Historiological Notes

Gender and Academia

Jill Walker at jill.txt discuss gender and academic evaluation in "perhaps we should be glad of quantitatively measures of research productivity". This is quite depressing. Women seems to need to achieve much better to get a good evaluation. She refers to a study of Swedish post.docs., but if this is the general tendency it means that women have to write more in more prominenent journals.

Education costs

I recieved my first letter on repayment of my student loan. I have to pay back 6267kr (£ 550) next month.

It feels thought to pay such and amount as I have not got a propper job yet and I have to realise that  education costs.

Yet another 'no'

I am afraid the motivation for writing historiological posts dropped even more today.

I do want to stay in academia and thus 'plan A' is to get a PhD scholarship and 'plan B' is to get some kind of relevant job either to finance my PhD or until I get research scholarship. Last Thursday it was confirmed that my 'plan B' was non existing as I got a job rejection and today my 'plan A' is confirmed gone as well.

I got a letter from the PhD committee at the scholarship I most wanted today. They informed me that they had not accepted my research proposal and would thus not send an application for the funding body for me. (This is the second of three steps to get the scholarship.) I was told that conceptual history was of great interest to them and that my theoretical approach was alright, but they had doubts that the source material I was suggesting would give any interesting results.

I do agree that the source material was a weakness. I tried to find more interesting sources, but were not able to find any before the deadline. The letter also states that "not accepted" only means "further work needs to be done on the research proposal", and I try to comfort myself that it does not mean that I am not qualified as a PhD student - I passed the first step. I know I can do further search for sources and apply again for next year. Hopefully there will be a new deadline in December, so I have the summer and autumn for writing a new and better research proposal.

But today I do not feel too motivated to try again.

Uncertainty is the worse thing at the moment. I do not know anything about the future. As long as one has an application in there is hope, but the rejection only leaves more uncertainty. I have another PhD application in (I should know in September) and another job application, but I do not have to high hopes for those two as I had for the two which have rejected me. (Of course I have had even more rejections, but in these instances I had made it to the second level; the interview and the PhD committee.)

This summer I am working in the shop I have worked part-time in whilst a student in Oslo. So I have the finances for July taken care of, but I do not know what happens in August. I need a 'plan C'.

Sorry for being miserable. I will put on a happy face and try to enjoy a family birthday this evening.

Waiting for a PhD commitee's answer

Waiting for Godot is on at the National theatre here in Oslo at the moment. Waiting for an answer from any PhD commitee seems as worthless as waiting for Godot. It is an answer that never comes.

I got a letter yesterday, that was somesort of a reciept for my PhD application that had its deadline 11th March. This letter tell me that they have 28 applicants and that a decision will be made on the 14th September. Why does it take almost two months to say "we've got your application" and why does it take half a year to decide who gets the position?

The decision for my other PhD application is to be finally decided 21st October (!), but I will know in June whether I made it to the final round.

Perhaps this is just Norway, but it seems as PhD applicants just have to be patient. However it is very tricky to plan anything. If you get the PhD that is decided on the 21st October, you have to start in your position before 01.01.2006. So if you are told by 1st November what the decision was, you only have two months to quit your job and make arrangements for your PhD-research. In Norway most jobs are terminable (by either side) giving three months notice. This means that they expect you to only have a temporary job that you can quit at once; which again suggest that you should keep you career on hold why waiting for a PhD position.

But what if you never get a PhD position and you have only had silly temporary jobs, your career will take you nowhere. One 28th chance of getting a position is not very high odds; though I suppose it could have been worse.

As far as I know in Britain PhDs always follow the academic year. That means that you will know in advance if you get the position and you know when it starts. Ergo, you can make plans.

"New" Historisk Tidsskrift

The Norwegian Historical Journal Historisk Tidsskrift has changed its image in its 135th year. The inside is of course to be as good as always; it is the layout that changes. The front has become minimalistic white and the page layout has wider margins and less print on each page. I beliebe they are aiming for a sofisticated, modern look. (A Norwegian article on the change)

The front cover of books influence what we think of the book (Ms Bookish has an entry on the time when the front cover did not matter). Does the front cover of a journal give the articles credibility? Or is it just the credibility of the journal and the name of the author that give the article credibility?

A university's fingerprint

I might have written on this topic before, but I was reminded of it as I had a discussion with a group of master students in history of ideas here in Oslo this morning. A university library is the fingerprint of the university. The books tells about syllabuses or a professor's special interest and the journals subscribed to tell in which directions research is leading. As the university libraries both in Oslo and St Andrews feel like my home library, I have become very aware of their differences. The university library in St Andrews has, for instance, many books on Norwegian middle ages (many of them in Norwegian) and I found that several of them had been donated to the library by a scholar who probably could read Scandinavian. St Andrews is good at Medieval History, so this migh not be very strange. Another peculiar fact about the St Andrews library was that most continental theorist could be found in English, but seldom in their original language. Now I am struggling here in Oslo as the library has seven (!) copies of Roland Barthes' S/Z and none of them in translation and my French is poor.

There were two things that caught my notice in today's discussion. First that all had read N. Å. Andersen's Discursive Analytical Strategies: Understanding Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau, Luhmann; a book that I have yet to meet anyone in Britain who has read. The other thing was that none of us could think of any historian in Oslo who had suggested ordering a subscription to Rethinking History (ed. Alun Munslow). I was explained in St Andrews that no one wanted it there and I had to get a copy of an article sent from the British Library. The library in Oslo has many more journals that the one in St Andrews, so they might not need to be as picky in deciding which journals to subscribe to.

Journals and libraries

I check the table of contents of the history/historiography/philosophy of history journals regularly on-line. (I love the ones you can subscribe to ToC by email). Some weeks ago I thus became aware of an article in the newest edition of History and Theory (February 2005) that I wanted to read. I went to the university library in Oslo to read this article but the newest edition was not in yet. And it had not arrived when I looked this week either. I got tired of waiting and went on line and printed the article of SwetsWise earlier today. However, when I last browsed the shelves with historical journals I saw that most journals were represented with a 2004 number as the most resent edition. Is the university library here slow, or its it common to wait months for a journal?

The article I now look forward to read is Anders Schinkel's 'Imagination as a category of history: An essay concerning Koselleck's concepts of Erfahrungsraum and Erwartungshorizont.' Continue to read abstract:

3-4000 pages a month

The young Norwegian Aslak Nore was interviewed a few days ago in New York, where he has an inspirational break doing a masters degree in political science/ history of ideas (or something similar), he stated that one should read at least 3-4000 pages a month to keep up to date. He does not specify what sort of pages - fiction, non-fiction, books, journals, magazines, newspapers, classics, new.

When I started to think about this I saw that this mean that you have to read 100-150 pages a day and I asked myself if I do that. I found it to be a difficult question. First I definitely have days in this category, but I also have days which probably do not. Do the good reading days compensate for the bad reading days? Secondly, what sort of reading should count? If only academic texts in my field counts I will definitely not come in the category of reading 4000 pages a month, but I believe in interdisciplinarity and a variety of reading. I usually read a couple of novels a week and they alone would almost full the "quota", then I read essays in journals - but in a week I usually read many or none it depends on the week, then it is the non-fiction that is not history - which quite often constitute for more than my history reading, but I find it necessary to read other academic text to get new theoretical impulses - and lastly newspaper -in paper and on-line - journals and magazines which is a daily activity. And perhaps I also should mention reading blogs, it takes time as well.

No matter how much I read I always feel I should read more, especially things relating to history. Being part of academia will always bring unread text to your attention. After thinking about Nore's 3-4000 pages I find them an unnecessary quota. People will always read as much as they can and some will always aspire to read more. Being up to date is more of an attitude than a goal to read a certain amount of pages.

Research Proposal

The normal way of doing a PhD in Norway is to get a three year research position at a university. As it is payed it is quite hard to get one of these positions. 1st of March is the deadline for applications for the 15 positions available at the Faculty of Arts in Oslo next year.

As I really want one of these positions I am now consentrating hard to write the best research proposal I can by tomorrow. Writing research proposals are new to me, but also for most of the other applicants, so I hope mine will not be much worse stylistically than the others.

I have a few other friends that also would like a research position and I was on the phone to one of them yesterday to discuss strategy for the structure of the proposal. During the conversation it occured to both of us that this is the first research proposal of many. Either we do not get the position and have to write a new and better one for another position or we will be accepted and becoming academics spending the rest of our lives writing research proposals and grants applications.

Well, I just have to get used to it.

Why a historian?

Having submitted my dissertation and now waiting for my M.Phil viva coming up sometime in March and at the same time looking for jobs and research grants, I do a lot of thinking about what I want to do with my life. I are soon officially a historian, and many people have asked me if working as a historian is really what I want to do. I usually answers that , yes, it is really what I want to do, but at the same time their question has put some doubt into my thoughts.

For the last few days I have been in the journal archives in the basement of the university library in Oslo reading journals mainly from the 1890s, and I have had a really good time. This afternoon it struck me that it is true that I want to be a historian, I want to be able to spend the rest of my life reading old articles and find out what people thought about before. It has been a few years since I studied Norwegian history, so my earlier text books are just a vague memory. Now, however, the history is before mine eyes as I read the public debate going on more than a hundred years ago. I have been reading in three different journals and I feel I have seen different point of views to the debate. However, some of the debates goes across the journal borders and some of the same names keep appearing again and again. The more I read the easier it is to see connections and implications.

My dissertation is theoretical and I feel I have read and written a lot about interpretation and hermeneutics. Hans-Georg Gadder's words on horizon of expectation and hermeneutic circle, feel so much more real as a historian than a theorist. I can feel that my horizon of expectation to the Norwegian social and cultural debate in the 1890 is widening and I can feel that I am in a circle that let me know more and more each time I experience a new text.

This is why I want to be a historian; I want to know more about the past by reading myself into past discourses. It is not enough to read about the past, I want to have a feeling of it myself.

And I know that we - postmodern historians - do not really experience the past, but only our present society and our own thoughts, but the feeling of visiting the past is still there. And if reading past texts can make me understand present historiography -which is what I am aiming for - the better.