bedding down

If things have been quiet around humanities researcher lately, it's not because I recently joined facebook (I can see how it might be addictive, but I hope I'm not going to be sucked in too deeply), but for these reasons:

(a) there is not much research being done around here lately. It's the pointy end of the teaching year for me, with two new subjects to bed down and a bunch of additional lectures; plus the whole getting-used-to-being-head thing and the business of bedding down our teaching for next year.

(b) there has been a lot of fussing (much of it on my part) about our large Centre of Excellence application (actually based at UWA). I have some excellence in some areas: budgets are not one of them. But finally the draft letter and draft budget of the Melbourne end of it are completed. It seems they all may have to be done again, but at least, now, there are some senior people in some senior research offices at two ends of the continent working together. It's working with an inadequate sense of what might be required that is very difficult.

(c) Finally, about two hours, on Wednesday, after the very successful inaugural recite-the-first-18-lines-of-the-General-Prologue competition (with appropriately Easter Lindten rewards [there's a good joke in there somewhere trying to get out], with first prize going to a beautiful solo rendition from memory; and second to a team effort, acted out with sun, winds, plants and birds, ending in a tableau of poor St Thomas with pilgrims kneeling at his side), I picked up a telephone message from my boy, rather apologetically saying he thought he had hurt his arm when he went over the top of the handlebars of his bike when braking suddenly, and might need an x-ray.

Thus began a two-day saga: I took him to emergency and after a couple of hours he was x-rayed; and then began the question of admitting him, and finding him a bed. Too young, really, for adult hospital, but unwanted by the Children's, he was in limbo (another incipient joke: if only I wasn't so tired) for several hours. It was becoming a political question, which would be resolved only by measuring the extent to which particular bones had finished growing. After P arrived, I left to attend my student's graduation: the hospital said they would send him home and admit him the next day. But because I went straight from hospital, after riding home, I was still in jeans, flat riding shoes; no make-up, and not even a hairbrush. I felt decidedly undistinguished sitting on the stage of Wilson Hall as a procession of beautiful shoes paraded in front of me to take out their degrees. I was very glad of my long robes. I was home by 10, but there was a note from P saying they had admitted Joel to St Vincent's, but because he was under 16, an adult had to spend the night with him.

I turned up at 8 the next morning to relieve P, who had an all-day meeting about his Centre of Excellence application (alas, we are rivals). They hadn't been admitted till 11 the night before; and had to wait and wait for a bed for P to sleep on. J was fasting since 6.00 am and was scheduled for surgery after 1.00. Well. He was bumped several times down the list as the afternoon went on (it's just a wrist fracture, but needed to be pinned), and so then it was my turn to stay overnight. At 3.00 this morning they were still planning to operate, so he had to remain fasting, while they put in a drip. At 5.30 am they wheeled him off to surgery, and nearly twelve hours later we are finally home. Everything went well enough, and apart from some nausea after the anaesthetic, he's feeling fine.

Oh. I forgot to say that the night before all this happened, I stayed up too late finishing the second Song of Roland lecture; and then after the graduation, came home to wrestle with the grant budget. I emailed it at 1.00 in the morning, and got a lovely personal message back from someone in the research office. The Perth people were up and on the case, too, but it was three hours earlier, there.

So while the doctors and medical staff lead odd hours (the orthopedic surgeon in particular often has to wait and wait for a free surgery while road trauma patients and knife victims are being treated), so too do scholars applying for research grants, and the research administrators who support them.

After three late nights and early mornings, then, I am just about counting the hours till I can go to bed again.

The wo that is in grant-writing

Horrible, horrible process, this writing of grant applications. I realise I have no head for figures, and can hardly bear the wretched negotiations over money and prospective contributions from the university for a grant we don't even have yet.

I've just spent a stupid hour re-formatting my ten "best" publications.

Grrrr.

But then I thought my neighbour had switched on the bathroom light, which I can normally see from my study. I looked up and there's two thirds of a big white moon with soft clouds floating gently across. Time to nip out into the garden for a good look, then finish this section and go to bed, leaving the blind up so I can sleep in the moonlight. Sigh.

Grant time again

In a return to one of the original motivations for keeping this blog, I'm going to talk about an ARC application. Not the Discovery grants that are due in now (sympathies to anyone in the final throes of this process), but the big national round for Centres of Excellence.

This is a highly competitive round that only comes up every couple of years. We think about 20 will be funded in the current round, and half of those will probably be renewals of successful existing centres. If you consider that all fields are eligible, you can see how tough it will be for research in the humanities to tick all the boxes of international collaboration and national interest, and to compete with disciplines with much longer histories of team research.

However, the clever medieval and early modern folk at the University of Western Australia, who developed the successful ARC Network for Early European Research, are putting together an application for a Centre of Excellence. It will be a Centre for the History of Emotion, spanning approximately 1100-1800. I'm glad to say I'm on the team as one of the potential Program Leaders. We heard recently that of the 230+* expressions of interest, about 50* have been encouraged to submit a full application in April; and we are one such, so we are madly scrambling to put ideas and plans together. 

I love working with these people. They are models of enthusiastic interdisciplinary collaboration; and we are really enjoying thinking about how to make connections, both nationally and internationally, with other scholars of the medieval and early modern; with musicians, writers, galleries, etc. And I'm thinking about all the folk in Australia and other countries it'd be so cool to have funds to support visits from. But the project would also investigate the long history, or the afterlife, of early European emotional regimes as they are played out in Australian and colonial culture (this would be my wing of the project).

So, in addition to getting ready to teach two new subjects in twelve days' time, working on other research projects, and a bunch of other things, and making sure the English program as a whole is ready for the academic year, I need to write up a couple of prospective research projects. Not from scratch, obviously: there's stuff in my head, though I'm not going to disclose it all here. Instead, I want to express some of the excitement about this new venture. As we said with the Network, even if we don't get it, we will still develop some neat collaborative research ideas for smaller grants.

Oh, and the other academic in the household has also had his expression of interest go through to the next round, too. The family that applies for grants together...

And ... can I just say: I had lunch (grilled chilli calamari, and grilled semolina-dusted polenta) with Pavlov's Cat?  And it was good. Very good. It had been way too long since I'd seen her (when she was last in Melbourne, I was in Perth); and she was looking terrific. We shared lunch with two other cronies; and it was just one of those lovely, relaxed occasions, with no ... edge, you know? What a shame I had to go and talk to a bunch of incoming students, as they were ordering another glass of crisp-looking white wine!

*Corrected figures: of 111 applications, 32 have been shortlisted. Our odds just got better!

Another Joyous Announcement...

... to report that I had my 12-month mammogram, ultrasound and examination with my surgeon this morning; and I am clean as a whistle. The ultrasound is the worst: it's the most pleasant physical experience, but the most testing on the nerves as the sensor slides up and down and around over the gel, and presses in hard to get a good look at what's happening, deep down under the scar tissue, where it is still tender after radiotherapy. But no one could find anything out of the ordinary, so I am in the clear for another year, now. I felt as fit and healthy, and as confident that I had done everything I can to avoid a recurrence, while also knowing there's a large part of the risk factor over which I have no control at all. How would I have handled a recurrence? I'm glad not to be tested in this way, just now.

I asked Suzanne when, over the five years after surgery I am still receiving treatment, and still at risk, the chances were greater of recurrence. She said over 80% of recurrence is found in the second or third year. So I guess it's early days yet.

Even so, we polished off a rather nice Jacob's Creek sparkling Chardonnay/Pinot Noir as we were reading about the parable of the vineyard in Pearl in the Middle English reading group just now. Time to nip out for a foccaccia and a strong coffee before the rest of the afternoon's work.

Just a year ago I found we had missed out on our grant and that I had breast cancer in the same week. A year later, what a joyful contrast. So... strength and solidarity and warm wishes to anyone else facing up the rigours of the grant system and/or of medical tests. May my good news be yours, too.

Formal (and Joyous) Announcement: Medievalism in Australian Cultural Memory

When I began this blog over a year ago I aimed to chart the process of applying for an Australian Research Council research grant. In the end, or rather, shortly thereafter, I got sick and didn't go ahead with that application. But over the summer, I was able to work on revising an unsuccessful collaborative grant. My research team was fantastic; and one burning hot day last January as I came to the end of my daily radiotherapy treatment, they were the first to see I was exhausted and was finished for that day. The lead-up in this immense national system is deeply attenuated. We submitted in early Feb, wrote a "rejoinder" to our four assessors' reports in July, and have just heard now that we were successful, with four years' funding to commence next January. It is a huge relief to be successful, partly because it is such a public process: lots of people read drafts and the final version, and can be quite scathing in their comments and suggestions. It's good for my program, school, faculty and university; and also for those of my collaborators, as funding will flow back into those units as a result. It's good for the PhD student we'll be able to offer a scholarship to; it's good for the postgrad or early career researchers we'll employ as research assistants and tutors. It's great for the field of medievalism. And it's great for our summer, as it means we won't have to revise and re-submit it all over again.

I've been a bit coy about naming our team or our project, but I have everyone's permission to do so now. We are me, Andrew Lynch (University of Western Australia), Louise D'Arcens (University of Wollongong) and John Ganim (University of California, Riverside). We have been awarded $340,000 over four years to study "Medievalism in Australian Cultural Memory". Here is our magic 100-word project summary:

This project is the first comprehensive study of the influence of medievalism — the imaginative reconstruction of the middle ages - on Australian literature and culture. Detailed examinations of archives, texts, artefacts and public records from 1800 to the present will trace Australia's transformation of its European medieval legacy, with reference to literary, public, academic and popular modes of writing and cultural production. The research will offer a new perspective on Australian cultural history, and the first comparative study of Australia's relationship with international medievalism. An illustrated monograph, a refereed essay collection and a digital repository will bring the resuts to the public.

And... the summary of national/community benefit. This is the bit that is "for public release"; i.e. the bit that has to pass the scrutiny of those who love to criticise the expense of public money on university research:

This project will provide the first long-range analysis of Australian cultural responses to the medieval period, and the first comparative study of Australia's relationship with international medievalism. It will show how Australians have used reference to the medieval past, both favourable and hostile, to articulate our complex relation to European tradition and our aspirations to a distinctive national culture. The published research will offer an original perspective on the development of Australian cultural identity and will enhance public understanding of our British and European heritage, in the context of contemporary debates about republicanism, the monarchy, and ethnic and cultural diversity.

Reports are In

It took all day yesterday, till about 6.00 p.m., for the traffic on the ARC's website to lighten up enough to let me on. All round the nation, eager scholars were trying to log on in order to start the torturous process of second-guessing the fate of their applications, remembering that these reports are only half the picture. As we did last year, we received four reports on our team project: three are strong, with only one or two little quibbles; the fourth seems to be written from a different disciplinary perspective...

I find I'm being rather coy about the content here: don't want to boast about the good things the reviewers say about the project, and don't want to tempt fate by criticising the fourth report. (Anyone in Arts at Melbourne who's interested, and who is going through this process, is welcome to contact me and I'll share reports and the rejoinder, when it's drafted.) Seems to me that the reports are substantially stronger, on balance, than last year, and IF this translates into higher scores, and IF we write a good rejoinder and IF the college of experts can see that (a) the application is stronger than last year and (b) the assessors overall agree that it is (one of them, who read it last year as well, even says so, which is fantastically helpful), then we are in with a good chance, given that we came so close last year.

But... there will be hundreds of applications all with similar claims, all clustered around the cut-off point, whatever it is. And stories are legion of people with good reports not getting grants, and people with mixed and even very critical reports being successful. We know that there is a high degree of uncertainty about this process, given that the written reports we see are really just advice to the College of Experts. It's just that the lead time is so very long. According to some schedules, you should start in July to write the application you submit in February and find out about in November, to start the research in the following January. That's a lead time of about eighteen months. For post-doctoral applications, this is pretty unrealistic.

If we get this grant, it would be just wonderful, and will give me and my collaborators the opportunity to do some really exciting work together, and with our international partner, and with the PhD students whose stipends we've applied for. If we don't, we'll have to face up to submitting it for the third time. And I will then have to decide whether I also press ahead with my individual application on public and popular culture in a manuscript era, whereas the only research I really want to focus on between now and over the summer to come is my Garter book.

It's just so important that we keep getting these grants, though, as funding for our Schools and Faculties increasingly depends on how many dollars we are able to raise for our research. On the latest proposal, the formula would be 50% on higher degree completions; 40% on research income; and 10% on publications. Sigh. I must admit it does seem as if Australian academics really do struggle under this system. We are well resourced in many ways (well, especially at the older and wealthier universities like mine), but it is sometimes hard not to look on with envy at colleagues in the US who don't have to put themselves through this annual mill.

Waiting for the Reports

This blog began in part to keep track of a grant application to the Australian Research Council. In the end, I didn't work on that application after I became ill, but in February I did re-submit a collaborative application that had come close to success the previous year. It is often said that one's best chance of ensuring success is any given year is to re-submit; we made quite a few changes to our scope and method, sharpened the application generally, and updated our track records, of course.

Today, the reports are supposed to be available on line. Actually, they were supposed to be on the ARC site last Friday, but a delay was announced; and at 1.30 this morning (according to the collaborative team member with by far the youngest children), they were still uploading them. And this morning it is so jammed I can't log on to the site at all.

Last year we had four reports (you can get up to six, or as few as none, if you are incredibly unlucky). Two were strong, but brief; two were more mixed but longer, so the rejoinder was difficult to write. Still, we made it into the top 10% of unfunded grants.

The system is a bit odd. We apply in March to one of several panels; the applications are then farmed out to both Ozreaders and "International" assessors. The former are paid ($30 per application!), and read up to 20 applications in their own area, or fields adjacent to their own; the latter aren't paid, and read fewer in their own specialist area. Most of them are Australians, too. The panel, or the "College of Experts" then divide them up and each has about a hundred to read and rank. The reports go to the applicants in June, but we don't get to see the percentage scores or rankings given to the various parts of the application, just the comments. We then write a "rejoinder" rebutting any criticism, offering further information and quoting the best parts of the best reports back to the panel (which is why it's nice if the good reports are long); and then the panel member may or may not adjust his or her ranking according to the reports and rejoinders. The panel then integrates its rankings, and then goes down the list adjusting the budget requested. In the end, these "Discovery" grants have about a 25% success rate.

So my day today, in between reading Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, and marking an honours thesis on Chekhov and Woolf, will be a series of attempts to log on to the ARC site and download the reports.

I'll also be thinking of the family of the courageous Brendan Keilar, who was shot and killed on the streets of Melbourne yesterday after going to the aid of a woman attacked by a bikie. And of a new aquaintance I've met so far only on email through my article in the Age, who's just last week learned that the tumour was cancerous, and who this week has just learned that there are shadows on the bone, too. A reminder that some reports are more devastating than others.