Back from California

I apologize for not really keeping up with comments for the past week or two — between the frenzy of final grading, my prospectus defense, and a week-long trip to California for my brother-in-law's graduation, I have not been tending to this blog as I should. The auto-posting seems to have worked well, though, so I have no complaints.

This summer, I will be working for two professors, doing course development on two new Gen Ed courses.

The first, to be offered in the Spring 2011 semester, is called Tangible Things: Harvard Collections and World History. It is meant to be an introduction to Harvard's many material object collections as well as an exploration of the birth of academic disciplines and the porous boundaries that separate them. This course has been in development for a year and is in the nitty-gritty stage of planning actual assignments, hammering out a syllabus, and honing readings. It is a tricky course to plan because so much of it involves traveling to museums and archives, but Harvard does not have preregistration (and this is a new course), so we have no idea whether we will have 25 students or 250.

The second, to be offered in the Fall 2011 semester is called Dead or Alive. It is an historical approach to many contemporary issues of life and death, including abortion, medical research, eugenics, reproductive technology, end-of-life care, disposal of the dead, etc. This course will use the case study method to introduce students to these issues and their histories. Another grad student and I have been researching and writing cases this semester and are meeting later today to determine which cases will make the cut. We also designed several assignments for possible use — my favorite involves asking students to design an environmentally sustainable cemetery that will serve the material and spiritual needs of Cambridge residents for the next 200 years.

I will also be starting serious work on that tiny project called my dissertation. At the moment, it is just a daunting pit and I can hardly stand to tiptoe to the edge. I think my first step is to make a To Do list that breaks it down into manageable parts so I can start somewhere.

And, of course, I will be going out with my camera to photograph gravestones. The weather is beautiful today, but I have meetings and email to catch up on. If the weather holds, I'll go out tomorrow.

Looking forward to a great summer!

Things That Are Preventing Me From Writing My Dissertation Today

I have spent the past half hour debating whether enough of my prospectus readers will know the difference between the terms "eschatological" and "scatological" to make using the former worth the risk.

Prospectus Success

Sorry for the lack of posting around here lately.

I presented my prospectus to the Early America workshop last week, so I've been pretty busy writing the darn thing, worrying about it, and talking about it. This was not a formal defense, just a draft presentation, but the consensus of the group was that I should not waste any more time laboring over a document that will bear little resemblance to my final project — I should get to work researching instead. That was encouraging to hear, so I will not worry too much about my formal defense, which will take place in April.

My one-sentence thesis is that New England graveyards (1600-1830) were contested public spaces in which living people enacted political arguments. I have a bunch of examples, several of which I have mentioned on this blog.

One thing I'm I little worried about is the wide sweep of my chronology. On one hand, 1830 seems like a logical place to draw the line between colonial-era graveyards and the rural cemetery movement of the Victorian era (Mount Auburn Cemetery was established in 1831). On the other, the heart of my project is in the 18th century and I could probably make my case by confining myself to 1720-1799. I suppose the best thing to do would be to start with an 18th-century chapter that will definitely fall within the chronology and then work my way either backward or forward as necessary.

In any event, I'll be a better blogger in the coming weeks now that I have this weight off my mind.