5 Deadlines, 5 Weeks

Between February 1 and March 2, I submitted five proposals: two for workshops, one for a conference paper, and two for fellowships for next year. Although they varied in intensity, preparing applications always seems to require me to devote, at minimum, a full day’s work (and additional hours later to revise and copy edit). Some take considerably longer. Needless to say, these deadlines have been my sole focus and stressor since the winter holidays.

With all the proposals submitted, I can now relax and feel a sense of accomplishment. I was ambitious in applying for so many opportunities in a single month, but I managed to complete them and grade 36 student papers! Better yet, I already received notification that I was accepted to one of the workshops, and so I know that I will not go 0-5 for this round.

Another immediate benefit of the process was that I was forced to revise the second and third chapters of my dissertation, to submit as writing samples. The revisions were time-consuming and difficult, but through editing the chapters I gained a better understanding of my dissertation’s narrative and argument. As I begin to write chapter 4, I think this knowledge will clarify my approach. The same fellowship application prompted me to consider the final chapters of my dissertation (which still seem far in the future, despite the fact that I will draft them this year). So chapter 4 will not only be built on a solid foundation, it will be written with chapters 5 and 6 in mind; I will be able to connect the first and second halves of the dissertation with ease. 

I’m looking forward to putting aside revision for a little while and diving back into research. More updates to come…

Benefits of Conferencing

After last year's AJS Conference, I blogged about my experience and the benefits of participating in a Graduate Student Lightening Round Session. This year, I coordinated and presented on a panel, which I found even more beneficial than presenting in a Lightening Round Session. Unlike a lightening session, which was more of a grab-bag of grad students from different disciplines researching very different topics, a panel session is only three people presenting papers on one topic. This singular focus was valuable for a few reasons. First, I learned what my colleagues' have discovered through their research on Jewish communal surveys. Now I can apply their findings to my own scholarship. Second, the senior scholar who responded to our papers could offer more than just a few comments on each of our individual papers. She also commented on how our papers fit together and how, as a group, we are contributing to a larger historical debate about how Jews understood themselves and their communities. Finally, several scholars with interest and experience in surveying Jewish communities attended our session. They asked very insightful and pointed questions about our research. In addition to identifying some aspects of my paper that could have used more elaboration or emphasis, the questions also helped me realize the value of my project to the broader field of Jewish Studies.

The benefits have continued after the conference. After reflecting on the respondent's comments and some of the points that came up in the Q&A portion of the session, I have refined some elements of my dissertation's argument. I have also extended, through email correspondence, several of the short conversations I had with scholars at the conference. Extending these discussions has given me even more great ideas for how to revise and strengthen my project. Most tangibly, one of the attendees at my session told me that he had an extra copy of the JWB Survey that I could have, and he sent it all the way from California to Pittsburgh. I now have my very own copy of the JWB Survey!

Before this, I've always had to use a library or archival copy of the text. Apparently, the JWB Survey originally featured a dust jacket!

I'm thrilled to have my own copy that can travel with me across the country and through the years. Never again will I have to return to the library and beg for just one more renewal because this one book is the basis of my entire dissertation!

Thank you to Dr. Bruce Phillips, for generously providing this book in addition to decades of wisdom about Jewish communal work, and thank you to everyone else at AJS 2015 who provided helpful feedback and made suggestions to improve my work. I'm already looking forward to AJS 2016 in San Diego!

Modeling

Although 2015 was my second year attending the Association for Jewish Studies Conference, this was my first year presenting a paper as a member of a panel (last year I participated in a Graduate Student Lightening Round Session). In preparing to write my paper, I did some research about what distinguishes a successful conference presentation. This blog post from the American Historical Association was most helpful, as was advice from several colleagues. In addition, I turned to academia.edu to find conference papers posted by other scholars that I could use as a template.

As it turns out, very few scholars in history or Jewish Studies have uploaded their past conference papers to academia.edu. I was able to find only one example, from a former graduate student in Jewish Studies, and I relied on it as a model for how to approach my own paper. I was nonetheless left wishing that I had other examples against which to compare it. It is difficult to take the narrative and argument from a dissertation or book chapter and reduce it down to a coherent 15-20 minute bite, and I had hoped to see several different strategies for how to do it! In the end, I think I did a fine job considering that it was my first time turning a chapter into a shorter paper--the presentation seemed to go well. With the hope that it may benefit other graduate students or young scholars, I have posted my paper to my own academia.edu profile. 

2015 in Review

This was a banner year for me, professionally. I received such generous support and was able to accomplish so much: I wrote three chapters, presented a paper at a major conference, conducted six oral history interviews, and did extensive archival research in New York and Cincinnati. Thank you to those who saw potential in my dissertation in 2015 and provided me with funding, resources, and time:

Department of History, Carnegie Mellon University

A.W. Mellon Foundation, Sawyer Seminar on "The Ghetto:  Concept, Conditions, and Connections in Transnational Historical Perspective, from the 11th Century to the Present," particularly Profs. Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe William Trotter, Jr. who granted me one of the Seminar's pre-doctoral fellowships

Graduate Student Association, Carnegie Mellon University

American Academy for Jewish Research

The Jacob Rader Marcus Center, American Jewish Archives

Feinstein Center for American Jewish History, Temple University

Association for Jewish Studies and Knapp Family Foundation

My dissertation committee, Profs. Caroline Acker, Rachel Kranson, and Joe Trotter

I also had the opportunity to serve as a teaching assistant again this fall, and it was a badly-needed reminder that teaching (if not grading) is deeply fulfilling work. 

In 2016, I hope to continue building on the growth I made this year. My goals are to write at least three more chapters, earn a dissertation completion fellowship, send an article to a journal for review, and present at another conference. Ambitious objectives, but ones that I believe are realistic and achievable. 

Happy New Year! 

Is VR a Useful Storytelling Medium for Historians?

This past Sunday, home delivery subscribers to the New York Times received a Virtual Reality (VR) viewer along with their newspaper. Meant to accompany the NYT Magazine's cover story, "The Displaced," the VR viewer gives the audience the opportunity to fully immerse themselves in the narratives they have just read. In the 360-degree interactive video, you follow the three refugee children featured in the print articles. To say you "follow" them does not do justice to the experience--your gaze does not follow their gaze. You are afforded the opportunity to take in the entire world as they see it, to look left when they look right. You see the children sitting on the truck bench behind them, the presence or absence of adults around them, the aid packages parachuting down from the sky above them, and the river beneath their boat. Of the decision to marry this subject with this medium, NYT Magazine Editor in Chief Jake Silverstein wrote: 

“We decided to launch The Times’s virtual-reality efforts with these portraits because we recognize that this new filmmaking technology enables an uncanny feeling of connection with people whose lives are far from our own. By creating a 360-degree environment that encircles the viewer, virtual reality creates the experience of being present within distant worlds, making it uniquely suited to projects, like this one, that speak to our senses of empathy and community. What better use of the technology could there be than to place our readers within a crisis that calls to us daily with great urgency and yet, because of the incessancy of the call, often fails to rouse us at all?”
— The Displaced: Introduction (November 5, 2015)

Uncanny is an appropriate word. When I finished watching the video, I burst into tears. It is a very different experience to see a life so different than your own than to read about it--you are able to visualize the extent and the scale of the crisis much more vividly. This pairs three intimate, emblematic portraits together with the mind-boggling vastness of the situation. You hear one voice describing the experience at the same time that you see the many, many others surrounding them who are (silently) enduring the same conditions. As a piece of journalism, it's incredibly effective. 

As soon as I finished watching the video, my first thought was, "Could historians make use of VR storytelling?" I believe the answer is yes, VR presents a really valuable medium for conveying past lived realities. Writing history is already an exercise in VR. As historians, we transport the reader to a past reality and help them connect with that lived experience. Narrative history already does what Silverstein identifies as the central benefit of this new medium: it "speak[s] to our senses of empathy and community." If VR can make journalism more vivid, immersive, and relatable, I believe it can also animate historical narratives. But so can standard documentaries. What does VR add? Or, perhaps more accurately, what would make historical VR worth the work? 

As I currently understand it, VR can best be used to demonstrate spatiality. I can imagine it being a powerful medium to convey what it would have been like to be a soldier standing on a battlefield, or to be living with ten other family members in a small tenement apartment. We can describe loneliness or claustrophobia, but wouldn't it be powerful for students to see a short VR video of just how close their bedmate would be if they lived in an 8' x 8' bedroom with their entire family? Or how densely packed (or scattered) soldiers were during a major battle?

These are just some ideas I've been tossing around since Sunday. I recognize that bringing them to fruition would require immense production budgets that are probably beyond the current capacity of most scholars and institutions. Nonetheless, I think it's a medium that humanists should begin to consider! I live by this great quote in The Historian's Craft that Marc Bloch attributes to his good friend and colleague Henri Pirenne: "If I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for old stuff, but I am a historian. Therefore, I love life." We should embrace these new methods for storytelling and expand our potential as historians.

Tell me: Do you agree that VR is a useful medium, or do you think it's passing fad? Or do you have other great ideas for how VR could be married to traditional written histories?