Still alive

Blog posts have been rather sporadic over the past month, mostly due to the fact that I've been preparing for my end-of year upgrade, to allow me to move from MPhil to PhD status. To do so, I had to submit a piece of work between seven and ten thousand words long, an annotated bibliography, a working thesis outline (including chapter breakdown), an evaluation of the past year and plan for the coming year, and exercises demonstrating my attendance of research seminars. Additionally, I had to make a fifteen minute presentation of my work so far in front of the other candidates, and have a fifteen minute mini-viva. Quite a workload. I just wanted to write about duelling!


Anyway, I've been very preoccupied with writing and preparing, the consequence being that blogging has rather fallen by the wayside. It was all to the good, however. My interviewers at my mini-viva - comprising of my supervisor, my advisor, and an external examiner - agreed that I passed, which is a huge weight off my mind. I could have my PhD by 2013!

I think my only downfall was the presentation. While I followed the guidelines for submission of work, I didn't realise that there were guidelines for what to include in presentations as well. As a result, I was one of the only people who didn't use PowerPoint, and I certainly didn't make any evaluations of my own work thus far. I was also much vaguer and informal than I ought to have been - so much so that I was asked (in full seriousness) whether the use of satire would be a part of my thesis. I was just telling some jokes to make my presentation interesting! To misjudge the requirements to the extent I did makes me feel embarrassed - I felt very unacademic when compared to everyone else - but I suppose I should try not to let it bother me too much. I was upgraded; that's what's important.

Under other circumstances I'd segue into a review of a book unrelated to my thesis, but this past month I haven't managed to finish anything that wasn't concerned with masculinity, duelling, or the seventeenth century. I did begin two (Hi-de-ho: The Life of Cab Calloway by Alyn Shipton and The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson - the latter an intertwined history of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the serial killer HH Holmes) but I haven't been able to finish them. I also bought and skimmed a beautiful book called Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made It by Michael J. Trinklein. As you can probably tell from the title, it's a peekaboo look at proposed US states which, for various reasons, never made the grade. This is a coffee-table book, really, and I read it in the same way that one might read a magazine.

I have just started Amanda Foreman's A World on Fire, an elegant account of the relationship between Britain and America during the American Civil War. Foreman is perhaps best-known for her biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (which shaped the 2008 Keira Knightley film), and this second book is an excellent follow-up, vividly written with a real feel for the atmosphere. She does seem to be writing more from the Northern perspective - the issue of slavery, rather than independent state rights, is cited as the predominant cause of conflict - but I suppose that slavery was the overriding concern for the interested British. Nevertheless, it's shaping up to be a wonderful book.

I'm taking the next week off from thesis work to allow my mind to fallow a bit. It's been both surreal and difficult over the past few days not to think about it - I've got an open tab of Thomas Southerne's 1696 stage version of Oroonoko which I'm trying hard not to read - but I do think that it's necessary. As of next Monday, I'm going to be tackling the second half of my first chapter; once I'm back into a normal routine, this blog will be updated more regularly again.