February, 2023 Research Update

Amici!  It is now March!

Looking back it appears I missed the January research update (which should have appeared February 1), so my apologies there.  I will be honest with you all, I have been pushing quite hard these past few months and I am frankly pretty burnt out, but there are quite a few months to go before I can rest.

But, let's start with book project updates.  I met with Oxford University Press' acquisitions editor early in January and they are interested, so we have set a flexible plan of having 5-6 chapters together to make a formal proposal for review.  The review process is likely to take 2-3 months, so I am aiming to have the whole package together no later than the end of June so that if it is accepted I can have a book contract in hand sometime in September, in time to include that in my job application materials.

In terms of the five-ish chapters, my plan is to include the chapter-length introduction, chapter 1 (farming & the organic economy), chapter 3 (materials and manufacture, also non-battlefield equipment), chapter 4 (gallic battlefield equipment), chapter 10 (Roman battlefield equipment) and chapter 11 (Roman mobilization systems), to provide a good 'vertical slice' of the whole project.  Of those, chapters 1, 3, 11 and the intro are effectively done short of some polishing, leaving me to need to finish chapters 4 (5% done) and 10 (20% done).

Complicating this plan is my teaching schedule.  I was not set to have any teaching this semester but at the last minute (literally on Jan 2 for a semester that starts Jan 10), NCSU found themselves short a military historian and my name came up to teach their US Naval History survey, since I am a military historian.  At the time, they had an active ancient history job search for which I was a candidate, so I agreed to teach even on such short notice.  That has, however, thrown a big wrench in my plans since it means I am teaching a course for the first time on short notice from scratch while trying to keep the book project moving.

Naturally, they did not even interview me for the tenure-track ancient history job they had.  As you may have guessed, this year was another bust on the job market; some interviews but that was it.  Hiring committees tend to want to hire the fresh products of prestigious universities and so tend not to really look very hard at someone like me, five years out of the PhD.  We are a strange field where the more experience you have, the less employable you are.  My hope is that a big splash with the book can effectively reset that timer, but the battle for a spot in academia is very much uphill.  Alas, 'solid scholarship and an exceptionally successful public history project' count for very little, even at programs like NCSU which has a public history PhD.

On the upside, US Naval History is a pretty fun class to teach, getting to talk about the mechanics of age of sail and then age of steam warfare.  I even got to use some Master and Commander clips in class to give a sense of the physical space of a wooden warship.  The class is great fun, the students are great, but alas for my time!

In other upcoming news, I have a number of invited talks coming up this month.  I'm (remotely) on a panel for the University of Maryland's History Department's History Graduate Student Association Conference (3/3/2023), the panel being on "History and the Public: Now and the Future."  More details here, I think this one is open to the public.  I'm also giving a remote talk to the Deutsches Zentrum für integrative Biodiversitätsforschung (German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, 'iDiv') in Leipzig on public scholarship more broadly on the 15th.  Finally, on the 28th I'll be in-person at Tel Aviv University speaking as part of the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies' Zeev Rubin Forum, on "The Appearance of Accuracy: Historical Verisimilitude and the Public's Understanding of History."

I've also got a couple of public-facing articles working through the editing process, which I hope will actually come out this month, including one byline I'm particularly excited to add to my collection.  I'll be sure to link to those in the Firesides as they come out.  Likewise, I've recorded some podcasts that will come out in the next few months, including appearances on The Prancing Pony Podcast, the Hellenistic Age Podcast and most recently a chat with Drachinifel.  Those should all come out in the next few months, so I'll be sure to link when they do.

So between that, the book and teaching it is bound to be a busy month.  As you can perhaps tell, I had been planning, when plotting out the book process as well as the various invited talks and so on, on not teaching this semester, much less teaching a new course for which I'd have to write all new essays.

Look forward for the blog, I suspect that getting the remaining chapters ready in time is going to mean taking some time off somewhere between now and the end of June.  I generally avoid talking too much about my non-cat-related personal life, but the other time consideration in there is that between now and then, my wife and I expect to welcome the newest addition to the unmitigated pedant household.  So that may mean the pace of new posts slows a bit through the spring and early summer (but then hopefully picks back up in the rest of summer as things settle down again).  I also have a few guest-posts from Michael Taylor on a few military history topics which I think you'll all find interesting to work in there too.

That said, I have some exciting posts planned.  The next big series, which I've already started writing, is going to be on the structure of Greek civic governance ('How to polis 101').  My plan is to pair that later with a series on Roman civic governance in the Republic ('How to Roman Republic 101') and if I can wrangle a certain colleague into writing it, a treatment on Italian medieval commune governance too.  The idea here is something both historically informative, but also handy for you worldbuilders out there who want town governments that make sense.

It also looks like the Senate has some clear post preferences for treatments on Roman roads and also ancient colonization (Greek and Carthaginian), both of which are great topics, so expect those to come up before too long.  If we do end up taking a month off (likely to be May or June, if it happens), I'll try to repeat what I did last November, giving y'all here snippets from the book project to munch on while the blog is on hiatus.

Thank you all again for continuing to support this project and my scholarship.  I think once my schedule is a little less crazy, I'll have to think of some kind of bespoke Patreon reward to roll out, but until then you all have just my thanks.