"of Washington insiders" = NO. My father worked for Robert Kennedy & worked at the National Science Foundation as a program officer until he had a psychotic break and lost his job when I was in high school. My father never worked full-time again, because of mental illness.
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It's true my father's sister was married to Pierre Salinger who was John Kennedy's Press Secretary & my mother worked at the Irish Embassy but after marrying my father, she resigned to stay at home. She went back to work to after my father lost his job & also declared bankruptcy.
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My father's mental illness & his inability to ever work again full-time, & as his refusal to ever seriously address his mental health took, and still takes, an immense toll on our family. He was from a wealthy family. He also lost his entire inheritance because of his mania.
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"after failing to achieve the success she believed was her birthright as a scholar of Old English" = HUH? How do YOU measure "success," HistoryGuy? I have published plenty and I am still a scholar of Old English. Are you STILL an expert on the Merovingians? What's wrong with you?
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"she pursued a similarly lame career as a theorist. And then gave up academia" = Old English studies + Critical Theory go hand in hand, it isn't one after the other, you pompus fucktwaddle. No one "left" academia. How do you define being *in* academia? Is there a secret door?
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How do you define intellectual historian, by the way? My PhD was granted in "English" but my Old English supervisor, Joseph B. Trahern, who was kind and supportive, advised me to go outside my school & dept. for better supervision of my project, which was intellectual history.pic.twitter.com/124adRWpvC
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My dissertation's two primary directors were Roy Liuzza, an Old English specialist who had also done some work on intellectual history of OE studies, and Owen Bradley, a historian who specialized in 18th-19th-century European political thought. Both were wonderful supervisors.
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My dissertation primarily addressed the intellectual history of practices of librarianship from the 16th-21st centuries, using the Cotton Vitellius A.xv manuscript as a touchstone object. The first chapter was published in the British Library Journal: https://www.bl.uk/eblj/2005articles/article1.html …
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The final chapter was an exploration of the representation of traumatic history in art (via Beowulf), in order to think about the relations between trauma, memory & art relative to work undertaken in Holocaust studies (e.g. by Dominick LaCapra, Cornell, who was Bradley's mentor).
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It may seem silly to even respond to this, but maybe try to understand that this is so TYPICAL of what goes on in early medieval studies: constant gatekeeping, name- & institution-checking: who's your DADDY? I mean, um, WHO did you work with, WHERE did you go to school (etc.)?
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This also points to the RIDICULOUS divide that has existed and continues to exist between literature & history scholars, with history scholars constantly being obnoxious twats re: their supposed superiority in understanding history, and who is, or isn't, an "historian."
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I am an intellectual historian, whether anyone likes it or not. I am a scholar of Old English literature (present tense) whether anyone likes it or not. & being a theorist is not separate from any of these things. It pains me to even rehearse my background and credentials, ....
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because I know from my own research, which has looked at OE studies as a discipline in the late 19th-early 20th centuries, that the *profession* of Old English studies is of very recent vintage, & the hyper-professionalization of all of our disciplines is a 100% shitshow.
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Every single thinker in the field of European History, before it was an academic discipline, were simply people who read, thought deeply about what they read (or sifted through, artifacts-wise), and wrote about that. That's the only credentialling necessary to be an historian.
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If you think 5+ years in a PhD program is what gives you the right to call yourself an "historian," um...ok. One might go further & say: it's the PhD + all of the publications. Okay. Sure. Makes sense. I've done that, too. But it's not what makes me, or anyone, an historian.
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Learn some real fucking history, REAL HISTORY GUY.
#LearnSomeFuckingHistory#MedievalTwitter#Racism#Elitism#WhiteMen#AngloSaxonWTFpic.twitter.com/ypTr61o5ErShow this thread -
Note bene: I assume Halsall mistags me as being from a New England family because he knows the story of my father's father, who grew up in an orphanage & was adopted by the Joy family in Spokane, WA, who were descendants of Nantucket whalers, one of whom helped inspire Moby Dick.
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Matthew Joy, 2nd mate on the Essex, was partly responsible for the aftermath of a run-in with a whale that led to cannibalism & inspired Melville to write Moby Dick, see here: http://bit.ly/37CcVjF So I am connected to New England whalers, by way of adoption. End of story.
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