"I Have a Chapter; Let's Have Some French Fries": Finding your Voice

Our initial foray into dissertation writing started at my house. I had just had my first child and was tired and overwhelmed, but still needed to write. Each week the group came to my house, brought dinner, and, we read two people’s writing. We agreed that the work could be in any stage of done (including sometimes sentences that trailed off into nothing!). We all finished dissertations in a timely fashion because, in part, there was always the group waiting for our writing and because we received such good feedback from each other. The feedback was so strong because it came from our different disciplinary expertise. We do not all study the same area of history, but that was our strength. This creates a remarkable place of strength for any group to begin.

Fortunately, we don’t write dissertations for our whole careers. One of the significant results of this phase of our group was the opportunity to find and strengthen our own intellectual voices. I learned, in this group, that I could contribute to the conversation even when I felt outmatched intellectually. I saw every week that there were different ways to think creatively and critically about material. The academy can posit a single model of what it means to be a good historian. Working in community, in a group like this, works against that and opens up possibilities for defining different ways of working both inside and outside the academy.