I returned from the USA two weeks ago, and have now switched to the second stage of my research leave: writing funding bids in an attempt to earn both prestige and time to do more research. This is a new thing for me, and I’m not particularly at ease with it. I’ve written plenty of research proposals (most in a vain effort to get a postdoc), but I can’t seem to put pen to paper, or hand to keyboard at the moment.

It’s tempting to say this is because I’m still recovering from the effort of sending off my book, but I’m not so sure. If I had to give an answer to the slowness of my work at the moment, I would probably point to a few other, interrelated things too.

First, there’s the usual difficult of asking for money to do research when you need to do some research in order to know what to ask for money for. That is a tortued sentence, but it expresses the paradox of research funding. Of course, I know that I can rely on what I already know to designate an area for new research and build a case for why research in that area is important – but this is only part of what will earn me funding: I also need to give some assurance, or some hint, that what I want to be paid to do will bear fruit and be useful to others. And that requires research to do research.

But not too much research, or else I risk running out of time to write the proposalm or – admittedly unlikely – plunging myself so far into a project that I cannot work out how to focus it into something discrete. This might be the most self-indulgent part of a very self-indulgent post, but I do miss some speculative reading: I have a database of (I think) almost every eighteenth-century publication about acting theory on my computer, and a good part of me would just like to spend the months of my leave that are left to me reading through it all.

One final thing. I find myself ill-at-ease with the competition of grant culture. This isn’t something I really experienced when I was a PhD student or looking for a postdoc: at those points, the necessity of competition came with the precarious status of those roles. But now, as I sit in my office on a permanent lectureship, my security makes me wonder if there’s another way of doing all of this.