The Return of the Professor

Cathedral in Bayeux

I pulled something in my neck the other day.  I didn’t notice the pain then, but now I am balanced in our cat hair-covered recliner with a heating pad behind my neck and my computer on my lap.  This is fine, for the moment, and I’m sure it will be better soon. Being still able to type is good because I certainly have a lot to do in the next week or so – in less than two weeks, I’ll be back in the classroom, teaching an art history survey class at a nearby community college.  I have a syllabus to finish off, some reading to do, and some lecture notes to write. 

I’m excited!  It’s fair to say that I didn’t realize how excited I would be to go back into the classroom until it began to seem like it would happen.  A friend put me in touch with the department—she heard they’d lost an adjunct lecturer to a sudden move, and she happened to know an Art History Ph.D. (me!) who could handle such a class.  This has little effect on my day job at the museum, for the most part, it’s additional and outside hours that I would not normally be working, so while I will soon number among the contingent faculty of the world, it’s not quite the same as relying on piecing classes together.

I finished my dissertation three and a half years ago.  After that, I took a FULL break, cut the cord, barely thought about my dissertation or trying to publish anything until last year when a call for papers came up that was too good to pass up, even if it meant finding the money for a trip to Europe.  I came home from the conference a little frustrated—it seemed like people were only just coming to conclusions that I had come to literal years ago now.  I had a greater sense of what it would mean to have my scholarship out in the world because I believe that it’s true that no one has replicated my work since.  As I think about that conference experience, and as new opportunities present themselves, I’ve been thinking more about trying to publish parts of my dissertation.  With a few years distance, I have better sense of what I want from academia and perhaps what it can give me in return. 

And with this distance, and the opportunity to return to the classroom, comes the hope that my years away from academia working directly with museums and nonprofits, places where humanities majors apply their skills, will help me be a better educator.  If I have a better sense of what my scholarship could mean, I am also more able to make case for why it’s important for students to study art history.  I know what skills they learn from art history because I have had to deconstruct those skills myself, repackaging my knowledge and experience over and over to get the jobs that I cobble together to get to the point of having a CAREER.  (I have thoughts about the recent Twitter feeds exploring the twists and turns of careers after leaving academic. I have thoughts about the notion of having careers.)

When I was in the classroom while I was still in grad school, especially when I was teaching expository writing, I tried to be deliberate in explaining why I demanded they do an exercise over again or why it was so important for them to see one thing or another in the text—there is always a reason. A lot of academics, especially, are bad at this. They replace the idea that people deserve a justification of how they spend their time with the belief that certain things are inherently worth knowing and require no justification.  That may be true.  It may also be true that knowing why they are supposed to learn something enables people to take it further into their minds and hearts.  So here’s to a new semester, my first proper semester in three and a half years, and here’s to art history!  Hopefully my neck heals enough, soon enough, to make those lecture notes as interesting as I know they can be.

Old and New Projects, Engaging the Public

For the last two months, I’ve been working, working, working, and so that’s why I haven’t been writing here.  I’ve been working on contract projects, in both of my regular jobs, and in trying to figure out how to move forward with a research project I’ve been itching to launch. What is most important though is that, in the work I’ve been doing for the last few months, I’ve had a chance to interact with a number of members of the public in Ohio who are not art historians and not museum workers, but who are incredibly interested in supporting culture and maybe in making art or writing stories.  These are the people I left academia for.

The sky above Sts. Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church in Youngstown.

One project found me in Youngstown, Ohio, leading an art and architecture tour of the city’s historic churches—many of which are stellar examples of their architectural styles and of what a city at the peak of its wealth and power can accomplish. Now, many of these churches rest potentially on their last legs as their congregations age and populations shift.  Even though Youngstown is experiencing a cultural renaissance of sorts and encouraging businesses and people to move back into the city, the churches are unlikely to be benefactors of that.  They were constructed along the old ethnic lines of the city, and the groups that once patronized them have long been gone, at least to the suburbs if not further away. The tour was incredibly moving because the people who participated seemed genuinely engaged by the treasures their city revealed.  I believe that when they left they understood the consequences of losing such historical structures, once pillars of the community.  

Another project that I worked on in the last month, one that I’ve been involved in for awhile now, asks people to respond to texts from the humanities as a means of reflecting on their own experience.  Most of these texts are chosen because they have inherent value—value that is not predicated on, for example, knowing that Charles Baudelaire was a poet and critic who produced most of his best stuff in mid-nineteenth century France.  The beautiful thing about this program is these texts do have value that is inherent; their words are words from which anyone can find strength or solace and through which anyone can grow as a person. Helping people have intelligent conversations about what they’re reading helps to increase the ability of those people to engage beyond a controlled discussion setting.

At my day job, I’ve been teaching more and taking more time to drill down on what it means when we teach students about primary vs. secondary sources, how bias and perspective function in historical documents and literary texts, and how to evaluate information they encounter.  All of these skills figure prominently in the state standards for education, but it’s important to show how they can be applied outside the classroom. After all, the goal is for students to carry these skills beyond school, into their college years or their career, and through their adult lives. Not everyone will go to college, but everyone will need to understand how to decide whether or not the information before them is true.

These projects and programs all, in one way or another, embrace and promote ideas and values that are important to me. They all suggest ways of moving forward in my career and types of projects to continue to seek out to promote my interests.  In each case, the project is, at its core, about civic engagement—about gaining the tools to look around you and read the world for what it is.