A Helpful Insight From a Fellow Blogger

It is uncanny how helpful reading blogs can be to a person. I've been putting off the moment when I will stop looking for more and more and ever more sources for a new chapter I want to add to my book and will finally start writing. The search for sources took so long that I have now completely forgotten what I read in the sources that I had found at the beginning of this protracted search. When the summer holidays began, I decided to inaugurate them with yet another search for sources. In the meanwhile, I kept congratulating myself on how hard-working and productive I was being.

And then, as I was browsing through some older entries on one of my favorite blogs, I saw a very short post that seemed to be directed at me personally. It said something like this, "Stop reading already. You have read everything you need on your topic. Now just start writing." 

"Hmm," I thought. "This kind of makes sense." So this morning I woke up early and finally started writing. And I already have 491 words in my new chapter. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it's more than I had written during all that time I was searching for sources.

I'm thinking of ordering a poster with this beautiful insight and sticking it in front of my desk. These three short sentences probably encompass the best piece of advice one can give to any academic.

Words of Wisdom from a Senior Colleague

A senior colleague in a field closely related to mine is about to retire. Here are some excerpts from a personal email I received from this scholar*:

As I look back on my career in academia, the greatest regret I have is that I didn't prioritize my research as much as I could have. I know that I could have done a lot more, made a greater contribution to my field, published more consistently. The world of academia offers so many activities and imposes so many obligations that seem designed to entice us away from our desks, from our unfinished manuscripts, from that eternally terrifying blank page it is our calling and our duty to fill. It is never too hard to find convincing, seemingly valid reasons why this difficult and often painful work needs to be postponed. "Just one moment more, executioner, just one little moment more," we plead in the style of Madame du Barry faced with the guillotine whenever we find ourselves in front of that blank page. This, however, is the greatest mistake made by so many scholars. . . Your are still very young, and your life as a scholar is just beginning. Since you asked for advice, here is the best suggestion I can offer: do everything in your power to make a name for yourself as a specialist in your field. Your record of publications will be the bulwark that will protect you in times of strife and uncertainty, give you security, respect, and ultimately, yes, power. There are institutional humiliations that become harder to accept as you age. . . The only way you can prevent the work of a lifetime from being undermined by these kinds of pressures is by ensuring that your name carries enough weight to shield you.

*Of course, I requested and received permission to publish this text anonymously on my blog. I translated it into English, so all verbal infelicites should be attributed only to me.

Research and Sprats

When I was a kid, I hated food. All and any kinds of food. The mere smell of food would make me gag. I spent more time dry heaving when I was a child than doing pretty much anything else. You wouldn't guess this if you met me today, but that's how it was. The only kind of food that I loved were these Baltic sprats that you can see on the picture. So whenever I was served a plate of food that included the sprats, I would think to myself, "OK, so I will first force myself to eat all this nasty stuff so that it doesn't cloud my enjoyment of the lovely sprats. When I'm finally done with the food I hate, I will be able to dedicate myself fully to the delightful food that I like."

Of course, after I managed to force down the food that I hated, all I felt like doing was throwing up and couldn't eat the sprats. "This is very strange," my mother would say. "I gave you the sprats because I know you love them but you ate everything else and left them behind."

The reason why I'm telling you this otherwise boring story is that I still have a severe case of sprats when it comes to doing research. To give an example, this week I had some writing planned that I've been dying to do. Thinking about how I would finally sit down and dedicate myself to this truly enjoyable piece of work was the highlight of my week. I simply couldn't wait to get started. Of course, I decided that first I needed to get all the other, boring stuff out of the way so that I would be able to proceed to do my research undisturbed by the unpleasant tasks I needed to perform. So I started on the unpleasant tasks, hating them passionately for keeping me from the enjoyable research. A lot of time was spent on complaining and moaning to everybody in and out of sight about how these nasty tasks were getting in the way of me doing what I really wanted to do. In the meanwhile, more of these little unpleasant assignments kept cropping up. 

When I finally finished the unpleasant assignments and sat down to my writing, I discovered that I was so drained that I could make no sense of what my own text was saying. 

I blame the sprats.

This post was inspired by a great article at Thomas Basbøll's blog that you can find here.

A Good Day of Research

Tools of my trade

A close encounter with colleagues who do everything they can to avoid doing research, inspired me to accomplish a great deal in my work on my next article.

I'm very thankful to slackers right now.

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An Elusive Journal in My Field

I requested a fairly recent article (it was published in 2001) on the subject I'm working on right now through our university's Interlibrary Loan. Our library is pretty sucky but our library services (including ILL) are outstanding. They always deliver everything I request extremely fast. This article, however, they have not been able to locate in any of the collaborating libraries. They say they are "unable to find any libraries owning this journal that participate in Worldcat Resource Sharing."

I wrote to the article's author to see if he'd be willing to send me the text of the article. Its title sounds very interesting, and I don't want to submit my own article without consulting this previous study. Now my question is: does the difficulty in locating this journal mean the journal is not good? I was actually planning to submit my own article there but now I'm wondering whether it makes any sense to publish in a journal that nobody can find or consult later on.

Research and Order

One thing I am very proud of is the way I organize my research. I am convinced that unless the entire process of doing research is organized according to a consistent and reliable system, too much time will be wasted on rummaging among stacks of papers in search of that one elusive quote. We have all had that feeling of having read something useful on the subject we are researching somewhere in the huge mass of articles and books that we accumulate for each project but having no idea which source in particular contained this useful statement. 

Of course, everybody has their own system of organizing their research. Mine is aimed at helping me to achieve two goals:

a) not to waste any time in search of something that I vaguely remember seeing somewhere;

b) be able to work on my research everywhere. You never know when a couple of hours might free up. It is always such a pity when, say, a meeting is cancelled but you can't use the time to write because your research materials are elsewhere.

You can buy a fairly small key-chain with cue
cards that will not clutter your
handbag and will even fit into
a pocket

Any research project in my area begins with a lot of reading. First, you read or re-read your primary sources. In my case, the primary sources are often lengthy Realist novels. Then, I think about the reading for a while, write down several ideas, and turn to secondary sources to see what people who have researched this work before me had to say about it. 

While I read, I always stop whenever I encounter a passage that interests me and sounds like it might be useful and copy it on a cue card. Copying sounds like extra work, but I have discovered that while I'm copying a quote, I begin to think really hard about it. Many important insights often come to me while I do it.

Everywhere I go, I carry two key-chains with me. One contains quotes from my primary sources. The other one, has quotes from secondary sources. In this way, my research is always with me. While I'm on the bus, or stuck waiting in a line, or have several minutes with nothing else to do, I take out my cue cards and re-read them. I did that, for example, when I was writing my doctoral dissertation that had over 300 sources. As a result, I knew my sources so well that I could find any quote I needed in matter of seconds. 

The cue cards on the key chain can also be rearranged in any order which helps with structuring the piece I'm writing. I save all of these key chains because you never know what source you might need to consult in the future. Recently, for example, I needed some sources on the narrative nature of identity. Instead of doing this research all over again, I just disinterred my stacks of cue cards from 5 years ago when I was working on this topic. Within half an hour, I got everything I needed from these old cue cards and was ready to proceed with writing.

I'm not insisting that this system will work for everybody, of course. I, however, find that it really simplifies things for me. Feel free to share any useful tricks you have come up with to organize your research.

The Rule of the Last Few Inches

In Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle (this author's best novel which I highly recommend), a great scientist Sologdin shares with his friend a set of rules that allowed him to preserve his capacity to create scientific breakthroughs even in the midst of Stalin's Gulag. In research, says Sologdin, the most difficult but also the most important stage is the one when the work is almost done. The temptation to let the project stand the way it is becomes enormous. Declare the work finished, step aside, and reap the rewards. 

However, it is precisely at this stage of the very last few inches of the way when a researcher who manages to stick with it just a little longer should expect to be amply rewarded. Final revisions are not just useless, often tedious work. Going over the project in search for a few words here and there that need to be changed can often offer one unexpected insights. It is tempting to forgo the last few inches because, more often than not, the resulting piece of work will not look visibly incomplete. However, some important new breakthroughs can be lost if we skip over these painful and boring few inches.

The Real Reason Research Doesn't Get Done

Do you want to know the real reason why people end up doing a lot more teaching and service than research? I've been sitting here, struggling with two sentences from the first paragraph of my article since 9 am. And I still don't like them. 

The temptation just to leave the whole thing aside and go grade some papers, plan classes, create the next mini-quiz, answer emails or prepare for a departmental meeting next week is definitely there. It would be so much easier to postpone revising the article and then blame the administrators, the colleagues, the students, the husband, the weather, or the "effectively gendered" research. Unless we recognize that we don't do as much research as we would like to for the simple reason that it's very very hard, we will not be able to move ahead and find actual solutions for the issue.

P.S. Sorry for the stupid alliteration in the post's title. I can only concentrate on making the article more or less stylistically acceptable for the moment. The posts will have to stay the way they are.

P.P.S. Finished the pesky sentences that had been giving me trouble since morning. Went to get a glass of pomegranate juice to celebrate. Drank the juice, came back, reread the sentences, and realized that they are crap. Back to rewriting the sentences.

The Gender of Research

Pseudo-feminist blogs never cease to amaze. Today I discovered that some people see the division between teaching and research in academia as gendered. Teaching is considered by these weird individuals to be somehow more female, while research is more male. See the following quote from an otherwise interesting blog:

One reason institutionalized sexism still haunts us all is the gendering of teaching as female and research as male.  This may be what’s inhibiting our conversations along the lines TR suggests, either because 1) we may discover that we don’t in fact hold men and women faculty to the same standard when it comes to their teaching, or 2) we may find that we’re all resistant to conversations about how research supports and enhances teaching because that might diminish its prestige. Why as TR writes “after all these years” don’t we talk more about how scholarship and teaching enhance each other and can be used productively to build effective applications for tenure?  Do we perceive research as the most prestigious of our activities because it’s effectively gendered male, and are we all–women and men alike–reluctant to compromise its value by introducing girly values like good teaching into our conversations about research? 

This is the first time in my life I see anybody refer to teaching as "girly." I love teaching and I believe I'm really good at it. However, research has always been and will always be my main priority. Every university where I have worked has encouraged my interest in research very enthusiastically. Nobody ever suggested that I should go easier on research because I'm female. Nobody ever suggested that research is "effectively gendered male," whatever that means. (May I suggest that the blog's author might not be publishing as much as she would like to not because of anybody's sexism but rather because she comes up with this kind of verbal monstrosities that make no sense whatsoever?)

It is only in the eyes of some pseudo-feminists one's active research agenda makes one less "girly", while one's dedication to teaching makes one more so.

P.S. I was just kicked out of that discussion because I was suspected of being male. :-) :-) I guess, my writing isn't "girly" enough to let me "pass" for a woman. Even though I'm a woman.

First Article vs the Most Recent One

A while ago, I shared the story of my very first research article that I wrote - oh my God, this is really scary - exactly 10 years ago. This week, I will be finishing my tenth research piece (not counting the two dissertations, of course) that I have written in these ten years. (Is ten articles in ten years considered good in the Humanities? Somehow, the number sounds very puny. I know I will go into a fit of bemoaning my lack of productivity after I finish this post. And then everybody who knows me will have to spend hours telling me, "Oh no, of course, you are not stupid.").

The article I'm about to finish is on the same writer that I discussed in the very first piece of research I published. On the positive side, I know a lot more in terms of the historical context of the novel I'm discussing. I have a good understanding of my critical apparatus. It also helps that I have read most of what this writer and the most famous of his contemporaries ever published. I am also writing this article in English, which is something I wouldn't have been able to do successfully all those years ago (the first article was, of course, in Spanish.)

On the negative side, though, I am beset by a multitude of fears and doubts. What if a critic whose conclusions I dispute ends up reviewing the article for publication? What if the article first gets into the hands of that scary Hispanist who hates me from the bottom of her heart? What if my choice of theory upsets somebody? What if one of the reviewers hates the word "consumerism" that is so central to my analysis? What if quoting Zizek turns out to be one huge mistake that tanks my article?

Given that you can only submit your work to one journal at a time and the review process takes between 6 months and one year, these questions become daunting. Fear, however, is not a good aid for creativity. Often it gets so paralyzing that it's difficult to type a single word.

Oh youth, oh innocence! How much I miss you! It was so wonderful just to write without even knowing that any of these things can happen to you.

Doing Research Isn't Easy

One would think that writing a research article for 4 hours is not that big of a deal. How can anybody get tired from that? For some reason, though, it's usually draining. I wrote 4 pages, dropped down in exhaustion, and slept for another three hours. Sorry for keeping everybody's comments in moderation in the meanwhile.

I have discovered that blogging has taught me to write my English-language articles a lot faster. When I was writing my doctoral dissertation, I could never do more that 3 pages in one day. (I did 5 once, but the I was useless for days after that.) But since I started this blog, I'm a lot more comfortable with writing in English. On Sunday, for example, I just sat down and wrote 8 full pages of my article. And then I had to force myself to stop. 

OK, I'll stop ranting about writing my article and just go write some more.

Meetings, Committees, and Time-Wasting

I now know why academics love having meetings every fifteen seconds, why they spend so much time on committees, service-related activities well in excess of what is required of them, sending out needless emails, discussing every tiny little issue for hours, etc. The reason is that they want to avoid doing research. 

I'm not saying I'm any different, mind you. I have the same problem. And don't get me wrong, I love doing research. The problem is that everything else I do (preparing for classes, creating fun activities for students, organizing my paperwork, creating new syllabi, going over my tenure portfolio, reading, taking part in committees, etc.) is so much easier. It just is. Three hours of research leave you more exhausted than 8 hours of any other academic activity. Research is hard. It's also fraught with emotional pain. I often drag out work on an article because I'm afraid of the moment where I will have to send it out and prepare myself that rejection can befall me at any moment. 

This is why there is always a reason why one can't do research right now. But I just thought of a great way of really advancing one's research. Do you know how when we are scheduled to teach, those hours are marked off on our calendars as the time slots where we are completely unavailable to the world? Something similar needs to be done with research. I teach 7,5 hours per week and in those hours I can't do anything other than teach. So let's say I dedicate 10 hours per week to uninterrupted research and refuse to make myself available to anything or anybody. Just like I do with teaching. Imagine how much I'll be able to publish. 

I'm terrified of becoming one of those failed scholars who only produced enough research to get by the tenure committee. So now I will be trying out this new strategy. I will keep you informed about whether it works. But I feel like there is something really valuable in this strategy I just devised. 

Academic Carelessness

I'm working on a research article on Galdos's Lo prohibido right now. As I'm reading the existing scholarship on the novel, I keep discovering how careless some academics are. One recognized authority in the field misspeaks and says something that is very obviously not true, and then everybody starts repeating it like trained parrots. "The protagonist of Lo prohibido falls in love with his three cousins," they keep saying, even though any familiarity whatsoever with this text makes it clear that this is not the case. Jose Maria, the main character of the novel, falls in love with two of his cousins and flirts with the thirs one while pasionately in love with the second. This realist novel makes this fact as obvious as humanly possible.

The same thing happened to me when I was doing research for my doctoral dissertation. There was this article on one of my primary sources that kept referring to some character in the novel called "Sagrario." I didn't remember any Sagrario in the book, which freaked me out because it's unacceptable to be so unfamiliar with one of your primary sources as to lose track of a character. Only later did I realize that the academic in question meant the character whose name was Rosario, only for some reason the article's author kept calling her Sagrario. Even though this was not the novel's protagonist, Rosario still was very important to the novel's plot. So it's kind of scary that neither the article's author nor her reviewers caught this repeated slip.

P.S. As I mentioned before, I freed myself up from all other obligations in order to dedicate the next 8 months almost exclusively to research. Prepare to hear a lot about it on this blog. :-)

Advice to Academics: How to Select a Conference?

Choosing a conference where one will give a talk has become more fraught than ever. Nowadays, we are lucky if our university pays for one or two conferences per academic year. Often, academics have to shoulder out-of-pocket expenses to attend conferences. This is why I believe that the choice of where you will give your talk should be approached carefully.

Many young academics choose to speak at conferences that are dedicated to their research interests. I think this is a mistake. You don't want to end up with a CV showing that you kept doing the same thing for years. Nowadays, only a very broad range of research interests and teaching experiences will guarantee a comfortable career path for an academic in the Humanities.

When I choose a conference, I always select a panel that will discuss something I have never addressed, studied, or even considered before. In May, I gave a talk on the Spanish mystery novel. Next week, I will be speaking about the horror genre. It was weary work to get myself knowledgeable enough about these subjects since they lie so far away from my regular research interests (identity, ideology, female Bildungsroman, XIXth century Realism.) However, once I got over my initial resistance to these topics, I have discovered a very interesting tendency that the mystery novels and the horror novels share in contemporary Spanish literature. As a result, I will be able to combine the two conference talks into an article ready for publication with very little extra work.

Sometimes, you get so comfortable with your primary area of interest that it's hard to push yourself to explore other research interests. There are people who keep giving talks on the subject of their doctoral dissertation years after they got their PhD. I never wanted to turn into this sad staple of academic life, whose appearance at a conference is greeted by a fatigued sigh of "Here she goes again with her Bildungsroman obsession." Yesterday, I talked with an older colleague who is a very respected and productive scholar, and he told me that choosing a subject he has never worked on before for a conference talk has been his life-long - and very successful! - strategy.

I understand that this advice will not be useful to people in the sciences because the purpose of going to conferences is different from what it is for people in the Humanities. For my colleagues in the Humanities, though, this should be something to think about.

NRC Rankings of Doctoral Programs

A reader has written in to ask what I think of the recently released ranking of doctoral institutions by the National Research Committee. Since I got my doctoral degree in the instituion ranked the highest in my discipline in terms of research and science, I can say with 100% certainty that these rankings are a load of complete and utter bullshit.

When I came to this highest-ranking doctoral institution as a graduate student, I had already started a very productive research agenda. I had published with good journals (not graduate journals, mind you, but very respected publications in my field), spoken at international conferences, won grants to fund my projects, etc. My professors at the much lower ranked institution where I got my MA had helped me enormously in my efforts to begin a research career.

As soon as I arrived at my highest-ranking institution, however, all that had to stop. The departmental philosophy was that doctoral students are not prepared to publish or speak at conferences above the level of a graduate colloquium. In my first couple of years there, I still tried to publish but the feedback was so nasty that I got completely discouraged. Not only wasn't anybody offering any help, the attempts I made on my own to continue my research were shot down immediately. As a graduate student, one still doesn't have the self-assurance of an established scholar. When your senior colleagues scoff at your publications and refer to them as "garbage," you tend to get discouraged. The only word I can find that would describe the general environment at the top-ranking institution in question is "anti-intellectual." While I was there, I could literally feel my brains turn to mush.

The entire experience of a doctoral student at this highest-ranking institution is reduced to taking some very antiquated courses and teaching lower-level language classes. Unless you are somebody's personal favorite (which always comes at a very high price), you never get an opportunity to teach or assist in teaching literature courses. As a result, you get this paradoxical situation where people graduate with a very prestigious diploma accompanied by a completely empty CV. In the recent years, people who graduate from this department have found it extremely difficult to find employment. The ones who will be able to continue doing research (as opposed to teaching lower-level language courses or leaving our field altogether) are very few. This is not surprising since our growth as scholars and pedagogues was stunted by our department on a daily basis.

So if you are thinking of applying to grad school and don't know where to apply, don't consult these stupid rankings. They are completely meaningless. Go on a campus visit as a prospective student or, if you can't take time off, at least establish a correspondence with the graduate students at the department where you are planning to apply. Make sure you ask the following questions (of course, it makes no sense to ask senior faculty members, they will not tell you the truth. Ask other grad students): how many literature courses will you teach or assist in teaching before you graduate? how many publications do you have? are you working on an article right now? are the faculty members helping you get published? how many conference papers do you deliver per year? what is the level of those conferences? how active is your thesis advisor in finding conferences for you to speak at and journals where you can publish?

I know that it's difficult to think so far ahead. I know that when you get that letter of acceptance from Harvard or Brown, all you want to do is go out and celebrate. In my experience, though, those grad school years roll by pretty quickly and the painful job application process begins. No matter how well your grad school's name sounds, it will not substitute a CV filled with varied courses one taught, a handful of articles one published, and several conferences one organized.

Here is a link to an article from Inside Higher Ed that questions the usefulness of such rankings.

My First Article

What does it say about my scholarly career that I still consider my first research article to be the best I've ever produced? I was 25 years old and had only been learning Spanish for 2,5 years. My knowledge of the Spanish language, let alone the literature written in the Spanish language, was obviously pretty limited. I had no idea how literary criticism was supposed to be done. I had even less understanding of how academic publishing works. The positive side of all this ignorance, though, was that I felt completely free to write what I wanted exactly as I wanted to write it. Today's beautiful rainy weather makes me feel nostalgic, so I want to share the story of that article with my readers.

When I decided to create my first research article, I started by going to the library and choosing the thickest novel I could find. The thinking behind that was that a long novel would definitely provide me with enough material for research. So I read this novel by the great Spanish realist writer Benito Perez Galdos and came up with my interpretation of the novel. Happy as a clam, I went to look at the research that had already been done on the novel and immediately discovered that what I wanted to say about it had already been said a hundred times before. In those days, it took me forever to read a novel in Spanish, so I didn't have time to pick another work to analyze.

"OK," I said to myself. "It makes no sense to repeat what others have said before. So why don't I argue the exact opposite of what everybody else is saying? Critics agree that this is a novel about religious intolerance. And I will say that it isn't." Strange as it may seem to proceed in this way, it actually makes sense. Whenever there is a general agreement on something, whenever something seems completely obvious, that means the phenomenon in question hasn't been subjected to a truly rigorous analysis.

I started analyzing the novel from this perspective and came up with some very interesting observations that never occurred to anybody before. At that point, I didn't have the slightest suspicion that writing "Critic such-and-such is completely wrong" might not be a good idea. I didn't know that the critic in question can turn out to be one of the people who will review the article for publication. Or that scholar's friend, spouse, or former student might review it and take umbrage at your argument. I actually believed that if that happened, the critic might feel flattered that their work was noticed by another scholar. I thought a scholar might be excited to enter into an intellectual discussion about the fruits of their research. Stupid, huh? But as I said, I was young and idealistic and had no idea how things worked.

So I finished the article and proved that my innocence truly had no bounds by sending it to one of the most prestigious journals in my field. At that point, I didn't even have a Bachelor's degree yet (the article was initially meant to be my Senior Essay.) The funniest thing is that when this eminently respectable (and to many scholars even scary) journal accepted it for publication, I didn't feel even marginally surprised. I knew the article was good, so of course it was going to be published. There is always space in a journal to publish articles by promising young scholars. It's not like space would be occupied by the friends and the relatives of the editors who need to get published even when they have nothing to say. That never happens. Hard work is always rewarded and good guys always win, right? God, I miss being young.

A short time after I got the letter of acceptance, I visited a conference where the editor of this journal was present. He was sitting in the first row next to the Chair of my department and obviously he asked her to point out this academic whose article he'd just accepted for publication. She turned around and pointed me out to him. I have a tendency to look younger than I am and "like an innocent angel." Which is something that I heard so many times in my life that one of these days I'll just scream "No, I'm a total bitch, and I'll start letting you see that right now, jerk!!" On the day of that conference, I'd also had the brilliant idea to put my hair in braids and tie it with cute little blue bows. I thought that one's appearance has nothing to do with one's intellectual capacities. See, I told you I was young and stupid.

When the esteemed editor saw me, he looked like he was on the verge of tears. He put his head in his hands and sat looking completely desperate until the end of that panel. The article had just gone to the presses and it was too late to recall it. Then, of course, he collected himself and congratulated me.

It's sad to think that the knowledge of how things work in academia did nothing to improve my research. Just the opposite, it made me think of all the things I should fear every time I sit down to write.

Scholarship

All day today I have been writing a schlarly article while watching a marathon of "America's Next Top Model." I have no idea why this happens but this show always inspires me to write like crazy. I have already written 8 pages today, which is a record for me. Normally, I do 3 pages a day (or five at most, if I feel especially hardworking). I hope there is another marathon of this show tomorrow because I need to finish this article.

Scholarly inspiration is a strange thing, indeed. You never know what will bring it out.

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Who Cares about Research?

When I accepted the position at my current state university, many people took it upon themselves to open my eyes to the harsh realities of this type of schools. "This is first and foremost a teaching institution," they would tell me. "You will be expected to just teach, teach, teach. Forget your research, nobody at your new school will care about that. If you do any research, it will have to be on your own time. And you will have to make efforts to conceal your research from your department because they might believe you are wasting the time you could have spent on improving your teaching."

Well, my friends, it all turned out to be a huge, steamy pile of BS. The administration of my new university is obssessed with research. A day doesn't go by when we aren't begged, cajoled, importuned, and encouraged in any possible way to do research. The university offers money, support, salary raises, and promotions to people who are actively pursuing a research agenda. If you publish something, everybody celebrates you for weeks.

This just goes to show how many preconceived notions about different kinds of universities there are out there. Young academics might hear these horror stories and decide to reject a job offer from a state college because of the fear that their research might suffer. And this absolutely does not have to be the case.

How to Write a Doctoral Dissertation in under a Year

A certain set of circumstances in my life presented me with the necessity to write my doctoral dissertation in its entirety in under a year. When I say write, I mean come up with the topic, read the primary sources (my dissertation had over 40 of them), do research, find the secondary sources, write the text, revise it (several times), and submit it. Now that I have gone through this experience and emerged with a pretty good dissertation (my extremely demanding thesis director, my doctoral committee and now two publishing houses seem to agree), I know that this is absolutely doable. Here is my list of suggestions for people who are starting their journey towards a completed doctoral dissertation:

1. The most important thing, of course, is choosing the topic that's right for you (and that your thesis director doesn't absolutely hate). There is always a temptation to choose a subject that is fashionable right now, will look good to a hiring committee, or will be easier to turn into a book. You need to remember, however, that before the hiring committee or the publishers even get to hear about it, you will have to spend months of your life living and breathing this topic. If it doesn't inspire you a lot before you begin wiritng, there is a danger that your enthusiasm for it will peter out pretty soon.

2. Decide how many months you give yourself to do pure research before you start writing. Remember, you most definitely don't need to read every source available on your topic before you begin to write. When you start writing, you will find out that the process of writing will always lead you to look for more specific sources.

3. Every time you read what might become a primary or a secondary source, I suggest that you copy the quotes that seem like they could be useful onto a cue card. Don't leave it for sometime later on, or you will find yourself in this unpleasant situation (known to every researcher) where you have a nagging feeling that you read something somewhere about something important but cannot remember where it was. I always carried a stack of cue cards with quotes on a key chain and went through them regularly. Eventually, I arrived at a point where I knew my sources so well that I didn't need to stop and rummage around in articles and books every time I wanted to quote something. This allows for a much faster and more seamless writing pace.

4. One of my professors once told me that the best pace to write is 3 pages a day 5 days a week. I found it to be a great suggestion. This writing schedule leaves you with 10 good pages a week (after revisions) and plenty of time to explore more primary and secondary sources. I know there is always a temptation to produce 8 pages in a row on a good day when you feel inspired. In my experience, however, this feat would leave me pretty useless the next day and those 8 pages would turn out to be pretty bad anyways. Besides, you always need some distance from your writing, so there should be at least one day a week when you don't work on the dissertation at all. Otherwise, you might start hating it pretty soon.


5. Learn to let go. As hard as it is to accept it, there will always be more relevant sources, critical theories, and primary texts that can be added to the dissertation. So at some point it's ok to just leave it the way it is. There will always be time to add more when you are transforming it into a book or a set of articles.

Work and Play

After observing my incredibly driven, evidently overworked and perennially stressed Ivy League students, I got into a habit of ending every class by saying: "Have a great day and don't forget to have some fun." As I would often remark to my students: "If we could find somebody who works as hard as your people (meaning the Americans) and relaxes as much and as well as my people (the Ukrainians), we would have one very well-balanced individual."

People often attach a sense of guilt to procrastination. They feel that, somehow, they are wasting precious time that could be dedicated to something important. Unfortunately, they forget that doing something completely unproductive (like watching reruns of a silly show on television, reading mystery novels, surfing the Internet for no particular reason, sitting on the balcony and staring at the sunset) is often the most productive thing they can do.

For those of us who do research, long uninterrupted chunks of time when we apparently do nothing except read, think, walk around, or sit staring at the wall are crucial. This time is necessary to let the brain process information and create new ideas.

Many of my colleagues let this sense of guilt force them into looking for extra employment during the long summer holidays. As a result, their research suffers and they arrive at a new semester drained.

So my new slogan is: let's increase our productivity through fun, rest, and procrastination.