Marginalia
The blog stopped in 2020. Its posts did not stop being useful. People still arrive here looking for the dissertation advice, the post-ac reading list, the mentor post and the Fort Negley story, usually one post at a time.
These essays read across the archive instead. Each one takes a single theme, follows it through several posts by different writers, and adds what has changed since. They are written by the people keeping the site online, not by the original authors, and they link back to every post they quote.
An Hour Before the Email: How the Smart Women Actually Got Writing Done
Seven posts, one recurring rule: write first, before anything else gets a claim on the day. What the writers did with that hour, and what they did when it was not enough.
Leaving the Seminar Room: What the Writers Learned About Life After the PhD
Eight posts on the job question underneath a writing blog: too many PhDs, the first years out, the economics of unpaid service, mentors, networking, and the applications that come after.
- Too Many PhDs?
- From PhD to Here: Towards a Life outside of Academia
- Lost and Found: A Post-ac’s Book List
- A Final Post: Reflections and Thanks to Smart Women Write
- Looking Out For Yourself in the Academic Gig Economy
- On the Virtues of (Feminist) Mentorship in Academia
- On Professional Generosity: a How-To Networking Guide for Writers, Educators, and Academics
- A Career Shift, A New Project
Who Gets Cited, Who Gets Recorded: Footnotes and Oral Histories in the Archive
Six posts about sources: drafting a UNESCO nomination, filming descendants of Fort Negley, writing encyclopedia entries, sharing credit with a co-author, and an argument about who historians are obliged to cite.
- Drafting the First US Nomination to the UNESCO Slave Route Project: Nashville’s Fort Negley
- Creation & Curation: The Fort Negley Oral History Archive
- Double Your Digital Archive
- To Write, or Not To Write that Encyclopedia Article?
- Collaborative Writing in the Humanities: Lessons in Co-Authorship
- When a White Scholar’s Work is Not Cited: 1619