Scholarly Self-Fashioning

My image of myself, of what I am doing as a scholar, has shifted gradually over the years. I once saw myself as the hot-shot, hyper-theoretical Young Turk. Now I am more the old-fogey, old-school Comparative Literature professor. Between these two phases, I saw myself as the person with the deepest possible insight into poetry, aspiring to be the greatest possible reader. Sometimes I've wanted to see myself as the consummate specialist in my particular subfield. Other identities I've tried on include the "poet-critic" and the high-modernist.

I mention these overlapping or partially contradictory identities because it might be strategic to define oneself in a particular way, but it is also helpful to question one's own identity from time to time. What benefit do we get from thinking of ourselves in a category like those I've described? If you call yourself a professor-activist, a cultural critic, or an interdisciplinary scholar, what does that mean for you?

(I borrow the word "self-fashioning" from Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning.)

Agenda (7)

Here is how one reader of the blog used some of my posts on this topic to define his own agenda.

Agenda (6)

Thomas does a good job here of defining his research agenda. Notice how it is very concrete and detailed: an exploration of the sense-making debate in Organizational Studies, as well as very broad in its implications: the epistemology of the social sciences.

In job interviews in academia there is always the "summarize your dissertation" question. Then the interviewers will typically ask about the next project beyond the dissertation. That is an opportunity to define your research agenda, because you will be able to make a connection between a specific dissertation topic and the larger agenda of which it forms part. If you can articulate the connection between a narrower topic and a broader agenda, you will be able to be very impressive.