Share and share alike
There’s a funny component of grad school that seems awfully like kindergarten: sharing. Twenty years ago, as you clutched your new box of 256 colored crayons in your hands, a kind adult would look down at you from lofty heights and intone, reproachfully, “Now, are you going to share?” Alternate-but-amiable courses of action were, in reality, non-existent. Survival meant sharing.
Graduate work, at least in the humanities, seems to operate under the same fundamental assumption. We have been deluged with e-mails from my department, exhorting each and every one of us to share. Submitting scholarly work to conferences is, of course, part of the academic life. But there is a certain urgency layered on top of these calls for papers that I was not expecting. If, heaven forbid, no one from our small department applies to an especially prestigious conference, a bizarre inferiority complex manifests itself. In the professors’ minds, the logic seems to proceed thusly:
I think we’re a good department.
Good departments apply to good conferences.
We didn’t apply to this good conference.
Therefore, we are not a good department.
Heavens! Should such a situation arise, we are sent terse e-mails, asking, “Can anyone tell me why no one has applied to this symposium?” The implication: Aren’t you going to share?
Well, good news for all: kindergarten worked, and I am sharing.
Dear Elissa,
I am writing to inform you that you have been selected to participate in the Seventeenth Annual Indiana University Art History Graduate Student Symposium on Saturday, March 24th….
Please send me an email conirming your participation in the symposium no later than Friday, February 23rd. In the meantime, please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions.
Best,
—-
Huzzah!
Rebekah said:
on February 21, 2007 at 8:26 am
Congratulations!! What’s the topic?
elissa said:
on February 21, 2007 at 9:59 pm
Thanks! I’m excited. My paper is about how patronage affected the cultural role of American landscape painting in Hawaii in the 1880s. A group of American painters were churning out tropical landscapes then; some were purchased by white business owners as a means of visual/cultural imperialism. Very similar paintings were purchased by King Kalakaua as part of broader initiative to create a Hawaiian nationalism and serve as a kind of cultural resistance. Well, at least I think it’s interesting…