Current Project: A Post That Took Seven Years (Kinda)

Me with a very official diploma. Photo by Saniya Ghanoui. 

Just about the time that I was setting into the warm bathwater of life after the PhD this month, I received a notice from the Thesis Office at the University of Illinois that my dissertation is now available on IDEALS. It is an odd feeling which lots of people have reflected on before-- seeing something has become available in some sort of "finished" format which to you feels, looking back, like it was concluded both too soon and too late. 

Folks have asked me what I plan to do with it, and the truth is I'm not yet sure. At the moment, I am satisfied with the fact that I got the most significant (to me) portion of the dissertation into print (the first chapter, as “‘Every One of Them Are Worth It”:  Blanche Van Leuven Browne and the Education of the ‘Crippled Child’”).

It was also important to me to release the dissertation with the most access possible. As I've moved away from a career in which it is paramount to publish at all costs, I wanted people who were interested to be able to read about the things I've found if it could at all benefit their lives, interests, or activism. I could see publishing it as a monograph or sorting it into more articles someday, but I could also see it as many small pieces; portraits of the activists who fuel its arguments in shorter and more personal formats. 

However, although the dissertation's content does still feel important to me-- telling stories that lots of folks have never heard about people who they've never known of--the dissertation itself represents a lot of things beyond what's in it. Perhaps this is part of the difficulty of coming to terms with what it means. It's the thousands (literally, thousands) of pictures from archival and secondary research in my storage (the archival photos with lots of typescript and thumbs; the secondary research scribbled pencil notes in whatever tiny notebook with a dog on the front I was carrying at the time). It's the hours spent revising and recycling its contents not only into proposals, drafts, and conference papers but into endless permutations of fellowship applications to fund (or attempt to fund) its creation. And of course, its the hours and days and years of feeling that you are, potentially, doing every single thing in your personal and professional life entirely wrong. (The dissertation has a way of exaggerating; even now, just the phrase "the dissertation" gives me a frisson of dread.) 

It's also the personal impacts of the dissertation process on the person you are. For me, it made me humble in the classroom, as I saw my own writing having the same exact problems as that of the students I taught (move the last sentence of the paragraph to the beginning and you'll have a topic sentence!). It made me a competent and resilient traveler, as I had to go to over a dozen archives across the country and pivot around multiple catastrophies (a car crash, a bad Airbnb, a suitcase held together with tape) to get to the finished product. And honestly, it made me pretty miserable a lot of the time.

In short, at the moment, my plan is to let it breathe, and get some distance, and take some pride in what it is without moving straight to wrangling it into a new form after this one was so hard-won. So, if you'd like to read, skim, or search it, you're welcome to; just save your edit suggestions for... some future time when I'm more ready for them!