Q & A Panel Part 3 (Video)

Transcript

[Music]
Welcome to the second,
what we hope to be annual,
Faculty Author Spotlight.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
My name is Melissa Chomintra
and I am the Scholarly
Engagement Librarian
for the social sciences
and geospatial data.
I have the pleasure of moderating
our last of three wonderful sessions
of this Spotlight series.
So sort of how today will run
is that we have three
pre-selected questions
will be asking of our faculty authors
and then we'll have some time
for questions and discussion at the end.
Before I introduce you to our authors
though I do want to thank
Amanda Morlas, Courtney Kearney and
Alan Velasquez for all of the work
they've done to make this
celebratory event happen.
I'm thrilled that we are able to continue
this event this year
despite its challenges.
One of my favorite things,
we were just chatting about this,
about this event,
is that it brings faculty
from across campus and across
disciplines together in one place
to sort of share and discuss
accomplishments.
I know that doesn't
always happen for most of us,
but with that being said,
I do want to introduce to you today's
brilliant faculty authors.
So joining us today
we have Michael Brumbaugh
from the Department of Classical Studies
chatting with us about their work,
titled The New Politics of Olympus.
We have Charles Figley,
who is the Chair in Disaster
Mental Health from
the School of Social Work,
chatting about Combat Social Work:
Applying the Lessons of War
to the realities of Human Services.
We have Elizabeth Gross
from Tulane Honors Program
with This Body/ That Lightning Show.
We have Jana Lipman
from the Department of History
chatting about their work,
titled In Camps: Vietnamese
Refugees, Asylum-Seekers, and Repatriates
We also have Felicia McCarren
from the French department
chatting about One Dead at the Paris
Opera Ballet,
which is, I think, my favorite title.
I don't mean to be
biased, but it's great.
And last but certainly not least,
we have Jonathan Morton
from French as well, live from Berlin.
And the title of
their most recent work is, and
Dr. Morton you say it
much better than me in your
beautiful video, but The Roman de la
Rose and 13th century thought.
You can share the much
more beautiful pronunciation if you like.
I'm going to stop
sharing my screen in this moment
so I can see all your lovely faces again.
So like I said, we have a few
prearranged questions
to ask our panelists
and then we'll have time for questions
from attendees at the end
because this is the Zoom
webinar platform,
all attendees are muted,
so we encourage you to,
if you want to chat among yourselves,
obviously use the chat feature
during this time.
When it comes time for the Q&A,
please use the Q&A function.
It'll allow us to better manage
the questions so that we may
address them in a more
manageable fashion, I guess.
So I'm going to jump
right in and you can...
I'm going to ask the question
and then y'all can just answer.
I'm not going to
go around and call on anybody.
I don't want to put any pressure,
if you don't feel like
answering the question,
you don't have to.
If you're like, No,
I don't really like that one,
I'll wait for the next one.
That's totally fine,
this is meant to be informal
discussion and fun.
Like I said, the last thing we want to do
is to celebrate your work
and then make this also feel like work.
So the first question is how
and why did you choose your book
or research topic?
I guess I can start things off,
the book that I wrote
is about ancient Greek hymns,
which are songs of praise
and how they work in a political context.
And the reason I chose that topic is
because in the ancient Greek world,
a very important part of social life,
political life, religious life was song.
It's something that we don't maybe
necessarily think about as much
because we have a lot of other types
of entertainment and media in our lives.
But for the ancient Greeks,
song was really, really dominant
and took up a lot of their attention,
especially within an elite culture.
And hymns, in particular
are ways of praising people.
And what that does,
in addition to making you feel good,
is it helps define what
the socially acceptable
standards and norms are
within a community.
And so when you praise
someone for doing something,
you are reinforcing
and setting the ground rules
for the rest of the community
about what praiseworthy behavior is.
And that had been studied in
some sort of formal literary ways.
But the social and
political ramifications
of that kind of praise
hadn't really been explored
in too much detail.
And so I thought that would be
an interesting topic to look into.
And particularly,
I look at how it works
in these sort of new emerging
authoritarian regimes.
Now, when I started this project
a decade ago,
that seemed more abstract
than it seems today.
And so the tail end of this book
was finished during a very different
political climate in the U.S.,
and it gave me a lot of insight
into thinking about how
norms can change rapidly and suddenly
in a way that a lot of
your society thinks
things are very fixed and static.
And then all of a sudden
things can change
in surprising and unexpected ways.
And so that was a really
kind of interesting
moment in our own lives that informed
some of the underlying
assumptions that I was
working with in my book.
I can go. So my
book topic, the reason I chose it was
because I got bullied by a bigger boy.
And so
my book is called The Roman de la Rose
and 13th Century thought,
they come in as The Roman de la Rose.
And this is the second
book that I've done.
This is an edited
collection, is a collection of essays
that came out of a conference,
so I'd already written
one book on this topic.
And what happened was
I was at a conference
that I'd organized talking
to a very, very senior
guy in the history of
medieval philosophy,
so I'm a medieval specialist.
And I might have had one glass
too many of fruit juice,
and I had said to,
I basically said to him,
Why does everyone,
Why do all like medieval
philosophy people
when you look for literature,
that's interesting in the Middle Ages,
why do you always look at Dante
and the divine comedy, which is
like big, 14th century,
late, 13th century Italian work?
And I said, Why don't you talk about
The Roman de la Rose,
the romance of the rose,
which is the thing I work on?
And the thing that my book was on,
my first book was on philosophy
and the Romance of the Rose.
And anyway, he then,
I didn't think anything of it.
And six weeks later,
I got an email from him saying
I was thinking about what you said.
That's great.
Let's organize a conference together.
And so I was like a very junior postdoc
and I had like the biggest name
in medieval philosophy,
which, okay, is not a big thing.
But, you know, in the small pond
he's like a reasonably large sized fish.
And he said, let's
do a conference together.
So I kind of had to say yes. And so
we brought together loads of
people who are specialists in philosophy
and people who are
specialists in literature
to make them talk to each other.
And so my kind of revenge
for being bullied
into organizing the conference
that became this book
was to make those philosophers
do something they didn't want to do,
which was
think about what happens when words
can mean like five different things
at the same time.
And philosophers really don't like that.
So they had to get, so, basically,
we made all of these poor
historians of philosophy read
this incredibly weird, obscene,
philosophical French poem.
And when we'd finished
wiping up the tears,
we persuaded them to collaborate
and bring out this volume.
So what happened was
I thought I was the expert in this topic,
like I had written about The Romance
of the Rose and philosophy.
I thought, this is my thing.
At the conference
that then became this book,
I realized there
either were all of these things.
I was so far out of my depth,
which was really exciting.
And so the result is this is like a book.
Okay, one other thing I did,
I bullied everyone
to reference my book in this.
So there are loads of references to me.
And they had to do it
because I was the editor.
And so out of politeness,
at least there were loads
and loads of people who were quoting me.
So it looks like I'm important.
And so that's what happened.
That's how I ended up doing this book,
which is this one.
That sounds terrifying.
You make it sound so great
and you know, you tied it up for this
nice bow towards
the end where you, you know,
now you have this thing in which
all these folks reference
you, but, you know,
being bullied by the bigger
boy just sounds...
I hope there are no
doctoral students attending right now.
They might just be scared.
I'm happy to go,
but I feel like Felicia,
you should go next.
I feel like the French
theme could continue.
Do you want to jump in
and then I'll go after you, maybe?
OK, if you want,
I'm not going to be bullied.
So, you know, I think
when you've written a lot of books,
you forget actually why you've done it.
But this particular one came from
the fact that as a
Historian of Performance,
I've been thinking a lot about
the way the stage,
you know, talks about difference, right?
Talks about gender or race
or diversity, human diversity.
And in particular,
all of my work has been focused
on choreography.
So when people on stage
don't necessarily
play human roles,
but they might play wordless roles
representing flora or fauna, right?
And then this idea
that that sort of biodiversity
that you see on stage in choreography,
in particular in the French tradition,
can really speak about human diversity.
So that's what I was working on.
And then it just so happened that
I came across a recent staging
of an old ballet from 1866
that is kind of unbelievable
and representative of a whole genre
of so-called Orientalist ballets, right?
But it had two key
things that were very, very
current still, right?
It had a kind of
stereotypical representation
of others and in particular,
Muslim others, right?
And there's actually a knife
attack in the ballet from 1866.
And then there's also a narrative
about the green world.
And actually, there's
a kind of environmental crisis
at the end of the ballet.
So when they restaged this
at the Paris Opera in 2011 and then 2014,
it was incredibly current, right?
These are things
that France is struggling
with very much today.
And I was able to start thinking
about what in French is called
decolonizing the stage,
thinking about minority representation
in a way that only now is really starting
to happen in public discourse.
Many of you may know in France
it's actually illegal
to gather data on racial
or religious or ethnic identification.
And so there isn't really
a public discourse about this.
And my argument is that the stage,
even the ballet stage,
opens that up and
really starts to address
these questions that are
so urgent right now.
Great.
Well, thank you so much.
I mean, I have to say
it's just great to hear
about all my colleagues work.
I feel like it's wonderful
to hear about our intellectual work
and not just about,
you know, administrative Covid details.
So welcome to everyone.
My name is Jana, I'm a historian
and I teach U.S.
20th century history and U.S.
foreign policy and immigration.
And I look at issues
of migration and race in a way
that's really different than Felicia.
But my recent book is called In Camps:
Vietnamese Refugees,
Asylum Seekers and Repatriates.
And it comes out of some research
I was doing about Vietnamese
refugees who were in a small base
camp in the United States in Arkansas.
I started doing research
about this group of Vietnamese
who left in 1975,
this is the end of the Vietnam War.
And I found these
just remarkable photographs
of Vietnamese refugees
who are brought first to Guam
before they are brought
to the United States.
And while they were in Guam,
a small group began to protest
because they don't want to be resettled
in the United States.
In fact,
they wanted to go back to Vietnam.
And they start marching
around with pictures of Ho Chi Minh.
And if you know about anything
related to Vietnamese
refugees in the United States,
you know the majority are identified
with anti-communism,
many of them supported
the United States during the war.
And so I was really struck
as a historian of the
Vietnam War and U.S. foreign policy
to find these images of people
who did not want to come
to the United States,
who wanted to go back to Vietnam,
and this would have been in May of 1975.
And I was like I don't think I'll
find anything about this.
You know, this story will be a dead
end, it'll be an interesting anecdote.
And what I found
was massive amounts of material.
And I was like, wow,
this is really interesting.
And so I decided to start
following the stories of Vietnamese
who leave Vietnam.
I ended up not just looking at
those who leave in '75,
but I look in the late '70's,
the '80's and the '90's.
And I began to look
not just at the initial group
of Vietnamese who left in 1975,
but those who left later,
who found themselves
in other refugee camps
in Southeast Asia and Malaysia,
Hong Kong and the Philippines.
And I write about their stories
when they are in between
the United States and Vietnam
and the experiences
and political movements
that they participate in in those places.
And in some ways, like Michael,
I began this project,
you know, more than ten years ago now.
And so there have always been questions
about refugees and
immigration in America,
but it was a different political climate.
And so as I was continuing
to do research it in many ways
resonates with contemporary debates
about refugee admissions,
about having asylum seekers
who are now detained
in American jails,
particularly in Louisiana,
which has a huge number of people
incarcerated who are asylum
seekers here in our state.
And so while the work
is very much about Southeast
Asia and Vietnamese
in the 1970s, '80's, and '90's,
I think it really resonates
with contemporary questions
about asylum seekers, refugee status and
migration today.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Anybody else want to add?
You know, I'm a poet
and my book that came out in 2019
This Body/ That Lightning Show
is my first full collection of poetry.
So the role of research
in that process is
very different, especially
since This Body/ That lightning show
is a fairly autobiographical work.
So a lot of my research involved
living my life
and specifically connecting
the traumatic events
surrounding Hurricane Katrina
and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to
personal trauma as both
sexual and physical injury
that I was also going through
at the same time and became
inextricably linked
in my own imagination
and my own emotional processing.
And that's kind of
the origin of the work.
That said, there is some
research in the book,
which it contains
what I like to call irresponsible
translations from Sappho.
I do read Greek,
but most of that Greek is gone anyway.
So I'm going to do what I want
and what serves me with it now.
And also there's a central poem
in the book that's a little longer
called Amazon Amichai.
That is an Amazon Amichai, a battle
with Amazon women.
And I did some research
into various names of mytho-historical
Amazon women warriors
as I was working on that poem.
It's hard to remember the details
because I first wrote that poem in 2008,
and this book was first written
as my MFA thesis in 2010 and 2011.
So it was a long road
from writing the book to publishing it
as well.
In terms of the role of
research in my creative work, though,
there are a number of other topics that
kind of touch on things
that have come up in other faculty
topics in this panel.
My second, as yet unpublished
full collection,
began as an erasure of Shakespeare's
Merchant of Venice
and then expanded to include
narrative and almost documentary poems
about working with refugees
in a camp outside
of Thessaloniki, Greece.
So that's
what I've been working on more recently.
And in terms of active research
for creative work,
I'm also working on a libretto
with a composer here
about an environmental activist
orca whale, J35.
And looking into that research goes in
lots of different directions, including
how to write a libretto,
which I've never done, but also
a little bit about whales, a lot
about the indigenous communities
of the Pacific Northwest.
And it's also a kind of version
of Antigeni, so my classics background
just keeps coming.
Can't keep it down.
OK, so our next question is
what was the most difficult
and or most rewarding part of
your most recent work?
And you can speak to the process or
whether it was the research
or the outcome in terms
of how it was received, really anywhere
you can take that question
any way you want.
Yeah, I think that strikes a chord
because I had the three of us
who are editors of Combat Social Work,
which is the book,
and I'm not a social worker.
I'm a Marine
and they don't have any social workers
in the Marine Corps, unfortunately.
But one of the challenges
that I had was enabling
those who are writing
their own combat stories
as social workers to share that.
And it was a challenge
for a number of people
and there were some that actually just,
you know, gave up.
And I'm hoping we'll catch them
the next time we put a volume
like this together.
But it's interesting, with combat
social workers,
you have to be an officer.
You start as a captain.
So it's like three ranks up
from the very beginning
of being an officer.
So they come in
right away as being an outsider.
We have, we kind of laugh
at this in the book,
you'll see if you were to
pick it up and look at it.
That combat and social work seems to be
inconsistent, if you will.
And there were a number of people
who were in the Army or Navy or whatever
branch, there were three of them,
I remember very well,
that explicitly wanted social work
and nothing else.
And some of them got that,
and particularly
because they hated the war, as I do,
that this would not work out for them.
The lovely thing about their stories
is that it's really
a story of our country
of trying to come to grips,
especially with the Vietnam
War in particular.
And I guess country was won over by that
because we haven't really protested
since that time, unfortunately,
but it was interesting.
Two of my colleagues
are also senior professors, one
still in the Military
and getting out soon.
But both of them
have ambivalence about the war,
but not about those who fight the war,
those who serve like social workers.
We are totally committed to the troops,
but not to tactics.
And the book that I wrote
that is coming out
next year that went
into press before this one
really focuses on that.
And I'm happy to talk about it
if you want, but that talks
about psychiatric casualties
and about the horrible things
that the military has done outside of war
to people who are different
and who are not specifically
like the typical military personnel.
So there are a lot of stories
that are untold, but these 13 combat
social workers really did a great job
of articulating where
they were at the time.
Many of them were not really
prepared to go to war,
but they were in the reserves
and so they had an opportunity for that.
The challenges they had
of imagining themself being in war,
the struggles that they had
in leaving their family behind
because all of them were, you know,
relatively mature
with master's degrees, at least.
So it isn't just simply a war story
and duck and shoot.
This is human service
professionals who are doing
what social workers do
in New Orleans and everywhere else,
way far from home in a combat zone
in which people are shooting at you.
So I thought it was a
good idea that we finally
devote a book to this kind of phenomenon
in hopes that it will encourage
other social workers
to consider that as a career.
So that was it.
Am I supposed to say anything more?
No, no, that was fantastic, I guess I'm
sort of in awe of all of what you said
and the fact that you,
you know, mentioned
that there is no social workers
in the Marine Corps.
I just, I didn't know that.
And it sort of baffles me.
Well, it's in the Navy
and the Navy takes care
of the Marine Corps.
So I guess that we could
attend to them, but I've never
worked with one.
Wow, OK.
I mean, for my work,
I think that there's
so many challenges, right,
I mean there are the
challenges of language.
I wrote a book about Vietnamese refugees
not speaking Vietnamese,
which in some ways is an act of hubris.
And yet I decided
there was enough oral history
that had been done, some in English,
some in Vietnamese, that been translated
that I was able to use the research
of other scholars. I also,
in terms of I do really sort
of archival research, and I'm particularly
interested in archives
that are not easily accessible.
I'm particularly interested in
archives that are in
what are seen as peripheral locations.
And so this is both
my favorite part of the job,
and in some ways,
the most challenging part
is the part that I find really exciting.
But for example,
as part of this project,
I was able to go to the Philippines
and to Malaysia,
those were separate trips
and actually went to the places
where the refugee camps
were in the '80's and '90's.
And there are archives there
and there are sort of private archives
there are public archives.
There are, you know, old
English ESL, English as a second
language, manuals and boxes
that are sort of sitting there.
There are people's
photograph collections.
There are people
who have newspaper collections.
And so for me, one of the most exciting
and yet also a bit
more challenging parts of the work
is doing that type
of research on the
ground, going to archives
and really trying to think about
how do those stories
of the refugee camps
fit into larger stories of U.S.
foreign policy and larger
political narratives?
And I'll just say this,
I don't know how the other colleagues
feel in this room, it's
always hard to write.
In terms at least for me,
you know, figuring out
how to tell the story
and then shaping it.
And so that hopefully it's compelling
to a large readership
so that it actually is storytelling
with real people and people's stories
so that other people can connect.
Jana, I totally want
to emphasize a couple
of things that you said,
first of all, travel to archives, right?
I think several of us work in archives
that are in other countries
and we have to get there
and we have to get there at a time
where we can have a series of days.
Not everything is digitized.
And in fact,
some of the stuff that hasn't been overly
studied isn't digitized.
And so it's really worth
travel to archives.
And then bringing it back,
I mean, I wonder how many of us
on this panel experience
what I experienced,
which is like that it's
another kind of work,
another huge amount of work
to try to bring that research
into the classroom, right?
Of course, it informs who we are
and how we teach,
but we don't always get the opportunity
to teach it, right?
So kind of this ongoing,
you know, teaching and research
and trying to negotiate
that balance is really, really tricky.
Very difficult to write
while you're teaching, right?
So I can talk about, I think, probably
the most rewarding thing
about doing the book that I did was,
and the thing is, it's the most
like the most ivory tower, like
the ridiculous pastiche of
academic life and in comparison to,
say, looking at social workers
and the military
and thinking about the legacies of trauma
and Katrina and murder at the opera.
It feels completely ridiculous to me.
So I'm going to make a case
for the absurdity
of a certain kind of academic life
that was incredibly rewarding,
even though on the face of it,
it looks completely pointless.
Which was the conference
that I organized with two colleagues
that this book came out of.
When we did it in,
I know it was definitely it was 2016
because it was just when Brexit happened.
And so I was, like,
really completely all over the place.
So that was, I mean, that's separate.
But, so the conference
took place in this 17th century,
it was like a really big private house
that was taken over by the French state
on this little island
in the sand in the middle of Paris,
and it's the place called the Institute
for Advanced Studies.
And it's like gorgeous.
It's got really like
tasteless gold chairs
and like red carpets.
It's ridiculous.
And so we organized a conference
bringing all of these specialists
to look at this incredibly obscure stuff
like medieval French
literature and philosophy
that was taught at the
University of Paris,
but only in the 13th century.
And then so we sat around
and talked for two days.
There were maybe 30 people in the room.
And just sitting there and talking
about the same things that everyone
who worked really hard on
and everyone was out of their depth
at different times
and just learning from each
other was incredibly, it was,
I think it was probably one
of the most exciting,
rewarding academic
experiences I've ever had.
I mean, how much it changed the world?
I don't know.
But I should probably try and tie
that up somehow.
So one way, okay, one lesson
maybe which I've taken from that is,
Oh my god, I can feel immoral coming on.
OK, one lesson to take from this is
I think none of us had computers open
really or looked at screens much.
But we're just talking with one
another in person at length.
And I guess that's something
we don't have right now.
But it's something that in the age
where we're all kind of
connected through screens
and the internet
and so on, it's really valuable.
I think I still I find like
that having that
connection which maybe
we can look forward to
in the not hopefully too distant future.
I'd like to connect
the challenge and the reward
not so much about the writing
of my first book, but the publishing it.
I've already mentioned
it was a very long time
from writing the book to publishing it,
and that itself was a challenge.
And particularly because of some of the
personal and traumatic
nature of the material.
I found that I was completely,
I kept working on the manuscript
after completing my MFA,
it didn't rest at the thesis manuscript.
But by 2013, two years later,
I had found myself
just changing punctuation
and then changing it back.
And realized that I was completely
emotionally locked out of the
subject matter and like
I had brought it as far as it could
go, and I couldn't
do anything more with it
in any meaningful way
and continued to invest in
sending it to publishers
ever more selectively,
as that is an expensive
and brutal process
in poetry publishing.
But had basically,
so had basically given up
on publishing my first book
as my first book
and which happens all the time.
I still believed in the book.
And I had been a
semifinalist for big things
early on in the process, so
I had that kind of
external validation as well
that it was good enough
to fight for, to keep going
trying to get it in the world.
But when I submitted to The Word Works,
who ended up publishing it,
I was submitting to that press
for the third time
and at least who knows
if I would have held to this
but in my heart,
I was submitting it for the last time,
at least for a while,
because I had just completed
another manuscript.
And it, yeah, both financially
and emotionally,
it was too much to be
sending both out at once.
And so it
was extremely serendipitous that
submission like it was the last time
it turned out for a different reason
than what I thought
when I was submitting it.
And then also to have it selected
by Jericho Brown was incredible.
And I had to jump in.
I was at
got the news while I was at a friend
from grad school's
wedding on Lake Michigan,
and I went underwater and screamed.
That was definitely a particularly
rewarding moment for me.
But also, having had that experience of
feeling locked out from the book,
I wasn't sure what it would feel like
to put it in the world and then like,
give a reading tour, for example.
And the other really surprising reward
for me of the whole long
story of the publication was
the work that I was able to
do with an editor
at The Works, Word Works.
The manuscript had
not changed since 2013,
and it didn't change in really
major ways, but in small, important ones
and to work through that process
with another person from the outside,
it's yeah, I hadn't
had that experience before.
And yeah, it
really changed my ability
to put that work in the world and
feel good about it.
Well, that's kind of been
sort of a common thread
between these last
few days, is like trying
to find that home for your work.
You know, many of the faculty
authors over the past
few days have talked about,
you know, trying different places
and finding a home.
And I think that serves
as I mean, personally,
for me, a point of encouragement.
When I think about
my own ideas, and starting
to formulate those
and thinking about that process,
and it's a very vulnerable process
to like put your work out there
for other people
to critique and accept
or deny, and that's, you know, can be
a bit of a point of trauma in its own,
I guess for some people. So
it's been very refreshing and
confirming to hear
that that has been
the experience of so many folks.
So I appreciate you sharing that.
I guess I'll just say really quickly
to echo what several of my colleagues
have already said,
you know, whether you're
doing creative work or you're doing
non nonfiction.
The process is messy, right?
The subject that you're dealing
with is complex.
It's large
and there's lots of different ways
you could tell the story.
And going back to what Jana said
a few minutes ago, finding a linear path
through that big
constellation of material
is very, very challenging.
And I think for me
was probably one of the hardest parts.
In a lot of fields,
the work that you're doing
is not going to be repeated.
There's not going to be another book
that comes out on this topic, maybe ever.
But at the same time, your narrative
that you've chosen to tell
is not the definitive way
to tell the story.
And so making sure
that the work you're doing
is going to advance the conversation,
not stop the conversation is also
a really important consideration
in thinking about
how you want to push
the envelope enough
so that people will respond
to your work and do more and add on.
And finding the narrative
that will do that
in an effective and responsible
way is a really huge challenge of doing
sort of a large project.
I should talk again.
It's my turn maybe,
this particular book on combat
social work, it was the strangest
set of events.
I actually proposed the book
ten years ago
and there were publishers
that were interested, but they were not.
They were interested
in other branches or other profession
psychologists, that sort of thing.
Family therapist, et cetera.
But we kept pushing and we acquired, had
two, had another editor.
We acquired someone else.
And each time it failed,
we told the maybe four or five
that were with us
what happened and they all stuck with us.
And even at the end,
when Oxford University Press picked us up
and provided everything
actually that we had wanted
and hoped for as a book,
things started coming together.
But I think that the hardest part was
the contributors and
what they had the right in terms
of their own individual chapters
because all but three of them
had never published anything,
not to mention something
about themselves.
So there was a tremendous
amount of anxiety, I think, even
among most of them, I would say.
But there was tremendous
amount of satisfaction.
I know all of you feel this way
and you've seen this in your students.
It just is so great.
And in particular, those that have gone
through the most horrendous experiences
I think did among the best
in sorting it out and finding the arc and
making that connection.
So even though it was the hardest project
and it took longer than any book
that I've ever worked on,
I have almost 30 now.
It was the most satisfying
because of the reactions of those
who wrote the chapters.
So that's it.
Thank you all for sharing.
We have one last sort of
prearranged questions for you all.
And then we'll open it
up to folks to ask some questions.
And that question is
and some of you are
already sort of touched on this.
So if you don't want to repeat yourselves
that is fine,
did anything you learned
while researching the topic surprise you?
And if you didn't, you know,
if you were an editor,
maybe you can share something that
surprised you while you were either
editing or like,
just engaging with the material again,
maybe with a new lens
or something to that effect.
I'll just jump in, I mean,
I think that's the whole point
is to write about things
that surprise you.
I mean, I don't want to write
about something that
I already know about.
I mean, that seems a waste of time.
And so one of the things that I mean,
as I started with explaining
like how I came to my book topic,
it was very much
the images and the documents
that I was not expecting
that are the ones that
drew me to the story
and that I wanted to follow.
And like during the course
of the research,
I learned so many things
that were surprising.
I mean, for people who are interested,
you know,
I did not know that
100,000 Vietnamese
were returned to Vietnam,
and those were largely
who did not want to go back
to Vietnam between 1990 and 1997.
I learned a great deal
about the ways in which
Vietnamese-American activists
had different techniques
of trying to support Vietnamese
who wanted to get refugee status.
I learned all about Malaysia,
which I knew nothing about at all,
but I started to learn
about Malaysia, right?
And I learned about
the variety of sort of politics
in Malaysia in the 1970s
and 1980s as it affected
questions related to refugees
and immigration.
And so, I mean, I would
only say that I'm only
in some ways interested
in the stories that surprise
because those are the stories that
are complicated.
And as Mike was saying
that are, you know,
maybe non-linear or maybe unexpected,
but those are the stories that are
worth writing and telling.
And in some ways, that's
what I think our jobs are, is
to sort of find a news story
and hopefully be able to explain
why it's important
not to tell stories
that we're expecting to find.
So those are just a few of the examples.
I think in my project,
I write about and study
and think about Ancient Greek
poetry, and we have the texts, right?
And we have them
and you can order them online
and they exist in little books.
But most of the work
that I tried to do
is to try to take those texts
and reconnect them
to the world that they came from.
And that is very difficult
because most of that world in an ancient
context, is missing, right?
We have little tiny fragments
of it here and there. And
when you aren't a specialist in all
of the different areas
where the evidence comes from,
it's hard to know what
the state of knowledge is.
So for instance,
if you were going to draw on evidence
that might be from coins, right?
And so coins from the period
might help tell you part of the story.
Pottery from the period might help
tell a different part of the story,
but no one is going to be an expert
on all of the different evidence.
And so it's very often the case
that you don't know what you don't know
but is available to be found, right.
So a lot of us who focus on literatures
sometimes fall into the assumption
that, oh,
we just can't know that information,
it's permanently lost to us.
And so we're not going
to try to dig it up.
And so the process of writing
this book of trying to test the limits of
why haven't we been asking
certain types of questions?
Is it because it really is inaccessible?
Or do we just have to
get more creative
about how we find answers
to those questions?
And that was very interesting.
And so I learned all sorts of things
that I never imagined as a poetry
specialist, I'd be
thinking about like where is
wood coming from
in the third century BCE?
Where are they chopping down trees
and what's it being used for?
It's all going to make ships.
And so a wooden statue,
which is not necessarily
a very expensive item
under normal circumstances,
if wood is in high demand
to make ships, all of a sudden,
the simple wooden statue
has an entirely different
significance in value
than it otherwise might.
And so there's a poem about a
wooden statue and
that sort of dramatically changes
the social significance
of discussing that object if you realize
that there's wood shortage because of war
needs and things like that.
So I learned lots of
interesting little niche
facts and details that really reorient
the landscape of thinking about something
that we've had codified in books
for a really long time.
Yeah, I want to thank Michael and Jana
for what they've just said.
I think oftentimes research
in the humanities gets,
or even social sciences, gets typified.
You know, it's not
scientific research, it's
not medical research, right?
Especially on our campus research
seems to really mean
what happens downtown, right?
And we have to really emphasize
that we're also asking questions, right?
The question is the mode that inspires us
and that we're working on, right?
And that we don't know the answer, right?
We wouldn't write the book
if we already knew the answer, right?
So it's it's an exploration
and it's very exciting
to be alive right now because we can work
really across disciplines
and we can really work
across archives
and across modes of thought and,
you know, even very, very different
kinds of disciplines.
So it's an incredibly exciting time.
And to see the work
that's being done
around us and on our campus
uptown as well as downtown
is, you know, is actually surprising.
Not surprising, really.
But it's very rewarding and wonderful.
And so I want to just emphasize,
you know,
thank you to the organizers, right?
Because we don't always all get a chance
to talk about our own work
on our own campus.
And that might be surprising,
but it's really fantastic
to have this opportunity so thank you.
Yeah, I want to echo that and also
say there's so much that
I found resonant
and in what you all have said,
I think particularly
in response to this latest question
about surprising and like,
the surprises that
motivate that research and also
like thinking about
as a person who also starts often
with the ancient text,
what I do from there is just
absolutely the opposite
of Michael.
Instead of trying to
contextualize the work
in its ancient context with gathering
what information can be found.
I think I I try to export
the uncertainty of the ancient world
and use that as a lens
to look at the contemporary world
and make connections there.
So just like inside out and backwards,
but also starting from the
same kind of stuff.
But in terms of the surprises
that come along in the work, for me, it's
really very rarely information
and much more often
those surprises that
stand out, our connections often
just unexpected connections.
And I have an example from my book that
started as an erasure of Shakespeare's
Merchant of Venice and became
also about narratives of
migration, European migration
from Thessaloniki
and also an examination
of my own Jewish identity
in the context of all of that.
But I was in the Jewish Museum
in Thessaloniki, and there
was a map on the wall of
transport routes,
migrants transport routes, and
I just realized
all of the ports are the same.
All of the ports
have always been the same.
The arrows are going
in the different direction.
There are the people who are
forced to migrate are
checking different identity boxes.
But like this, cross
Mediterranean migration is
definitely not new and that there was
a more direct connection between
the kind of World War
Two history of migration
in that area and the current situation
that I was in, mostly working
with people from Syria.
And it's those moments of sudden,
unexpected connection
that for me can motivate an entire
book, basically.
And also, why conversations like this
are so much fun.
So that was, that was really fascinating.
I mean, all of the answers, particularly
that last one from Elizabeth.
So I've read one thing that
I discovered or learned this is maybe
like not quite as serious
as it could have been.
I think this is a recurring theme
in my life and work.
And this is one thing that actually is
one thing I wasn't expecting
to find out about
was how people learned
in medieval universities,
which ended up being a big part
of what the work I ended up doing
for the chapter
that I wrote in this book.
So I started looking
at the teaching of logic
and the teaching of how to think
in 13th century
and 14th century universities.
And so it ended up being a slightly
self-reflective exercise.
And I so I looked to them, particularly
I was really interested
in the question of what sophism is,
which is a specific...
I mean, on what sophistry
is which is kind of
in general when someone looks like
they are saying something
that makes sense,
but actually they don't,
which is something that I identify
with very strongly.
And this was a really important tool
for the teaching of logic
in medieval university.
So I ended up going down this rabbit hole
and finding out about the different
classroom techniques.
And so you would get sophisms
which would be a sentence
that looks like it
makes sense, but doesn't
or it doesn't make sense,
and you have to try and work out
how the logic works in it.
And there was one about donkeys,
which I didn't make it.
I just remember thinking about it
I wasn't expecting to come across
and it didn't make it into the book.
But it's this logical problem,
and it's supposed to help
you learn about grammar.
And I'll give it in
Latin, and then I'll
give you it in English
and I'll just be very quick.
It's [Latin] .
So in English, it's
all humans are donkeys
or humans and donkeys are donkeys.
So it has to basically it's an exercise
supposed to make
you think about how
grammar works because either
you can say, all humans are donkeys,
or men and donkeys are donkeys.
And that doesn't make any sense,
and so you have to think, OK, well,
you can say, all humans
either donkey or human
and donkeys are donkeys,
so that makes sense.
And so essentially
what you have is a ridiculous
classroom situation
where you're doing really boring
grammatical learning,
but or you're just talking about
how humans are actually donkeys,
and this is kind of fun.
And then suddenly you're thinking about,
I don't know, like
[inaudible] and the goddess
or humans turning into animals,
which is a big thing
in medieval literature.
And so then you just
get to say donkey a lot,
which I've just successfully done.
And so it ends up being quite reflexive.
And so anyway, I learned a lot about that
I was not expecting
to find out about that
and I had a lot of fun doing it.
So what's the moral,
it needs to be moral,
this needs to be sensible, learning's fun
It's really exciting, like
doing the research,
even if it's hard, it is really hard.
And then there's always this like,
I find, anyway in my work
is like really fun moments
of discovery along the way.
Thank you for being so entertaining.
I'm going to toy with that, probably
longer than I should.
Does anybody else want to add
to our final question
before we have just
a few very short minutes
for questions from others?
So feel free to pop those in the chat.
Like I said, I always like to be
mindful of folks time, especially
knowing how exhausting Zoom can be.
So pop questions in the chat.
I actually, I'll start.
I'll be selfish in this moment.
I don't see any in the chat yet,
so I'll ask a question.
Some of you touched on,
you know, archives.
So as a librarian,
I'm obviously going to ask the question
about archives and accessibility to that.
So in your opinions,
would you prefer archives
to be more accessible,
which is something that
librarians and archivists
think about all the time
and are constantly working on.
Or do you feel like it adds
an additional layer to your work
that you do have to visit
the archives in person
because they aren't accessible?
And how do you feel
like that sort of either
bolsters your work?
Or maybe if the alternative has happened
in which it hinders
your research, like what
are your thoughts and feelings on that?
I mean, I'll start
because I am interested in archives,
I mean, I obviously want archives
to be accessible, right?
I mean, there's no doubt about that.
But I think it depends
what you mean by accessible.
And does that just
simply mean digitizing?
Or does that mean being
sort of a place that people
feel capable of going to,
both experts and non-experts?
I think that there's [inaudible]
about what accessible means.
I would say simply,
though, that I mean, whatever
I'm an old school historian,
I think that it's important
to actually be in the archive
because it does matter
how the materials organize,
it matters like, you know,
there's all sorts of,
I mean, you're an archivist,
it's not just about
popping up the document on my screen.
It's about the documents
that are next to it.
It's about thinking about
how it's been collected,
it's about thinking
about even the search terms.
And so I think that there are
all these different ways in which
it's important for archives
to be accessible,
and I obviously want them
to be more accessible.
But it doesn't,
even if it's accessible, doesn't
mean that I don't necessarily
have to go to it
physically for my
own purposes or my work.
And what I would say is that
I mean, this again is not original,
but there's all types of archives.
And I mean, for me,
I'm interested and thinking
about formal archives
and informal archives in my research.
I like using state archives,
like going to the National Archives,
whether it's in the United States
or Great Britain,
and then going to places
that are less traveled,
but where there are archives
which are also there.
And archivists everywhere
want to preserve materials
and make them accessible.
And so I think that it's,
in some ways, it's
sort of an ongoing question.
So I don't know if
that answers your question, but
I don't think that accessibility
is just about digitization.
I would agree, absolutely, I agree.
I think one of the most
important things is to
give ownership I guess, to
those folks whose you know,
those materials do belong to
and give them proper agency
on how they're used and accessed.
So I think that's probably
what I see as something
that will continue to be
at the forefront of archival work.
And I am not a trained
archivist, obviously,
just by proxy as being a librarian,
I know some things about archival work,
but I am definitely not,
I wouldn't say I'm
an authority on that, so
I just kind of wanted to
grab your opinions.
Can I just add one thing
to what Jana just said?
Absolutely.
With Jana's colleague Emily Clark,
our colleague in history,
I started a group,
an international group
that's based at Tulane that does work in
various archives, archives of all kinds.
Looking for what
we're calling history's extras, right?
The people who got written
out of the narrative.
Oftentimes, people
representing some kind of
minority or diversity.
But also I work in particular on people
who made it to the stage.
And then one thing that we can do
is we can create, you know,
files dossier to constitute
these people as characters in themselves
who then can be on offers
to people doing creative
work or staging or
making films or whatever.
So it isn't just the archive, right?
There's like a whole circular
thing of what you find in the archive
and then to what public you can bring it
and then what can be done with that.
So it's a very rich
site, and I think,
yes, accessibility is great.
But I also think we have to understand
that there are different knowledges
in different places in the world
and we have to go deeper