November 2023 Research Update

Amici!  It is now December!  Happy Holidays - whichever you observe (I am a Christmas fellow, myself).

My apologies that this post comes late, but the reason it is late gets us right into my professional update.  Early this weekend I was out of town because I was doing a 'campus visit,' the final stage of the academic job interview process.

Now for whatever reason, academics don't generally discuss the specifics of the job market in public - you won't find many folks on Twitter or what have you saying, "oh, I interviewed at X and Y."  I don't know why that custom is in place, but not knowing it would be foolish to break with it while the coin is in the air, so to speak, so I'm not going to say where, except that it was a public east coast R1 (the highest tier of research university) which I have never been affiliated with.

This was the third campus visit/job talk I've done, so the first thing to note is that this doesn't mean 'I'm in' so to speak.  As I've noted before, at every stage of the academic job process, the odds are against you.  To recap quickly, there are three hurdles you need to get past: you need to get from an applicant pool (in my field, generally c. 100-200 applicants) to the 'long short list' for zoom interviews (8-15 candidates) and then to the 'short list' of campus visits (3 or 4 candidates) of whom then just one is hired.

So your odds get better - from 1 in 100 to 1 in 10 to 1 in 4 - as you go, but they never get particularly good.  And I suspect that's part of why no one talks about the process as its in process: you don't want to do any chicken-counting or the getting up of hopes for wonderful things which are nevertheless profoundly unlikely.

In any case, this job season has already been a lot more productive than previous years, despite it being a generally weak year for ancient history (somewhat better if you do the ancient Near East).  I've had one first-round interview (which resulted in the campus visit) and am scheduled for one more, both at R1's (top-tier research universities); a history and classics department respectively.  That's remarkable to me because I've never made the interview list at an R1 in any previous year.  Quite evidently the book contract has given a least some committees reason to take a second look at my application (and then they liked what they saw).

So that got me to the campus visit stage, which I'm not sure I've talked about.  Most people who work any kind of job are reasonably familiar with what a job interview is like, so that first stage 'long list' interview is pretty understandable.  The only big difference there is that academic interviews are always done by committee, rather than a single person.  But the campus visit is a creature that really only lives in academic searches, so far as I know.

And since I just did one, I can just describe it to give you a sense of the process.

On Thursday, I flew up to the university (the interviewing institution pays for travel costs, mercifully).  My plane came in in the afternoon on Thursday and a member of the department met me at the airport and drove me to the campus.  This is the beginning of the interview process: the car ride in.  And that's the odd thing about the campus visit: as you are moved around to the 'official' interview components of the visit, you are being moved by department faculty (or grad students, or sometimes even undergrads), who are stakeholders in the process, meaning that car ride or walk across campus is also an interview.

So thirty minute interview-during-car ride to my hotel on campus.  Then an hour or two to cool my heels to get ready for dinner with several members of the faculty, which is also an interview.  That naturally goes fairly late into the night - you want to be building a rapport here.  One of the expectations is that you have done some research at this point in the department and so you know what people work on and are prepared to ask questions about their work that show how it connects to your work ("oh, Dr. so-and-so, I saw your book project is about <thing>, my research also touches on <thing> in <other place and time>, I'd love to talk about how <thing> works in your place/time, etc.").  This was actually very easy for this visit, because there was actually a lot of real overlap in themes between my work and their work.  In any case, I got back to my hotel room around 10:00 or so.

Then the next day was the core of the visit.  Breakfast at 8am with some of the department's graduate students; this is also part of the interview, but also a chance to meet some of the grad students and get their perspective on the department.  Then at 9am, meeting with the department chair where you discuss the core mechanics of the job (teaching load, tenure expectations, research funding, etc); this is also part of the interview and you are expected to ask questions which demonstrate your interest.  Then more informally caught coffee with a member of the department in the break time before my 'job talk,' this is also part of the interview.

Then at noon we had the 'job talk.'  This is typically a 40-ish minute presentation of your research that you've prepared in advance; in history this typically means 'reading a paper' (that is, presenting from a script), with a powerpoint.  That was followed by a Q&A; the whole thing ran about an hour and 15 minutes.  This is the one part of the process that is officially an interview, but it is also where you will be in front of the most people, so some department members will only see you for the job talk.  That matters, because the eventual hire decision will be collective, so you need to do a good job with the job talk.  Famously, going over time on a job talk is absolutely sink your chances.

After the job talk was lunch, in this case as is typical a catered lunch with the faculty and thus effectively a less formal continuation of the job-talk Q&A.  This is also part of the interview.  One tricky thing with this is that because you are center-stage during every single meal in the trip, you may not eat very much.  One thing to watch for to get a sense of the kind of people the faculty are is if they are aware of this and try to make sure you have time to actually eat (these folks did; it seems to be a really collegial department).

At the end of lunch was the 'teaching forum.'  There's usually some kind of teaching event in the campus visit, but its form differs: you may be asked to give an example or sample lecture or class, or to discuss your teaching.  In this case it was organized as a seminar, where I provided several sample syllabi (a mix of undergraduate and graduate classes).  I introduced my general teaching approach, then we moved syllabus to syllabus, where I'd introduce and describe the class and the pedagogical strategies in the course design and delivery method, followed by questions about that from the faculty in the seminar group.  This is also, of course, a formal part of the interview.

After this, I was marched off to an interview with a member of the university leadership, in this case an associate dean.  As with every time you get moved in this, you have a department member moving you (in this case, the chair of the search committee), so this short walk across campus is also part of the interview.  Then comes the actual formal interview with the associate dean, where they talk about the university's priorities and strategies and you ask questions that both give you answers but also demonstrate interest and so on.  Naturally this formal interview is also part of the interview (though while you might imagine the highest ranking meeting you have is the most important, this is not the case; university administration generally follows department recommendations).

After that, the chair of the search committee picked me up to walk back to my hotel to give me a bit of time to cool my heels again.  Naturally this walk-and-talk is also part of the interview.  Then I had about an hour in my hotel room (it was supposed to be a bit longer, but the walk-and-talk stretched a bit), before being picked up from my hotel for dinner.  Naturally this drive too is also part of the interview, as was the (really very good) dinner that followed with four other members of the faculty.  I got back to my hotel room a bit after 10, at which point the interview was finally effectively done.  Then I spent most of Saturday in airports or on planes getting home.

(Note that in this case I had to arrange my transit back to the airport (though the department paid for it), but in other campus visits, you'll get driven back by a department member too, in which case that is also part of the interview.  In a very real sense the interview is not done until you are back on the plane.)

Needless to say, that's a process that is pretty grueling and which also requires a lot of before-hand preparation (picking sample syllabi, potentially writing them if - like me - you've never been given a chance to teach a graduate class, writing the job talk and then practicing it repeatedly) and culminates in what is essentially a 36-hour-long nearly continuous interview.

You may thus understand why I ran a 'Gap Week' post this week.  I must stress that getting to the campus visit is no guarantee of success; this is my third campus visit.  That said, this is a very fine R1 university (a state flagship), so I am extremely excited merely to be seriously considered.  I'd be over the moon to get an offer.

In addition, the research process rolls on.  The sudden campus visit invitation threw off my writing calendar a bit, so the chapter I was working on (on military equipment in pre-Roman Spain) is not yet done, though it is close to done.  I also received news that the volume on Greek and Roman military food and supply, for which I wrote a chapter on the organization of logistics, is now going to print.  Alas, it is at Brill, which means I am both forbidden to share my off-prints in a space like this (sorry, on this point they were explicit), and also that the volume is going to likely be quite expensive.

What I may do instead is write a new, blog-sized essay on the topic incorporating the research I did for the chapter, so that nothing is missed.  But first, I have been noodling a discussion of shield walls, so that's the next target for ACOUP.

In any case, thank you all for your continued support as we weather the winds and waves of an unpredictable and bitter job market.