April, 2023 Research Update

Amici!  It is now May!

I suppose the thing to start with is that the pedant household has our newest addition in late April.  Our little girl arrived three weeks early and with more excitement than I'd have liked, but everyone is fine, healthy and home.  The early arrival has caused something of a disruption in my work schedule, but we've got a shift-system working in the pedant household and I am now looking to catch back up.

Also I want to note that I did get the electronically sent gift from the Pedant Present Panel and thank you all very much!

The other big happening in April was my New York Times essay coming out.  If you don't have access to the Times, this link here should let you read the article.  In any case, my sense is that the piece did quite well in terms of readership; it even got a few responding letters-to-the-editor featured as well.  In particular, much to my surprise, the essay got enough attention and feedback to be pulled for the print edition.  I don't get any of my newspapers in print anymore so I had to scramble to go find a print copy but I did manage to do so:

Meanwhile, the promised 3MA podcast on The Great War: Western Front is now out and you can listen to it here.  I'm planning on going into a bit more depth on the game this week on the blog, so you'll get a bit more discussion of it from me there.  Overall, I think it is a really interesting effort to capture trench warfare which does fairly well, especially for a first try, but is also a touch off in some ways (mostly in the translation of historical warfare to engaging gameplay).  It's a game I'd love to see iterated on, either by Petroglyph or other developers.  Remember that it took quite a lot of iteration on what a WWII tactics game was supposed to be like before we got Company of Heroes, so this is a pretty good start, I think.

I was also on the Hellenistic Age podcast for a discussion of Roman military structure and capacity, for those who want something a bit more ancient themed.  This is, of course, the topic of my book project so I had a lot to say!

Speaking of the book project, I am now pretty deep into work on the Gallic equipment chapter, which I hope to wrap up in the next couple of weeks.  I was somewhat delayed by the long time to get ahold of a key book (T. Lejars, La Tene: La Collection Schwab (Bienne, Suisse): La Tene, un site, un mythe 3 (2013)) because, it turns out, there was just one available copy in all of the libraries of the United States!  But I have it now to work with so we should be moving forward again.  For the curious, Lejars' book is a study of Gallic objects (mostly weapons) in the Schwab collection from the site of La Tene and is certainly the most thorough and careful such study I know of so large a body of La Tene material culture objects.  It is also, as you may gather from the title, in French, as nearly all of the best scholarship on Gallic peoples is.

After the Gallic equipment chapter is done, that will leave just the Roman equipment chapter left until we hit our goal of five-chapters-and-the-introduction to be ready to hopefully submit the chapters plus the proposal for review to get a book contract.  My hope remains to submit those at some point in June so that we might get a yes/no answer on the contract by September (and thus in time for the job market if the answer is 'yes.')  That'll also mark the 50% point for the finalization of the manuscript; at the current rate, I expect to have a final manuscript ready for delivery to whatever lucky publisher picks it up late in 2024.  So it might hit shelves as early as 2025, assuming everything works out.

Books are long processes.

Meanwhile, on the job front, it looks like I've got a one-year contract with NCSU to teach two large courses each semester (which they understand as a 4-4 load for the purpose of paying me, rather than 2-2, since they treat a 70-student course as a 'double section,' though of course that you may or may not have a TA to help with the grading).  It's not ideal, but then nothing is and it is a better gig than most in the adjunct space.  It's still possible I could parlay that into a longer-term teaching track appointment, but all of that remains in the air.  Of course my preference is for a tenure-track appointment rather than a teaching track one, but one has to work with what one has.

The one downside to this arrangement is that I have to teach within the lines of what is on the books for NCSU, which means teaching American Military History in the Fall and probably the Cold War in the Spring, rather than what I might like to do, such as a global military history course or something on ancient warfare.  Unfortunate both because I might rather teach those courses but also because building up a syllabus for something some distance outside of my normal area of research takes more time.  One more way the system steals time from adjunct instructors and then wonders why we don't publish more.

In terms of ACOUP, as noted we have the Great War: Western Front analysis coming up.  After that, I plan to crack into the top voted Senate request, which was on Roman roads and what made them special.  We'll likely also have another guest post or two from Michael Taylor sprinkled in over the next few weeks as well on some military history topics.

In any event, that's the month.  My current class should be done in the first few days of May, so that leaves the upcoming month focused on writing and learning to be a parent.  Wish me luck!