline while parenting.
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'm pacing myself for the marathon of projects that follow after this proposal, and part of that is turning my attention to reading that makes me truly inspired to write. As an undergraduate, I dedicated all of my elective course hours to creative writing and literature, particularly nonfiction. I was fortunate to have an incredible professor, Jill Christman, and I learned that good reading fueled good writing. The words seemed to take up physical space in my body until they forced my own writing to spill up and over and out of me. I'm trying to get back to that feeling--that the ideas are urgent and need to be given space, that I am excited to be working. This is all part of my new year's resolution to own my identity as a writer. With two publications to my name, I feel myself pulled into a world of academic writing that doesn't quite match the tone or audience I most enjoy. So, here is a reading list I'm working through to feed the other writer in me with the goal of creating a dissertation that speaks to a wider audience and has last value outside of the dark corners of a university library.
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If you missed it, I spent the last three weeks doing our department's take-home version of comprehensive exams. This is the first year they've been an option, & while we all have complicated feelings about the idea, I was fortunate to have this version. Because let's be honest, my baby--now five months & increasingly demanding--would not let a closed-book test happen. Not the memorization required, & not three uninterrupted four-hour time blocks. (Is it an unfair advantage to take a break mid-exam to pump? The world may never know.)
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