In continuation of what I was thinking and feeling earlier. For G. C.
Tag: personal statement
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Personal Statement (I)
William Hogarth, The Distrest Poet (c. 1736). I am writing to apply for a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. My primary research area is eighteenth-century British literature and culture, with additional specializations in poetry, poetics, and the history of literary criticism. … In what follows, I will provide an overview of my dissertation, and an outline of my research plans for the 2020-23 fellowship period.
Long before I drafted these sentences for the application that would bring me to Belgium, I harbored feelings of self-doubt over becoming a ‘researcher’ at all. I was taught English literature (what everyone in the US abbreviates to “English” without a second thought) for most of my life, and I was taught to love it. The more classes I took as an undergraduate at Rutgers, the more I discovered I was ‘good at it’: good enough, that is, to abandon my greater self-doubt at ever becoming a professional chemist and commit to concocting mechanisms and explanatory schemes for texts instead. By the time I passed my Ph.D. qualifying exams in English at Penn, I knew I could master the codes that came with the degree. Articles. Conference presentations. Questions at conference presentations. Small talk at receptions. Large talk over dinner conversations.
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Between Two Rivers 