finally, a job!

I'm thrilled to announce that it's official: starting in August, I'll be an assistant professor of Classics at a college in New York City and the director of their intensive summer language program! I made the decision last week, but it took several days for the contract to be generated, arrive, and be signed. As most of you know, I've had a long relationship with the Institute – I learned my Greek there in 2002 and have been a faculty member for the past three summers. Never did I dream of becoming the director, though, or landing a tenure-track position in New York City!

It's going to be a tough job. I'll be tackling duties that most academics don't approach until after tenure, if at all: fundraising, branding and advertising, faculty recruitment and training, curricular development, building partnerships across the city, etc. I'm excited, though, to gain new skills and have a real impact right away. I'll be teaching at Brooklyn College in the spring and directing/teaching at the Institute in the summer; the fall will be for research and publication, as the same research expectations for tenure will apply to me as to other faculty. I'm not exactly sure how I'll balance it all, but I guess we'll find out soon enough.

We really struggled with the decision, but I'm feeling increasingly confident that this was the right one. Returning to NYC has long been a dream of mine, and the move will bring us much closer to our parents and families. Last week, we found out that the Fat has matched for his residency on Long Island, so we'll both be moving to the NY metro area! That means more time for me with the Flower and the Florette, which I am particularly excited about. Most of all, the NYC area will hopefully provide more opportunities for Dave to pursue his research. He won't be coming with me right away, but as soon as he can make the move, he will. So cross your fingers that the sequestration won't affect his grant applications and that he will find a hospitable home at a medical school or university in New York soon!

adventures in academia

I'm three weeks into my whirlwind campus interview stage, with about two more weeks to go! So far, so good. I'm learning so much at each campus – about what it means to be an academic, the state of Classics these days, what makes me a strong candidate (and likewise, weak), and what my own expectations for my career are. I'm not ready to make a grand summary, but so far, a few observations:

Sometimes, the hotel with the best view:

(Hartford, CT)

can also be the most "creative" in finding solutions to broken hairdryers:

Texans really ARE serious about their beef:

And their bears! This is a terrible picture, but try to spot two pairs of fuzzy ears in the center:

This is where they live, right in the center of campus:

More seriously: I'm coming to understand the way in which academia CAN be divided into "winners" and "losers" (and how important it is to be in the "winners" camp), but also the way in which academia is much "flatter" than I had imagined, with much greater equality across different kinds of schools. On the one hand, I'm extremely grateful to Princeton. There are so many ways in which my Princeton education helped to position me for success in graduate school: it was at Princeton that I learned about Dumbarton Oaks, the American School, the Latin/Greek Institute – all things that perhaps distinguished my CV from others'. Let me not neglect to mention the strong training I received in the languages, which gave me a head start in grad school and helped me impress the people who are now writing my letters. I hardly ever talk about Princeton while I'm at Michigan, but on the job circuit, I've talked about it many times – with the many academics who did their graduate and undergraduate training there, with committees wanting to understand my intellectual trajectory – and it always reminds me of how fortunate I am to have gotten my start there.

On the other hand, my time at Princeton gave me a very skewed idea of what it means to be an academic or what the broader field is like. When I was an undergrad, I thought there were only 3 schools of import (and you can probably guess which ones those are). But it turns out that brilliant and successful academics end up everywhere – big schools, rich schools, poor schools, in glamorous and remote locations, with amazingly accomplished students and the poorly prepared. Yet in many ways, their lives seem the same: they struggle to produce and publish while teaching; administrators want to see more Classics majors and minors; committee work is a drag; students are inspiring and terrific, as well as difficult and unmotivated. There is one school where I'm truly terrified of ending up at, and it's a replacement hire for a retiring scholar whose article on Euripides' Heracles really shaped one of my chapters. Who knew? And so much of where you end up is based on luck: who is hiring this year, what they're looking for, and whether you can fool them into loving you and your work.

a busy season

It's hard to believe that it's really here: the hunt for a job offer. Before I came to graduate school, I dated a humanities PhD student who was on the academic job market for the first time. Needless to say, it left me somewhat traumatized and deeply anxious about my own future employment situation – starting 7 years ago. And now the time is here: I have several campus visits lined up. I'm polishing the talk, revamping the handout, editing the slides. I'm preparing my teaching demos, researching faculty interests, and starting to imagine myself here, there, or somewhere in between. Part of me wants to ask, how did this happen already? The other part of me reminds me: oh, about seven years of hard work (and I'm even getting the right husband out of it, too!).

I was feeling paralyzed and overwhelmed by it all last week. Too paralyzed even to blog about it. I'm not ready! I'm just a diversity candidate! They'll find out that I'm too young or not what they want or a total red-faced Asian when I drink! How on earth can I possibly the survive the scrutiny I will receive over the next six weeks? Then my dad reminded me, "It's just six weeks." That's right: six weeks. I can do this! It's just "a busy season," right? With all the travel, snatching of sleep, and frantic hand-washing, it will all be over before I know it. It's a little microcosm of this blog's subtitle: "seven campus visits. four performances of beethoven's 9th. one bridal shower. one job offer. six weeks. let's go!"

I'm off to my first school on Tuesday. Wish me luck!

success?

I can't believe I survived this semester! Looking back, I can now see how hybristic it was to attempt to accomplish so many things at once. And yet, things seem to have worked out. My dissertation only requires modest revisions before deposit; I have opportunities to discuss my work and teaching with search committees; aside from a few students who are angry at not being awarded an A just for showing up, my students seem to have enjoyed our class; the wedding will happen.

Victory! ...right? Yesterday was the first day I could wake up not feeling completely overwhelmed by the tasks awaiting me that day. And so it became the first day on which I could survey the costs of this kind of lifestyle. I gave up a lot of things I love this semester: singing, cooking, exercising (not that I exactly love it), keeping up with friends, reading fiction, leisure time, personal grooming, sleep. I needed all that time and mental energy to focus on myself and getting myself through each day. In fact, all I did was think about myself.

Turns out that utter self-absorption is not good for a relationship! Dave has been extremely generous and supportive this whole time – he has made me gifts, written me notes, and cared for me so many times. And while I appreciated each act and expressed that to him, I never returned the favor and made him feel cared for and beloved in the ways that he likes. We are very different, which is usually a good thing, but sometimes that means communicating our care for each other requires extra effort. I simply did not have the energy to take that extra step and think about what would make him feel especially cherished or known.

Fortunately, the time in my life of crying about my dissertation is over. But from all indications, the first year or two as a faculty member is even worse than any period in graduate school. In the Humanities, we talk all the time about how studying literature is supposed to help teach us lessons about life and relationships. Funny how a significant part of my dissertation is about the corrosive effects of individual heroism on the home: the very process of heroic success – victory in competition over a worthy but external enemy – is antithetical to wise rule over a stable household. So you'd think I might have been more aware...but no. So here's the challenge: how can we accomplish everything on our to-do lists, while still nurturing and protecting our future marriage? A new year, a fresh start begins soon. Let's see how we do!

The Odyssey on Marriage

In my Great Books class, we just finished reading selections from the Hebrew Bible and are now getting started on the Odyssey. Funny how none of the marriages of the Jewish patriarchs have inspired me with hopeful visions for my own upcoming marriage! What a relief, then to leave behind those abysmally dysfunctional relationships and turn to the Odyssey. Odysseus and Penelope have far from a perfect marriage, and there's plenty to criticize, but I have always loved Odysseus' wish for Nausicaa in Book 6:

"And may the good gods give you all your heart desires:
husband, and house, and lasting harmony too.
No finer, greater gift in the world than that...
when man and woman possess their home, two minds,
two hearts that work as one. Despair to their enemies,
a joy to all their friends. Their own best claim to glory." (Fagles' translation)

Odysseus has experienced every glory of the battlefield and every victory of the intellect, and yet he defines the greatest gift in the world as marital harmony. Love it!

oh, the honesty

On the first day of each class I teach, I like to circulate a little survey for the students. I ask for some basic personal information, so that I can get to know them a little better as individuals. This term's survey included such questions as, "What do you hope to get out of this class?" and "Is there anything I should know about you?" Fun fact: not a single one of my students has a proposed major in the Humanities, yet almost all seemed to think that understanding the Classics is important. Plus one for high school propaganda about "western culture"!

Some choice answers came out yesterday. In response to "What do you hope to get out of this class?", I got:
"a good grade"
"I want to be a true part of this Western tradition."
"I do not find old literature interesting, so I hope to change that."

And for "anything I should know?" someone wrote down, "not much other than I am excited for college." Awww!

Back to School

Farewell, Summer, with your idyllic schedule of being able to write all day and all night! University classes begin on Tuesday, and I'm hardly prepared for the onslaught of new students, new emails, and new distractions. This semester, I'm a Graduate Student Instructor for Great Books, which is a required class for all incoming Honors students. There are a total of about 500 students in the class, nearly all freshmen, but I'll have 19 students in my own section (or precept, if you will ;) ), which meets twice a week. The course fulfills the University's First Year Writing Requirement as well, so I'll be in for a whole lot of grading.

The syllabus is great: Homer, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and Genesis and Exodus. I've taught nearly all the texts in translation in the past, except for the Hebrew Bible. This will be interesting! But even more interesting are the goals for the course. There are reading and writing goals for the students, which are to be expected, and then there are the "ethical goals." As distributed to the students:

• have broader empathy and cross-cultural understanding

• be persuasive while respecting other views, in both writing and in discussion, and maintain high standards of civility

• Understand Greek lit’s relevance to contemporary cultural and political issues and problems in order to supplement their experience in life when considering moral, political, and personal problems, and so become wiser and more resilient

After my long lament in the previous post, I was shocked to see such bold claims for the power of ancient literature made openly and officially. Of course we all believe this personally, but we often don't speak of it in public, as though the declaration that the Humanities can make us more humane is too naïve or unsophisticated for "real scholars." (Or maybe it's because most scholars of the Humanities are typically insufferable.) Moreover, university classes are ever-more-geared towards the measurable and the replicable, where rubrics rule and success is easily defined. Setting an unmeasurable goal for the course is courageous indeed.

I'm still unsure about how to integrate community engagement into my research, or how to engage with a community outside of the University at all. But it's refreshing to be reminded that my job as a teacher of the ancient Mediterranean can have positive, significant, and meaningful effects in the lives of my students. These "ethical goals" may be foolishly idealistic (how much can a student grow if he/she never even opens the reading?), and I'm sure I won't be nearly as optimistic come Fall Break time. Especially while grading a stack of papers. But I'll take whatever fleeting moments of inspiration I can get.