Yet more good news for Celtic Romanticist Travel Scholars

At some point I'll return to using Plashing Vole as a dart board for my arrows of opinion (perhaps having grown a beard for a few weeks I was the anti-Samson), but for now, here's another opportunity for all you budding scholars of Romantic travel writing:

The AHRC-funded ‘Curious Travellers’  project is pleased to advertise a fully-funded PhD, to start 1st October 2015, exploring any aspect of C18th and Romantic-period tours to Wales and Scotland.  The post will be based in the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (CAWCS) in Aberystwyth, and will run for three years.  We invite applicants to offer ideas from a broad spectrum of possible research topics within the main subject of 'The Welsh and Scottish Tour 1760-1820'. Suggestions might include (but are not restricted to): 

Perceptions of Wales and the Welsh/ Scotland and the Scots in written tours, published and unpublished; the experience of female travellers; antiquarian recoveries of early Britain; the writings of Thomas Pennant;  correspondence and knowledge networks; encounters with Welsh/Gaelic literature or song; natural history writing in the tours; enlightenment science and domestic travel; topographical art and artists. A candidate interested in the visual art aspects of the project would have the possibility of working closely with the topographical art collections in the national libraries and museums of Wales and Scotland.  

The successful candidate will work alongside a team of researchers currently engaged in the AHRC-funded project “Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour (1760-1820)”, jointly run by CAWCS and the University of Glasgow, and led by Dr Mary-Ann Constantine and Professor Nigel Leask.  The deadline for applications is 30 April 2015: for further information about the project and details of the award please contact mary-ann.constantine@cymru.ac.uk

Etiquette for postgraduates

I took a long time to finish my Ph.D. I won't rehearse the litany of excuses reasons here, but suffice it to say that I endured the 'how's your thesis?' question for far too long. After that it was 'when are you going to finish your thesis?', and finally it was 'are you actually doing a Ph.D at all?'. It wasn't just my supervisors either: friends, family, passers-by. 

I regret not buying a t-shirt I saw in Cambridge, which read 'DO NOT ASK ME ABOUT MY THESIS'. Here's PHDComics' explanation of the social minefield of postgraduate research:

The People Speak…

Just for fun, there's a Rate My Thesis: Hot or Not page. Go there, vote on my PhD, which was titled

‘Constructions of Masculinity in Four 1930s Welsh Novels in English: Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy and We Live, Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley and Gwyn Thomas’s Sorrow For Thy Sons’.

I say hot.
Society at large thinks not.

A wonderful opportunity

If you were one of my students this year, you'll have been exposed to the delights of Welsh literature written in English: Lewis Jones, Gwyn Thomas, R. S. Thomas and others. So, desperate to explore this world further, you'll all be applying for an AHRC-funded PhD in the field at Bangor University, won't you?

It's a top quality university, and your options are: bilingualism, cognitive linguistics, Arthurian literature (one of my hobbies) and Welsh Writing in English, though other proposals are welcome. And at £13,950 per year, the scholarship is a lot better than the £6000 I survived on.

Apply today!

The PhD Challenge

Emory University asked their PhD students to translate their research into 100 words understandable by ordinary people. It's a tough call: PhDs are very specific and not configured for laymen.

So history PhD Leah Weinryb Grohsgal’s “Reinventing civil liberties: religious groups, organized litigation, and the rights revolution” becomes an exploration of how Jehovah’s Witnesses helped spark the modern civil rights movement and shows that “religious liberty, far from being an afterthought, was integral to the 20th century transformation of civil rights”. 

Here's my attempt.

Original title: Constructions of Masculinity in Four 1930s Welsh Novels in English (Lewis Jones's Cwmardy and We Live, Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley and Gwyn Thomas's Sorrow For Thy Sons)

It wasn't my preferred title, which started with a quote ('"There's something wrong with us blokes"…') which was a bit clearer.

So: These books are about South Wales mining communities of the 1930s, in which unemployment destroyed familiar ideas about what it meant to 'be a man', while fascism and communism provided complicated new models: these novels highlight the opportunities and difficulties of being a man in this strange cultural and historical moment.

Best-seller?

So you want to go to Grad School

(Or in English, post-graduate study).

A while back, I posted this short movie about doing a PhD in English. It's all completely true, but that doesn't mean you should take its advice. Education is being progressively deprofessionalised: further study and an academic career (to use the old joke, it's a career of the kind that happens when your brakes fail on a steep hill) are despised by many people as somehow not in the 'real world'. This is mostly because it's one of the few jobs that involves potentially doing something you enjoy.



PhD candidates split into two camps as far as I can tell: the ultra-confident megabrains who breeze through it, and those who desperately cling on and scrape through. I read an obituary last year of a professor who held PhDs in chemistry, physics and literature. He wrote the physics PhD in 6 weeks, claiming to have been 'thinking about it' while on active duty in World War 2, and for a hobby would write academic papers in Latin. There are a few of those types around in The Hegemon: they churn out learned journal articles every week and appear not to need sleep or beer.

I'm the second type. I was utterly stunned to get a First class degree and prizes in my BA, because I was expecting a 2.2. So someone suggested I do an MA and it sounded like a good idea because a) they kindly offered to pay the fees and b) I didn't want to be a teacher. I struggled through that, and somehow got a PhD scholarship. Suddenly things were much, much harder, and I always felt like I was faking it - especially at conferences, where the Gods of Postgraduate life swanned around like fully-formed geniuses. I fervently hope that they're faking it too.

So I found getting a PhD difficult, but it was still rewarding. You can pursue your own impulses in a way that people rarely can once they're potty-trained. In return for becoming a stereotype (hello, Big Bang Theory), you're licensed to roam. Until, that is, you try to find a job, at which point you discover that hourly-paid drudgery is the universities' secret weapon. You can bet that when the £9000 fees come in, the Oxfords and Cambridges will be dumping a scared postgrad or desperate new PhD in front of the class: the professors don't want to teach undergraduates and in any case, cost too much. Elsewhere, I don't know what you'll get. Imagine doing an MA and a PhD, at your own expense, when you already owe £50,000 for your BA/BSc: only the very rich will be able to do it.

Why do a PhD? Because you need to know about and think about a tiny corner of human endeavour. Don't do it because you want a job, a house or a pension. Do it because there's nothing else that will satisfy you. (Unless you're thinking of a PhD in banking, finance, economics or weapons design. Just don't).

PhD opportunity in lovely Sweden

If you have a master's degree and an interest in new media, surveillance and user labour, you really should apply for this PhD at Uppsala University in Sweden. It's delivered in English, and would be an amazing opportunity.

Uppsala University hereby declares the following position to be open
for application:
PhD position in Media and Communication Studies
at the Department of Informatics and Media as of January 1st, 2011.
The candidate is supposed to participate in the department’s ongoing research in the field of web 2.0/social media/social networking sites & economic online surveillance/Internet prosumer labour. Therefore applicants with a solid background in the combination of the following areas are solicited to apply: critical media and communication studies, Critical Theory, critical political economy, critical political economy of media, ICTs and communication; Internet studies, surveillance and privacy studies, critical advertising and consumer culture studies.
Qualifications: master’s degree (candidates with any suited disciplinary and interdisciplinary background are welcome to apply), excellent command of written and spoken English. 

I'm tempted to apply for it myself…

Are you doing a humanities PhD?

If so, don't read this. It's American, so the figures and comparisons aren't entirely relevant, but the general trend is accurate: PhDs take a very long time, a lot of people never finish, they fit you for a very narrow niche, and there are very few jobs in that niche. On the plus side, most humanities PhD candidates are so socially inept or nerdish that we're unsuitable for any other job anyway.

UK PhDs are shorter - 3 years minimum, 4 years average. I took a bit longer, but I was teaching basically full-time (not for full-time pay, I should point out) and I'm extremely lazy it took deep thought.



I'm almost 35 (I was studying for something from the age of 5 to 32), broke, I don't have a permanent job - and yet I'm having a great time and I know things about stuff you didn't care existed.



So ignore the Jeremiahs: postgraduate life is wonderful. Most of the time. And you may even get a job later. Perhaps even one related to your knowledge.

O Frabjous Day!

Congratulations to Daniel J Pedley, formerly know as Deep Pan Dan, who has today handed in his PhD on human/wildlife urban interaction or some such. Now he only has to wait, terrified, for the viva examination in a few short months. And get a job…

Too Many Birds

Westing By Sextant and Musket

The Boy Done Good (Billy Bragg)

I Love To Say Da(n) Da(n) (Beach Boys)

There must be some way out of here…

Are You Looking For a Way Out? (Tindersticks)

Still Lost (Cowboy Junkies)

I've Lost the Reason (Boo Radleys)

Show-off

I'm pretty lazy. Sometimes, I can flog myself until I do some work, and on some of those occasions, I can manage something decent. Sometimes though, you just have to admire the drive of people like Mary Daly, the controversial radical theologian who died recently. Her obituary includes the casual phrases 'she was awarded her first PhD' and 'acquiring further doctorates'.

Doing a PhD is a major undertaking, as several of my readers know. It takes several years of dedicated study and writing. At least in the humanities, it means isolation and poverty. One is quite enough - several is insane.

Welcome to the Blogosphere: you'll never leave

My former PhD supervisor is an expert on e-learning, and will be blogging regularly on the Higher Education Academy's site about the joys of e-learning in an English literature context: catch it here.

Every day is cloudy and grey

I've got a lot of marking to do today, so I've rewarded myself with treats. Having managed 40 lengths in 27 minutes (backstroke), I had a cinnamon swirl. I'm listening exclusively to The Pastels because I have the office to myself and I damn well like Scottish indie lo-fi, I'm reading Moominpappa at Sea and I'm going to see Serious Money tonight.

Actually, Moominpappa at Sea isn't very comforting. My PhD is about failed masculinity in 1930s Welsh political novels, and many of the same themes are emerging in this Moomins book. Poor old Moominpappa finds that his existing model of masculinity and paternalism is all over - they don't need him to protect him, so he gets depressed. He thinks about starting a forest fire, then moves the whole family to a lighthouse (very phallic) on a remote island so that he can refound the family on conservative lines. Moominmama seems to know that it's a phase she'll endure and seek to mitigate - I'm sure he'll learn the error of his ways in the end.

I hope I haven't just ruined the Moomins for you. They're amongst my very favourites.