Grants: Why do historians apply for them?

At this time of year, graduate students (and faculty, too) scramble to apply for research grants. Grant deadlines fall throughout the year, but often the year-long fellowships that begin in August/September post their call for proposals (CFPs) in October or November, set their deadline for January or February, and notify accepted recipients between March and May. I personally will submit three grants within a three week span in February. 

If research is a requirement of our jobs, why do we apply for money to do our jobs? That's a good question, and one that requires a long discussion of the university's relationship to capitalism. Leaving that aside, however, there are three big reasons why graduate students, postdocs, and faculty members (from junior profs to the most senior scholars) all compete for a small number of opportunities:

1. Research is expensive! In the discipline of history, we often need to travel to archives to read our documents. Digitization has greatly reduced the cost of research--you don't have to travel when a collection has been made available online--but digitization has also put pressure on researchers to look at more and more sources. To write a book (or heck, even a good journal article) requires multiple archival visits. Sometimes these archives are in the same city, which is convenient and efficient, and sometimes a project demands that a scholar make costly visits to archives all over the country. The travel itself is expensive, but with housing and food and other incidentals it really adds up. Sometimes you end up with big photocopy bills, too (oops). Grants can reduce or cover the costs of visiting archives. 

One other thing that grant money can buy is time. If you're usually paid to teach, a grant can buy you out of that responsibility and give you more time to write or travel. What happens is that the grant pays your salary, and your university then uses the money it usually spends on you to hire a replacement instructor. When scholars are in the writing phase of a project, this grant of protected time is especially valuable. 

2. Grants are prestigious! A grant application is a description of the research project that the funds would subsidize. Receiving a grant is thus an endorsement of your research. It's an institution's way of saying, "hey! we think you're doing interesting work! we want you to keep doin' what you're doin'!" You get to write it on your CV and when your university or other scholars see it they think you are very smart and accomplished.

3. Money begets more money. Funding institutions do not like to take risks. If they see that other, similar funders have endorsed your research, you look like a safe bet. The buckshot approach is thus the best method for applying for grants. Researchers send out as many applications as possible and hope that they'll be chosen eventually. Once you've gotten a few, though, the odds improve.

This week, I will talk about the tangibles and intangibles of the grant process: how to find and apply for grants, and how to cope with the angst and waiting they inspire. 

Baltimore or Less

Yesterday I gave my first presentation at a major professional conference. The Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies is taking place right now in Baltimore (it opened yesterday and concludes on Tuesday). It is an international and interdisciplinary gathering, and panel topics range from new interpretations of ancient texts to recent sociological changes in 21st century American Jewry. 

As this is such a large conference, the AJS requests that graduate students participate in lightning sessions rather than presenting in a traditional panel format (where you and two or three other scholars deliver 20-minute papers and answer audience questions). Lightning session presentations are limited to 5-7 minutes, which is just enough time to introduce a project, discuss a question in the field, or propose a methodological problem. The goal is to familiarize grad students with the newest work being done in Jewish Studies, and to foster connections between grads at different universities. 

My paper was titled "Jewish Adjustment and the Professionalization of Jewish Social Work," and in it I defined how a concept in mid-twentieth century social work was used by leaders of Jewish Community Centers to justify their authority as the providers of Jewish leisure-time activity. 

This is not only the first major conference I have attended, it was also my first time trying to distill my work down into such a tight time limit.  All academics know that more time is better, and that 20 minutes always seems to fly by before you manage to make your point. To condense an argument down to five minutes required a lot of trial and error! I began by carefully structuring my paper. I included a very brief introduction of my dissertation topic and the historiographical importance of the project. I offered my argument up front and provided and overview of what I would discuss. I briefly reviewed the theoretical background and answered the question I posed at the outset (what is Jewish adjustment?). I shared a case study from my research to demonstrate how the concept was used to defend the JCC's authority within Jewish communal life, and concluded by reiterating my argument. After all of that, I still barely cleared 7 minutes, and had to remove all but the most essential context. 

I spent hours rehearsing over the past week, and the more I practiced the more nervous I became! I knew I was going to be the only historian on the panel, and the only one doing a topic on American Jewry. I was really worried that my paper was concise but not cogent, or that it flattened reality and made the past appear too simple, too pat. 

In the end, it went well. The panel was more informal than I expected, and I was sufficiently prepared and stayed close to the time limit. My respondent--an academic whose work I really respect--gave me excellent feedback and made several valuable suggestions (my favorite was that I should explore the content taught to rabbis in American rabbinical schools during the mid-twentieth century and compare it to the Jewish training given to Jewish social workers). It was informative to hear the wide variety of topics being studied by my peers in Jewish studies, and I benefited from hearing about the various themes and questions they are exploring in their research. 

I am relieved that I was able to present on the first day, and feel like I can now relax while other people present. Conferences are like a blitz of short classes, you learn or are reminded of interesting questions or themes or issues. Presenting was nerve wracking but such a valuable experience, and I feel that the lightning format prepared me to participate in a more traditional panel at a future conference. Twenty minutes will feel like such a luxury!

Getting a Good Read on the Situation

I struggled to get out of bed this morning. I partially attribute this to the darkness of the early hour, and partially to intimidation. I have a long to-do list this week! I let a few tasks simmer on the back burner over the past two weeks while I focused on a time-sensitive project. I'm excited to get moving on a few of these tasks, like planning my travel for January through April. Inherent in planning this travel, however, is deciding what I will research, and where, and for how long. So many choices!

Although my heart's true desire was to spend the entire day in bed playing Bejeweled on my iPad, I declared today a dedicated reading day. Reading seemed like a decent compromise between productive efficiency and total evasion of responsibility. Reading is the most inert activity in my profoundly sedentary profession, and it's like green eggs and ham: you can do it in a bed, you can do it on a couch, you can sit stiff as the dead, or bend over in a slouch. 

The first three years of graduate school are heavily weighted towards reading, with a side of writing. Coursework in history usually demands you read a book a week per course. Preparing for doctoral exams forces you to read a book a day for about five months straight. After that, you read on an as-needed basis.

I've really struggled with incorporating reading into my life as a dissertator. I started out slow, and introduced fiction back into my routine. I rationalized that it would be easier to muster enthusiasm for stories about vampires than for stories about the past (though sometimes those interests combined in magical ways). Now that I'm getting further into the dissertation research, though, I recognize that I have to keep up with the history books (and articles) on the subjects I'm writing about. I'm finding it hard to switch gears from reading documents to reading a book, especially because I prioritize the former activity. I try to devote my most productive morning hours to the mountain of evidence that I'm digging through, and by the time I'm done it's hard to concentrate on a book. The consequence of this is that I haven't done much reading lately....

So, what is the point of this story? It's just a reminder to myself that a day spent supine is not a day wasted, as long as there's a history book in my hands. 

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I'd love to hear other researchers strategies for tacking between research, reading, and writing! Do you have any personal rules or self-imposed structures for finding this balance?

Chronologies and Indices

Even with all of the clarity a pristinely organized database bestows upon a researcher, the soul-crushing volume of information necessitates additional strategies to help move the most important knowledge into the foreground. Two methods that I have used to help me keep track of details are making a chronology and making an index.

A chronology is a glorified timeline, a visual representation of change. It highlights patterns (economic growth!) and major disruptions (coup d'etat!). A well-done chronology is a valuable reference when you want to contextualize an event or debate within the larger history of what you're studying. For example, I created a chronology of the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights from its founding in 1917 up until 1980, the final year for which I have records. Since I want it to be a simplification of my notes, I do not record every detail I know about what happened in each year. I choose special events, like changes in leadership or the inauguration of a program, or notable debates, like whether to establish draft counseling and condemn the Vietnam War. That way, when I read a document about New York City's fiscal crisis in 1975 I can quickly turn to my chronology and see how the Y reacted to the threat of budget cuts for their municipally funded programs. 

In some unknown future, when I invent a machine to add hours to the day, I plan to create chronologies for other institutions I study in the dissertation (like the Jewish Welfare Board). I'll also write one for the history of New York City. Luckily my doctoral exams taught me the broad sweep of American history during the postwar decades, so I don't have make a macro-level timeline. I could imagine that a researcher could also benefit from creating chronologies for historical actors important to their study.  A "master" chronology of all the actors and organizations in a given project would be quite an undertaking, but could prove valuable. 

What I refer to as an index is my own personal encyclopedia of the historical actors and debates that appear in my work. It's hard to keep track of all the leaders in all of the major Jewish institutions in New York City (plus all the national organizations!) and so I like to have a handy document with the basic details on the most important people. I list whatever "vitals" about them that I can find: their birth and death dates, occupation, marital status and children (if relevant), and where they lived. I also note the organizations with which they were affiliated, especially if they served on a Board of Directors. If they were involved in a major debate, I write down what position they took (for example: X was in favor of opening the JCC on Saturdays). Basically, I commit to the index any information I think I will need if I have to jog my memory about an individual's identity. I try to make entries for most of my historical actors, even when I think to myself, "how could I forget this person!" Many of the individuals I study have similar sounding names, and it's possible that I could mix them up. Or, I could mistakenly associate someone with an organization that they didn't belong to. Keeping track of basic information in an index saves me from having to look through pages and pages of notes to verify small details like that. 

Again, these are tedious extra steps that often cause me to shake my head and wonder if it's worth it... the last thing I want to do is waste my time! From experience, however, chronologies and indices become valuable reference tools that I rely on throughout the duration of a project. 

Should [It] Stay or Should [It] Go

In yesterday's post, I emphasized that notes are most effective when they focus on details that support your argument or that help you tell a particular story. That raises the question, however, of how do you know when a document will contribute to your study? Sometimes you go into a project already knowing what events, themes, or arguments you plan to make. Other times you go in thinking that you will  write about one of thing, but then the sources lead you to make a completely different point. It's also possible to just begin reading sources without a particular intention. You just hope that the sources will inspire a question or present an interesting story for you to tell. 

During my first foray into archival research, I thought absolutely every word that I read was relevant and compelling, that each source presented a simple, uncomplicated truth. I couldn't see the forest for the trees. That became problematic when I began writing my paper. There was no clear place to start, and when I went back to look at my notes it seemed that every conflict, every policy, every decision was equally as important. After many hours of paralysis, I stepped back and re-read some of the sources I remembered most clearly. I figured those were the ones I must have found to be especially engaging. The story that jumped out at me ran through a set of document from the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights, in which a building fund campaign committee described how difficult it was to raise money for the construction of a new home for the Y. My question became, "Why did such a such a desirable and necessary neighborhood institution struggle to raise funds for this badly-needed capital project?" I was then able to reanalyze the documents I had collected and to clearly identify which records helped me answer this question, and which records were tangential. Some of them provided context but did not support my argument. I was glad to have those, but I certainly did not need copious notes on each of them!

Three years later, I've gotten much better at "triaging" sources.  I ask myself the following questions in order to sort documents into the categories of relevant/important, contextual/necessary, and irrelevant/tangential:

1. Does this document (or set of documents) tell about an event from start to finish? Does it/they provide all of the information I need to describe what happened?

2. Is the event, controversy, or debate described in this document related to other events/controversies/debates that I plan to study in my research project?

3. Does this document help me answer a question I am interested in?

4. Could I find other sources that I could use to "cross-examine" this document? Do I have any way to check if the event(s) described happened that way, or if the event(s) were interpreted another way by other people? [You need to have other evidence that support your documents, just like a lawyer needs evidence to support the testimony of a witness].

5. Is this source trustworthy? Who wrote it and with what intention?

If I answer yes to these questions, the document is a keeper. I let myself take notes freely, with gusto and verve. If I answer no to the first three, but think that it's a source that will help provide context--for example, to show how an organization worked, or what a particular individual was like, or to describe the physical surroundings of a place--then I would consider the document necessary but would try not to spend more than a few minutes taking notes. These sorts of documents are useful at the writing stage, when you need to fill in the details. They can also be useful for cross examining your most important documents, because they can corroborate small details that support the veracity of your interpretation. 

If I answer no to all of these questions, I force myself to put the document back in the folder from which it came. I may be dying to read it, to see if there's some juicy story buried inside. I constantly have to remind myself that there are many good stories buried in the past, but I can only tell a few of them in my dissertation... and those few stories all have to make sense together.

I used this same process to choose case studies for my dissertation. I surveyed urban Jewish Community Centers across the U.S. and quickly decided whether the experience of each Center could help me answer one of my questions about postwar urban JCCs. I also asked: Does an event, controversy, or debate experienced by this organization represent a larger historical trend in American (or American Jewish) history? I had already studied the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights and wanted to include it as a case study in the dissertation, so I decided that I would narrow my focus to other Centers that experienced a Jewish to Latino demographic transition during the 1960s and 1970s. That's how I chose JCCs in Los Angeles and Miami as my other case studies. To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure if I've done a good job selecting case studies. I may decide to reevaluate as I continue the research, because the more I learn the more unsure I am that Los Angeles and Miami can help me represent a larger historical trend in American Jewish history. That's how it goes, though. As my advisor says, writing a dissertation is not fulfilling a contract. You're allowed to wing it a little! There's always contingency in research, and you can only have fun with it if you learn to accommodate and enjoy the surprises.