James Harriman-Smith

Category: Research Leave 2019

  • A Slump

    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…

  • Another Finding in the Folger

    As I said in last week’s post, there is a lot of stuff in the Folger Library that I could talk about. I spent my week looking at as much as I could, in the hope of one day returning to work in more detail around a specific project. For the post, I thought I’d…

  • Findings in the Folger

    I have spent from 8:45am to 5pm of every day this week sitting in the same chair in Folger Shakespeare Library’s main reading room, which, with its wood panelling, green carpet and nice solid tables and chairs, takes me back to my Cambridge days (and working habits). Here’s a picture of the place: There are…

  • #ASECSat50

    Although the metadata will only show the steady rhythm of my weekly research leave posts, I’m writing this entry one week later than I should have done. This is because I am now sitting in a library (more on that in the post for next week – or this week’s, if I’m being honest) ,…

  • Knights of the Roundtable

    Research Leave has given me the time to travel to the annual conference of the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) this year. I’ve never been before, and am looking forward to meeting both old acquaintances and other people whom I only know through their books. I’ll be giving a paper on character theory, drawn…

  • Library Collection

    As I put the final touches to my book’s draft manuscript, I realized that I had achieved a new status as a scholar. For the first time, I now have a reader’s card for four of the five legal deposit libraries in the UK. One of the rules I have given myself as an academic…

  • Book Manuscript

    So, I finally submitted my book manuscript this week. Because of that, and the amount of time spent reading, rereading and rewriting myself that this activity entailed, this is not going to be a particularly long post. Let it take the form of a list, in hommage to Eric Griffiths’s If Not Critical, which –…

  • Magical Thinking

    I remember when I first told someone that I played the fantasy cardgame Magic: The Gathering. That was nearly a decade ago now, and the excruciating set of emotions I experienced then have faded, but I still don’t tell many people this. To the best of my knowledge, none of my colleagues know that I…

  • Teaching Assessment

    It’s a bit ironic, but I keep having ideas about teaching while I’m on research leave from teaching. I suppose it’s the new perspective I’ve acquired, and will make the most of these thoughts by putting them down in blog posts from time to time. The one that came to me most recently concerned assessment.…

  • The Speed of Criticism

    My teachers would often write ‘slow down’ or ‘unpack this’ on my essays. I do the same thing now with my students’ writing, and – during this research leave especially – with my own. The comment appears whenever something is explained in insufficient detail, when the author makes a point and then rushes to another…