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Sunday, September 2, 2018

Work Buddy

I'm look for someone with whom I could exchange ideas with on a regular basis.  Not an editor of my work, but someone that I could talk to once every two weeks about how my project is going by Skype. In exchange, I would be your research buddy too.  We would take half an hour about yours, and half an hour about mine, or alternate weeks.

I just find it too isolating to just work on this amazingly rich material and not talk to anyone about it, aside from very brief elevator pitches I make from time to time in a social context.

Let me know if you want to be my research mirror.  Write me at jmayhew@ku.edu. It has to be someone writing a book of serious scholarship and working every week on it. I don't care what your book is about, as long as it's not STEM. I don't need specific expertise in your field, nor you in mine. The idea is that you should be able to talk about your ideas to a non-specialist in an understandable way.

It might not work out, but it's worth a shot. If you contact me and I feel you're not the right person, don't take it hard. Even if you're the right person, it still might not work.

For you: a chance to work with me one on one. For me, the chance to learn from you, whoever you are. I think that I could learn from anyone, so don't worry if you are at a different career stage.

I'd also be interested if you have ever had that kind of relationship. I really haven't, even with a former spouse in the profession. I read her stuff, but mixing a personal relation in that way doesn't really work well.

1 comment:

Leslie B. said...

I have coffee every week with a colleague in Linguistics to do this. It sort of works. Our problem is both being inconsistent with work hours, we teach too much & have too many obstacles. But the principle works. I had a *brilliant* dissertation group that was like this, 4 people, every week we'd read and comment on one person's work. We were all in Comp. Lit. but had 1 classicist, 1 medievalist, 1 on modern novel, and me on modern poetry. All really good philologists and all conversant in theory in the way one could be before theory textbooks existed.