How I made it in academia

 I had a successful academic career. I retired recently as a full professor at a flagship state school, published a number of books and numerous articles. I won the major research award in my university. I was nominated a few times by my department to be a Distinguished Professor, but I was not selected. I applied for other jobs once in a while at more prestigious universities, but I did not get them. I probably rose as high as I was meant to. Salaries stagnated in my institution while I was a tenured faculty member there, so I never made the same amount as other full professors made in my same department the year I was promoted. When I complained about my small salary bump, a prominent "feminist philosopher" who was associate dean at the time told me I was lucky to have a job at all. 

This is how I did it: 

I had long been fascinated by poetry. I was a voracious reader and wanted to be a poet. But my actual aptitude was for figuring out how poetry worked. I became a good student of literature simply because I had read more than most people had, even most people going into the field, and because I thought about literature more analytically than most people.  I essentially trained myself. Of course, I also studied for my courses, but I tended to learn more from my own reading and study than what others could teach me.  

I was also a second generation academic, so I had started to think like a college professor when I was a teenager. This is what we would call privilege, now.  Let's say, though, that starting early is an advantage, as in almost every other human endeavor. 

I switched my major from English to Comp Lit. and studied a year abroad in Madrid. I pursued a comp lit degree at Stanford, with the goal of being a specialist in Spanish and/or Latin American poetry. I realized that the Latin American field was too politicized for my taste, and that I could leverage my knowledge of Spanish poetry to become an expert. I read the secondary literature in my field, and assessed its quality. I saw that I could do at least as well as some of the experts in this field. 

My interest, for better or for worse, is how poetry works on its terms, a kind of poetry engineering, as it were. This could still be done in the 1980s, when I began. I am not opposed to politically driven research into literature and culture, but it is simply not my thing, not what I am good at.  

I wasn't interested in studying Spanish fiction. A lot of people did this, and the field was crowded while also being prone to plot summaries. It would be easy to distinguish myself in a smaller field. 

I realized that a lot of people going into Spanish were not literature nerds like me. Those people were going into English. I had an automatic advantage over people who were going into the field for other reasons. I could leverage my greater understanding and knowledge of literature and the privilege that came with being a second generation academic. 

I wrote a dissertation on major, but still only half-recognized poet, whose work had been ill-served by the critics, in my view. I wrote the dissertation to be my first book, with few revisions. I know people tell students now that the only important thing is finishing the dissertation, not how good it is, and that the first book project can be something different from the dissertation, but I thought I needed to start my career on a solid foundation.

Looking back on it, the dissertation and first book does not seem as intellectually deep as some of my later work. But if still stands up well in my own biased opinion. 

I determined what the top journals in my field were, and submitted articles to them, with success. I hedged my bets by also publishing in some second-tier journals. My first university, another flagship university in the midwest, was on a quarter system. I learned that you could teach a summer quarter, of shorter duration, and take one of the three other quarters off. I did this a lot and had time to write a second book, which is still one of my most cited works. 

I was recruited to another flagship university and got the job. There was a fallow period, in which I began projects without being able to finish them. I still published enough, so that there are not significant gaps in my cv unless you look very closely. 

Then I got an idea to write about the most canonical Spanish poetry, Federico García Lorca, in American literature and culture. Lorca was well-studied, but not from this angle. In a way, it was having the idea to right this book that was the most significant moment of my career. 

At around the same time, I completed work on another book on contemporary Spanish poetry. Two books appeared during, and I was promoted to Professor. I needed four books to accomplish this promotion, not the normal two, because I had not produced at a steady rhythm, and had not excelled in my service obligations to the university. (Later, I was able to figure out how to contribute to the department more productively.) I am also not a natural born teacher, and had difficulties until I was able to figure out how to do better there.  

The Lorca book brought me a lot of attention, since it was of interest to readers of American poetry as well. Also, working on a canonical author brings more rewards. People talk about the value of non-canonical authors, but their actions speak louder. When dealing with a canonical author, the interest of the audience is simply assumed: you don't have to argue for the importance of Lorca. The audience is automatically larger and more engaged. 

Through continued work on contemporary Spanish poetry, I became known in Spain as well, and was invited to lecture there with some frequency. I continued to work on Lorca, and became known and respected in this subfield. I began to specialize in musical settings of Lorca's work, another well-known but at the same time ill-studied subject. I have now retired, but still work on my research projects. 

This essay is not meant to be advice, because I don't know if my trajectory could be reproduced in today's academic climate. What I had going for me was an educated family background, a strong intellectual interest, set when I was very young, vast amounts of reading and thinking about literature, a strong competitive drive to be one of the best scholars in my own field, and the luck to be able to leverage these advantages in environments favorable to my scholarly temperament. I've only received two job offers in my entire career, at two flagships where I worked. If I hadn't been hired, then I would have had no academic career at all.