The Labor of Research in Modern Academia

I am happy to see The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature released—and I appreciate so much the work Medieval Institute Publications and De Gruyter have done on this book. I have nothing but praise for the editors and publicists, proofreaders and designers.

But this text also represents, for me, a great amount of anxiety and frustration, of work completed during mental unhealth and job insecurity. Over the years since my doctoral graduation, I could not shake, as I am sure is the case for others, that I would not be a real scholar until I published a monograph.

I drafted The Language of Heresy over three to four years. If you only count the years in which a file dedicated to this project existed on my computer. If you don’t count the 2-3 years spent writing the dissertation out of which the book, much changed, came; the five years or so in which I cut out and revised articles from the dissertation, preparing myself for a refined project; or the year spent navigating the job market between positions, all writing energy spent drafting and redrafting cover letters (a hateful genre).

 When I went on the job market during the last year of my Ph.D., Medieval English job openings were few and far between. By which I mean there was a relatively high number of postings. But those were twenty openings in an international market to be split between every graduate, public, private, and ivy alike. Late in the season, I landed a full-time gig, teaching a 4/4 load, at a small institution that had recently abandoned tenure and was on the verge of being fully collapsed into a large online university/business.

When the collapse came, most full-time teaching jobs were eliminated. As a new faculty member, I was much luckier than my colleagues—and I retained a job in an academic support capacity. But I was unhappy (and insecure) in my new position and so returned to the job market. The combined forces of career ennui and new job docs hardly incentivized my research.

After a year in this limbo, I accepted a full-time tenure-track position, still with a 4/4 load, as a generalist in the SUNY system. Now tenured, I am the lone medievalist at a college of technology in rural New York and, on rare occasion, can offer a Brit Lit survey. Usually, I teach a combination of Composition and Intro to Lit courses.

This is not intended to be a sob story. In almost every way, it is a privileged narrative. And I feel lucky to have my job and to work with my colleagues and students. But I did want to take a moment to acknowledge how labor-intensive a task it is to complete a book in all but the most perfect of circumstances and research positions.

I have never had a sabbatical. Any course releases come with increased service that is often more work than teaching. I grade papers and homework for 4 classes, for 60-80 students, on a biweekly schedule; I am in the classroom every day most semesters. Our library has no medieval resources and access to few databases; there is almost no book or article that I do not have to order through ILL or from another library, adding weeks’ worth of waiting to any research timeline. I rely, sometimes, on Google Books to try and find—frantically—a sentence I need in a book that I have already returned (pro tip: sometimes an incognito browser will let you view a different selection of pages).

Now add onto this the insecurity of an adjunct. Or an even higher teaching load. This is what academia, in 2024, looks like. And it doesn’t look set to change in the near future.

So, here’s my point. As we medievalists, and academics more generally, strive to make our field more inclusive and more equitable, we should not forget to simultaneously adjust our expectations of labor and research. It is, after all, a western and patriarchal institution that has set the monograph as a minimum achievement among research expectations, a lingering reminder of a fictionalized heyday of academia where the elbow-patched and bespectacled professor had lifetimes and libraries to help him write.

Let us celebrate the articles and the teaching accomplishments, the public scholarship and activism, and value them as they deserve to be valued, to value not the amount of pages but their contribution.