October 2023 Research Update

Amici!  It is now November.

I'm afraid I don't have a tremendous amount to report for October, as my time beyond ACOUP and teaching was mostly consumed with working on job applications.  The last of the jobs on my list for the season are now in, however, so I am hoping to turn more fully to other projects.

I have started laying down sentences on the next chapter of my book, this one on the military equipment of third and second century Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal).  That's an exciting chapter to work on because the material is quite diverse.  Spain sees military equipment that is fully indigenous and appears nowhere else (the caetra and soliferreum, its own sequence of 'Antenna' swords, so named for the decorative shapes of their pommels), equipment that is imported (Montefortino helmets from Italy, oval shields and La Tene swords from Gaul) and equipment types that are local variations of imported types distinct enough to be their own class (the falcata, Iberian versions of the early La Tene sword, which eventually becomes the gladius Hispaniensis).

That said, this chapter is one of those which is bibliographically thinner than the others, because someone else - in this case, Spanish scholar Fernando Quesada Sanz - has largely already done a massive, comprehensive study of arms and armor on the Peninsula.  It is one of those cases where one has to make decisions in terms of how to spend research time: I could update and/or reinvent Quesada Sanz' work, or I could simply follow the conclusions of his monumental 1997 study and cite it.  In this case, I have decided to settle on the better part of valor and so largely follow Quesada Sanz in basically everything and let him handle the c. 100 years of archaeology and historiography behind these various types of equipment.

I do wonder if that approach will be viewed as acceptable by reviewers in the future, but at some point one cannot be an expert in everything, especially given that most of the key scholarship on ancient weapons and armor in Spain is in Spanish, a language which I have no training in and struggle to read.  There is as a result a limit to how many Spanish-language works I can incorporate, which has led to the decision to mostly stick with Quesada Sanz' work, which in any case, I think is correct on pretty much every point.

Apart from that, I am also spinning up to begin writing a chapter on how the ancient Mediterranean world is represented in video games for a large 'companion' volume - such volumes generally collect a large number of chapters covering a wide range of topics, each written by a different scholar.  This has required me to do some legwork familiarizing myself with the academic research into historical video games.  This is one of those challenges that may not occur to non-academic writers between writing about a topic in academic vs. non-academic settings.  On ACOUP it is entirely fine for me to craft an analysis about Imperator which is focused almost entirely on Imperator and does not incorporate the latest academic theory-work on gaming, but for an academic publication, those sorts of things need to be in the footnotes and I need to be aware of them.  So I am doing that homework now (part of the grad school experience is learning how to do that kind of thing quickly).

Meanwhile, in addition to the update, I thought I might muse a bit on the job market this year and the sort of programs I've applied for and why.  In practice the programs of interest are divided between 1) history departments, 2) classics departments and 3) Professional Military Education (PME) programs, the latter of which may require some explaining.

First, I should note that most of my applications these days are directed at what we'd call 'research universities,' though not all are R1s (the top-tier of research universities).  This is in part because I am a 'research first' scholar, but also because at this point, I'm actually a pretty tough sell for a 'teaching college' (the other major kind of college/university).  Such programs may worry that I would leave if given the offer - they can tell my level of writing is designed to attract the attention of an R1 - and I can hardly assure them that I wouldn't, because I would leave a teaching college if offered a TT-job at an R1.  With a book under contract at OUP, they can be effectively certain I am aiming for a more research-oriented position.

(The difference, for the curious, is that research universities have higher expectations for tenure/retention/promotion in terms of research and writing, but lower teaching loads, typically a 2/2 (two courses each semester, research in the summer), while teaching oriented schools often expect far less or even no research from their faculty, but have much higher teaching loads, often 4/4 or 5/5.)

So, back to departments.  The expectations of History and Classics departments are rather different for ancient historians, though they both hire them.  A history department is generally going to expect their ancient historian to teach some of their large surveys, which may mean an ancient Mediterranean world survey or a 'Western Civ' survey.  If they have a graduate program, they'll also expect their ancient historian to occasionally teach some version of a 'historical methods' or 'historical theory' course, introducing graduate students to the how of historical research.  That latter one can be an awkward fit, because ancient historians don't do research with the same methods as modern historians, as we don't have archives to search through.

Meanwhile, Classics departments continue to generally expect their ancient historians to teach language courses, often signaled by the phrase in the job application that applicants should be prepared to 'teach Greek and Latin at all levels.'  This requirement has been criticized by ancient historians - Walter Schiedel critiqued exactly this approach in his keynote at the Association of Ancient Historians annual meeting in 2020 - but that critique has not generally filtered into the rest of the field of Classics.  My own view is that for most departments, language teaching is a waste of their ancient historian and their language-specialists ('philologists') - we won't be as good as language specialists at it, and by having us teach language classes, you are giving up potentially large courses on Greek and Roman history which can help drive enrollment and lead students to take up classics majors/minors.

More advanced teaching in Classics departments also varies in a few ways; there is likely for graduate teaching, to be a greater emphasis on archaeological subjects simply because the department almost certainly has more archaeology graduate students than ancient history graduate students.  Alternately, there is a desire to turn courses into reading courses - for instance, instead of a course on the early empire, what if you had the students read Tacitus instead?

So both sorts of departments in some ways 'pull' one's teaching in a given direction, though I would say that generally history departments allow greater latitude and it certainly seems like most ancient historians in the United States would rather be in a history department than a classics department.

Finally, because I am also a military historian, I am applying to Professional Military Education (PME) jobs.  These are professorships at the various 'War Colleges' (Army War College, Navy War College, Air Command and Staff College, Air War College, Joint Forces Staff College, Naval Postgraduate School and so on).  Those institutions employ a mix of civilian academics and experienced officers to teach a mix of strategy, policy-theory, military theory and concrete 'war-fighting' lessons to officers who are rising from the ranks.  Basically, whereas the Service Academies (West Point, Anapolis, etc.) turn cadets into Lieutenants, PME turns majors into colonels or colonels into generals (that is, you teach 'field-grade' officers).

That is, as you might imagine, a very different teaching environment; I have a number of friends and colleagues who work in these institutions and so have a sense of how they work.  Compared to a department at a university, PME is essentially 'all graduate school,' which in turn means the classes are all small seminars.  That said, the mainline courses are also a lot more rigid, with standard syllabi developed collectively by the faculty and then taught the same by all of the faculty to those small sections.  On top of that, faculty offer electives in their own specialty, but as you might imagine those electives are also influenced by the fact that they are not being offered to undergraduates but to professional officers deep into military careers looking for insights to help them improve as military leaders.

I think I could find a home in any of three, though I have to admit that I think I would most prefer a civilian history department in terms of the breadth of courses I'd be likely to be able to offer.  Both Classics and PME would fit some of my interests, but not all.  I'm not likely to get to teach much military history out of a Classics department - and what I did teach would be exclusively ancient - whereas in a PME department, I'd be doing a lot of military theory (they'd most likely bring me on to teach either on Leadership or Strategic Theory, so I'd either be teaching a leadership seminar analyzing historical leaders from the ancient past to the present or a theory lecture working through major thinkers like Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, etc.), but not a lot of teaching on the politics and culture of the ancient world.  A history department offers at least some ability to blend those twin interests.  But beggars can't be choosers and there were only a very few openings in history departments for ancient historians this year.

In any case, we'll see what the year brings.  I admit, with all the applications out, I feel less hopeful this year than I did last year.  Fortunately, you all keep me researching, writing and working regardless of the outcome of these academic searches.

Once again, thank you.