Brandon Walsh

Teaching with the DH Awards

2026-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

It’s that time of the year when the DH Awards goes public with the results of their annual cycle. The process is, of course, only a snapshot of the field and limited in all those expected ways. But I am astonished each year, chronically online as I am, to find that there are so many projects out there that are new to me. Each season is a delight as I page through the many different links offering new work, unknown-to-me scholars, and fresh ideas. Reading this year, I thought that the list could make for a useful way of constructing a DH teaching activity. Here are a few ideas for how you might use the DH Awards to teach your students:

Take five; pick one. Students pick five projects to examine in detail, using a rubric you provide in advance. In session, they each quickly present on one topic to the group. You follow up with a general discussion to which the students can bring all five pieces they examined.
Dig into a year. It’s not uncommon for scholars to designate particular years as uniquely important for their fields of study. In this activity, students pick one year and examine the projects showcased in the DH Awards closely. What was distinctive about this year? What trends do they see? What seems curious?
Look over time. Ask students to consider how representation of the field has changed over time as articulated in the DH Awards. Probably easiest to narrow their focus to a single category for this one. Does anything rise up? Fall away? Remain steady?
Consider what’s left out. Invite students to look critically at the awards process. Can they think of any topics or kinds of scholars who are consistently left out?
Design your own. Encourage students to speculate on their own award cycle. What kind of work would they want to promote? What do they value? How could they design a shoestring award process to help facilitate that every year? What kind of collaborators would they need to implement it? How much labor would it entail?

For extra flavor, I might offer analogous or contrasting exercises with Reviews in DH or Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. Maybe that’s a future post. Endless thanks to those who provide volunteer labor to keep DH Awards going. I always appreciate the project as a service to the community. I always learn something each awards season, and hopefully the above activities give some ideas for how they can teach your students as well.

Breath in DH

2026-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

Winnie E. Pérez Martínez’s post on the Scholars’ Lab blog this week got me thinking. In “Breadth and Depth, a Self-Centered Dialectic,” she revisits how we discuss breadth and depth as two approaches to digital humanities professional development. In this framing, one that I have put forward myself, we can think of careers in DH as operating on two axes. On the one, we are expected to know a little about a lot of things. On the other, we are directed more towards narrow, specialist-level knowledge about a smaller subset of methods. Breadth vs. depth. Few careers really ask us to go entirely in both directions. More practically, we tend to specialize in a couple areas within DH and develop passing familiarity with many more.

For me, the dichotomy between breadth and depth was a way to help students map their career plans onto the different skills they might acquire. I thought of it as a way to free yourself from the need to be expert in everything. In her post, Pérez Martínez expertly shows how breadth and depth actually inform and lead to one another. There can be no one right way in. If you start deep, you might find yourself broadening, and starting wide can help you to focus in. What most resonated about Pérez Martínez’s post, though, was the way in which you can see an exceptional scholar and practitioner wrestling over whether they are enough, over whether they could ever develop the necessary skills they need to feel complete. Those anxieties never really go away. I feel them too. I recognized myself in Pérez Martínez’s post, and I couldn’t help but sense that the breadth against depth framing seemed to be having the opposite effect I would want, heightening anxiety rather than mitigating it.

Pérez Martínez proposes a broadening of the axes I had envisioned. Breadth and depth move beyond just X and Y, curling in upon themselves until they start to push outwards. The moment reminded me of the age-old dichotomy of “hack” vs. “yack” in DH work and how Laura Braunstein offered “stack” as an important third term. In addition to coding and technological critique as key parts of DH work, Braunstein’s intervention elevates “the often invisible technological, social, and physical structures within which scholarship is produced and disseminated.” For Braunstein, DH work is more than just the sum of what we do, it also consists of the structures we put in place to enable that work. In the same spirit and inspired by Pérez Martínez, I have been wondering what breadth and depth leave out, what they gesture towards within and beyond the teaching that we do.

Put another way, what is education if not just content? One point of comparison here is L. Dee Fink, whose Taxonomy of Significant Learning illuminates the various components of teaching.

Caption: L. Dee Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning as shared on Florida International University’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Fink’s Taxonomy usefully illustrates all the things that lie beyond the subject matter in the courses we teach. Learning is more than consuming books, articles, or topics. Teaching is more than passing along skills and methods. If we think of DH merely as skill building, we live too much in the upper right of the circle. We leave out the rest of what makes DH experiences—and DH learning—significant for so many of us. We ignore the transformative mentoring that shows a variety of career options. We miss the collaborative practices that can change how we view our work in dialogue with others. We do not account for how true interdisciplinarity changes our perspectives on our own research processes. We need a new term to trouble the dichotomy between breadth and depth that can capture a more capacious view of what it means to practice digital research and teaching, one that goes beyond subject matter, methods, and skills.

I find this particularly urgent in the age of generative AI, a complicated set of technologies that threatens to instrumentalize education beyond recognition. What counts as methodological training if you can vibe code your way to a launched digital project? What counts as digital pedagogy if our students are secretly using chatbots as study partners? How do we make room for conversations about professional development that do not reduce people to a tidy axis of skill acquisitions?

What lies beyond the breadth and depth of what it means to be a digital humanist?

I would introduce a third term for DH professional development: “breath.” Breadth and depth ask us to think about what we can and cannot do, about the subject matter and methods of DH work. The terms ask us to think about the limits of our knowledge and our inability to pursue universal expertise. Breath asks us to reframe the conversation entirely. It is an invitation to pause and re-embed our work in the body. How do we feel about our labor? Who are the working souls in DH and how do we engage with them? How do we work or overwork our own body to the point of breathlessness? What is the lived experience of our labor that transcends the skills or methods? What are the affects—the joys, frustrations, traumas, triumphs—of DH work that cannot be captured by thinking in terms of skill acquisition? How do our energies map onto a living, breathing community of thinkers and doers beyond the work on the table in front of us? Where do we fit in?

Breadth and depth ask students to think about where they could be, professional development by way of spatial orientation. Breath invites students to consider where they are, to think of themselves as real people with real needs that need attending.

Tables of Contents

2026-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

Tables of contents are spaces of imagination. Ideas to be shaped by the writer. Gifts to be received by the reader. Possibilities.

My graduate program required all PhD students to take a dissertation seminar. The usefulness of the course varied wildly from person to person, largely dependent on where you were in the process of developing your project. My wife recalls going through the motions during the meetings, for example, submitting assignments to check boxes but not in a position to benefit from them (her project took shape the year after she finished the seminar). I came to the course at just the right time, and the activities helped me narrow from a big baggy idea into an actionable proposal. The most powerful exercise given to us by our instructor asked us to develop a series of potential titles and speculative tables of contents. Something about the free-ranging possibilities clicked for me, and living among the imaginary chapter titles helped to solidify the shape of the thing to come. It’s an activity I often recommend to my students.

This past month I submitted the full manuscript of the book I’ve been working on to a publisher for consideration. The piece clocked in at 60,000 words, and I’ve blogged some of the material in this space. Things might change, but I wanted to mark the submission here by documenting my table of contents for Embedded Pedagogies such as it stands now. Screenshots follow from the manuscript, but I’ve also typed out the table of contents for ease of searching/screen reading.

Section		Page
Table of Contents		1
Acknowledgements		2
1. Knowable		4
	⁃ Embedded Pedagogies	4
	⁃ The Pedagogy of Digital Humanities Budgets	15
	⁃ Pedagogies of Transparency	28
2. Neutral		44
	⁃ The Neutral Classroom and the Paradox of Tolerance	44
	⁃ Co-creating Committed Communities	53
	⁃ Values-based Pedagogy in Times of Crisis	69
3. Intellectual		81
	⁃ Bodies, Not Brains	81
	⁃ Collective Action and Intellectual Solidarity	89
	⁃ A Digital Humanities Pedagogy for the Rest of Us	99
4. Future-oriented		111
	⁃ Pedagogy of Contested Futures	111
	⁃ Professional Development and Imagination	119
	⁃ Toward a Better Tomorrow, Together	129
Coda		143
References		151

Swan Dives into Cat Food

2026-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

One day, shortly after our toddler learned how to walk, he suddenly became entranced with a new kind of chaos. Hour after hour, our son would make eye contact with me across the room, look at our cat’s food dish, and look back at me. Every time, it felt like a horror movie to which I already knew the ending. I could see it coming. Time and again, he sprinted across the house and dove headfirst into the cat’s food and water. What a fun sensory experience for him, water and protein substitute scattered all across the floor. What a nightmare for his parents.

The first time, I corrected the behavior and moved on. But my son did this multiple times a day, every day. He was obsessed with looking at me and then sprinting across the house to create a new mess. Try as I might, no matter how many conversations we had, he kept doing it. After all, he’s just a toddler. It’s his first time living. I get it. Every parent has been through some version of this. Small comfort, though, when a little one is driving you to the edge of your patience. Tiny legs can still be quite fast when they want to be. I was able to stop him occasionally, but he made huge messes plenty of times.

One day, all at once, he stopped. I don’t think I even noticed it right away. Maybe a month later, I suddenly realized that the cat dish had gone undisturbed for weeks. No more cat food on the walls. No more playing in the cat water. He would just walk by as though there had never been issue, and it’s been like that ever since. Parenting is full of these stories, those small behaviors that drive you to the brink until they suddenly don’t anymore. You seem to be making no progress on helping this small creature learn, but one day they just get it. Other examples of this for our child would include throwing food, spitting water, and, you know, sleeping.

There’s a real lesson here, both for parenting and for all walks of life. Sometimes problems feel completely unsolvable, totally immovable. You grind away at them with no progress for what feels like ages. Then they move. So much of parenting is about learning to trust the process, and I want to take this forward into all walks of life the next time I am frustrated with a new challenge.

It might be a swan dive into cat food.

Preparing for Leave

2026-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

My wife and I are expecting our second child in just a few weeks, which means that I am gearing up for a new and chaotic phase of life. As a part of the preparation, I’m doing everything I can to keep things running smoothly for student programs in the Scholars’ Lab while I’m out. I set up a process for doing so when I took leave two years ago for our first child, so I’m not exactly working from scratch. Here’s how I’m preparing for my leave this time around to make things easier for my coworkers who will be keeping things going in my absence.

Give notice early

Everyone has different interlocking reasons for when they give notice to their team. Those reasons might be medical, personal, or professional. Given my own particular circumstances, I let my immediate collaborators in the Scholars’ Lab know fairly early, several months before I would be out. With this knowledge well in advance of the due date, my collaborators knew that I was taking steps to accommodate my absence. I also notified students who would be impacted. The dates I chose to take these steps were selected carefully in conversation with my supervisor, who helped me decide who needed to know and when.

Identify areas of responsibility

One of the first tasks in preparing to unplug for two months was to list my tasks, differentiating between major ongoing initiatives and smaller one-off items. This process helped me to create a to-do list such that I can make progress on my leave in a controlled manner. Otherwise, one can get lost in an anxiety spiral feeling like there is already more to do. I identified the Praxis Program, the DH Fellowship Committee, and our summer programs as primary initiatives in need of continuity.

Wrap up what I can

For smaller projects, I sprinted over the past two months to finalize whatever I could. Rather than working with a particular student on a weekly basis, for example, I set a date for a multi-hour meeting where we could make significant progress on their project. I set early writing goals for myself to meet deadlines in advance. And I took advantage of the slow down between semesters as space in which I could get ahead.

Establish points of contact for what I can’t

Some projects and initiatives will inevitably roll over through my leave. Working through my list, I worked with my supervisor and coworkers to identify people whom might be willing to take on specific pieces of my work. This process always involved asking my collaborators a series of questions: what do they need to feel comfortable? What can they do? What do they feel uncomfortable with? Who else might make sense for particular tasks?

Document everything

So much of the work I do exists in my head. Workflows, points of contact, procedures, norms. I tried to write as much of this down as possible so that someone stepping in would know exactly what to do and when. Winnie E. Pérez Martínez has been exceptional at working on this with me as a student worker, especially in regard to clarity and formatting. Winnie has a special talent for taking an enormous brain dump from me and assembling it into a coherent, less intimidating guide. I have learned a lot from her!

Put guardrails on future commitments

If possible, I tried to stop planning major commitments that would take place a couple weeks before the due date. At the very least, when I agreed to something, I made it clear that I might unexpectedly withdraw with little notice. I am also giving a couple weeks buffer before scheduling new commitments after I return in April. After all, babies have their own schedules in mind, and postpartum life is enormously challenging and complex. It’s impossible to know what our lives will be like for the next several months, and I tried to be honest about these facts with everyone involved.

Caveats

Everyone deserves the time and energy that parental leave allows to refocus on their personal life and meet the needs of a difficult transition. Everyone deserves coworkers kind enough to help them make space for their family. But I also know this is not the norm. I am enormously fortunate and privileged to have such support. That being said, I hope that what I’ve outlined above can be helpful even for those who do not possess such a robust support system. In those cases, this post might offer a rough guide for how to advocate, push back, and find small space for what you need in infrastructure that might not otherwise allow it.

Many Ways; Many Gifts

2026-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

I was asked by Katina Rogers to be a part of an MLA 2026 roundtable titled “Writing in the Margins: The Freedom of Scholarly Work in Non-Disciplinary Spaces.” Given the format, I don’t have fully written remarks for what we’ll be discussing. But, in the spirit of the conversation, I thought it could be worth sharing a sketch of what I will offer. What follows are my slides and a few thoughts.

Writing has always been a part of my life, but the last two years have made me rethink what that means in several key ways. These years brought the birth of our first child and preparations for our second. I have far less time or energy to give to writing. All the same, writing continues to offer me the best way to work through my own anxieties about the world as it is, the job that I have, and the ways that I would rather both of them be. This tension—the urgency of writing against the pressures put on it by things that, frankly, are often more important—has resulted in some real creative gymnastics that I will share with you today. I have had to re-evaluate how I write, what I write, and why I do so. Central to my practice has always been the idea that all writing is useful, and this belief has proven more important than ever as we chase a toddler around the house. The care that needs to be given comes first, so writing has changed in important and useful ways as it fits into the cracks of the day.

For one, we simply do not have the luxury of time. None of us do. But this is especially true for caregivers and those people and communities on whom this work disproportionately falls. When I sit down to write, I have to be able to write. I can’t wait for inspiration. So I’ve put together a range of strategies for getting thoughts out even when I feel like I have none to give. My colleague Amanda Wyatt Visconti and I have begun a series of multimedia experiments where we ask, “What would it look like to write a blog post by text? How about if we letter pressed a blog post? If you had to write just one sentence today what would it look like?” These playful constraints offer inspiration, motivation, and fun when writing might otherwise feel like a chore.

A tool I keep coming back to for this practice is the Oblique Strategies deck by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. You pull a card and get enigmatic phrases like “reverse it” or “turn it on its head” that can help you get around creative blocks. I’ve often used these cards to prompt me for blog posts. The deck is also available as a phone app. Central to this practice is the idea that the more you write the easier it gets. These throwaway prompts can create useful material I might use later, but, even if they don’t, I at least practice turning on the creative spigot such that I am ready to go when the time calls.

I have started being careful not to let any time slip through my grasp. This has meant dictating blog posts or material for a book project while driving to work using otter.ai. Does this material need a lot of editing? You bet. But it also means that I never feel as though I am faced with the tyranny of the blank page. I always have something to work on when I sit down at the keyboard. When prepping for talks, I use a companion tool from The Amazing Slow Downer that allows me to slow down, cut up, and loop my talks such that I can practice them on the go. The ASD is a tool I first used with music practice, but it’s proved to be very useful in my working life as well.

I have had less time for writing than ever before this year, but I have also produced far more than when I had vast oceans of time in the past. I think this is no happy accident. So much difference comes when you approach your work with intention and as a daily practice. I worked with Katina on a book proposal in the summer of 2024, and I tried hard to touch this project daily ever since. Some days this meant I dictated a paragraph in my car while driving. Most days, I was pressed to come up with at least one sentence. But I always tried to do so. These small pebbles add up to a great mound over time, those mounds into a mountain.

This year has reaffirmed for me the importance of writing as a daily intervention that means more than just the words you get to the page. Even as other, more important parts of my life have emerged, those margins in which I continue to try to make space continue to be powerful. I’m put in mind of Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design, a text shared with me by my Scholars’ Lab colleague Jeremy Boggs. While the book describes design most directly, Chimero’s words are relevant to anyone who practices a creative craft:

“And if you look closely, and ignore the things that do not matter, what comes into focus is simply this: there is the world we live in and one that we imagine. It is by our movement and invention that we inch closer to the latter. The world shapes us, and we get to shape the world.”

This quote comes from Chimero’s chapter on gifts, which refers to his sense that creative work involves two distinct exchanges. The artist gifts their art, and this offering is then matched by the time and attention gifted back by the person who receives the artwork.

I’ve talked mostly about writing, but, in Chimero’s spirit, I want to close with a scene of reading. I started the year writing anxiously and against time pressures because of my own anxieties as a parent and person in the world. I hoped that the words might be useful for others, but to some degree I was writing for me, as a way to manage and process what is taking place in the world and workplace as I see it. At the end of this long year of writing, I placed the first print of my book manuscript in front of my supervisor and friend Amanda Wyatt Visconti. “Check this out,” I said, expecting a high five in response. Amanda took my manuscript and held it to their chest. (Sharing with permission here) Through tears, Amanda said, “Thank you—this is exactly what I needed today.” I had not intended to actually give that copy away. My text was far from ready for public consumption; it was incomplete and needed both developmental editing and proofing. But I certainly couldn’t take it back. I printed another and let Amanda have that copy.

As someone who has a lot of imposter syndrome about my work and my writing, I will be thinking about that moment for a long time. As I wrote on my blog, may we all be so lucky as to find readers as generous as Amanda, who see the power in our messy, imperfect work. We may not know what gifts we have. We may not even think of them as gifts until others receive them as such. We might write because we think we need to do so for us, but other, unknown readers might need it more.

And with that, I thank you for the gift of your attention.

What I Read in 2025

2026-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

This year I managed anxiety by diving into reading in a huge way using the only medium I could. I made it my goal to read 50 audiobooks, and at some point it became clear I was flying through things while cleaning, cooking, commuting, exercising. So I doubled the goal, and I finished 101. I was hesitant to share publicly about the personal project because year-end lists of accomplishments can often feel self-serving and navel-gazing when there is so much pain going on in the world. But reading this year became my own small act of rebellion, healing, caring, love. And we could all use more of that in our lives.

Huge shout outs are due to Libby and to the many, many friends who shared recommendations. There was no way to read this many things without grabbing ideas from anyone I talked to, and it was a beautiful way to connect with friends this year. When I see the list I see the book I started reading out loud to my son before he got old enough to start requesting his own books and didn’t want any Dickens. I see the book recommended by my therapist. The three books a friend suggested over beers. A book I never read from an undergrad class but finally made time for. I see all kinds of genres. Some serious, some for work. Others for fun and for teenagers. I got into history for the first time. I dug nonfiction in a way I hadn’t before. I found beautiful inspiration from amazing writers. At least one book on here made me think writing was a mistake.

I haven’t read this much since grad school comps, an experience that by and large burned out of me the ability to read anything in any great quantity unless forced to do so. But doing so this year was a way to wrap myself in words, cultures, ideas, pains, stories in ways that I desperately needed.

My absolute favorites from the year:

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Next year I will slow down. But all the same - may the new year help you find the words others have written that let you know you’re not alone.

The List

2025 Total: 101 Books

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black
My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
We have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Wool by Hugh Howey
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Strike by Sarah Bond
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
Shift by Hugh Howey
Dust by Hugh Howey
Kraken by China Mievelle
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
What I Ate in a Year by Stanley Tucci
Programmed Inequality by Mar Hicks
Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters
Gunslinger by Stephen King
The Roundhouse by Louise Erdrich
Introduction to Greek Philosophy by David Roochnick (Great Courses)
How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy
Strange Library by Haruki Murakami
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
The Raven Tower by by Ann Leckie
Big Questions of Philosophy by David K. Johnson (Great Courses)
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Pastoralia by George Saunders
The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown
Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Effective Editing by Molly McCowan (Great Courses)
Novelist as Vocation by Haruki Murakami
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
The Art of Statistics by David Spiegelhalter
Evicted by Matthew Desmond
First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
Academia Next by Bryan Alexander
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami
50 Philosophy Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon
Legendborn by Tracy Dean
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Small Teaching by James M. Lang
The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna
We Want to do More than Survive by Bettina L. Love
A Pedagogy of Kindness by Catherine J. Denial
Ain’t I a Woman by bell hooks
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Clean Agile by Robert Cecil Martin
A Field Guide to Grad School by Jessica McCrory Calarco
Imagination Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin
The Making of Incarnation by Tom McCarthy
The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
J Pod by Douglas Coupland
American Higher Education in the 20th Century edited by Michael N. Bastedo, Philip G. Altbach, and Patricia J. Gumport
White Noise by Don DeLillo
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
The Next Conversation by Jefferson Fisher
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
The Library Book by Susan Orlean
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop by Felicia Rose Chavez
What Masie Knew by Henry James
Educated by Tara Westover
Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick
Analogia by George Dyson
Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
A History of American Higher Education by John R. Thelin
Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant
Grit by Angela Duckworth
The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje
The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
Universality by Natasha Brown
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Chesapeake Requiem by Earl Swift
The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
Leading Generously by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Outline Rachel Cusk
Furious Hours by Casey Cep
Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit
The Gifted School by Bruce Holsinger
Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh
Complaint by Sara Ahmed
The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty
The 5AM Club by Robin Sharma
Exit Strategy by Marha Wells
Eichman in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt
Viral justice by Ruha Benjamin
Dangerous Rhythms by T.J. English

Committee Questions

2025-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

It’s application season in the Scholars’ Lab, which means that the DH Fellows program has a CFP live and waiting for new students to send in their work in. We’re also evaluating applications for our Praxis Program Fellowship, and we always have one student representative on the committee to read these applications. Students are closer to the program than we are, even as instructors, so they can help the staff see who will excel in the program. The students thankfully find it useful to be a part of the application committee. Students consistently say they learn a lot from seeing how application committees work, as it’s not a perspective that they often are able to get in their day-to-day graduate training.

I’ve written in the past a post called “questions to ask when applying” about what I wish applicants would ask themselves such that they produce the best applications possible. Questions like…

Do I know what the fellowship is?
Have I made a clear plan that matches the requirements?

Our student representative told me they have also found it illuminating to hear those questions that experienced application readers ask ourselves, as a committee. So, without too much elaboration, here are some questions that I always ask myself when reading an application for the first time.

How does this match the rubric? What’s left out?
How might the rubric be insufficient?
Who is a bad applicant that put together a good application?
Who is a good applicant who wrote a bad application?
To what degree are we willing to stretch our imaginations beyond what’s in front of us?
How much should we limit ourselves to the materials we have on the page?
Who might not yet know who they are?
Can we see something in an applicant that they don’t yet see in themselves?
Who will get something out of this opportunity they can’t possibly get elsewhere?
Who already has the resources to excel?
How can we build on the experiences of those who already have a lot of experience?
How can we balance the needs of the program with the needs of the applicants?

I’ll leave these hanging as questions, because the answers are things that any particular committee will have to find for itself. But hopefully enumerating them here give future applicants a resource that they can look to while also giving students a peek behind the curtain. The next time you’re putting together an application, think about what questions the evaluating committee might be asking themselves.

The Gift We Give

2025-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

As I’ve written in this space before, I’m working on a book project and recently hit a major milestone. I finished developmental editing and initial proofing just last week, and I compiled the whole thing together into a complete manuscript for the first time. I printed the text out for one last proof front to back before I send it out. This means I suddenly have a physical copy of the whole thing for the first time. It’s forty pages longer than my dissertation. Exciting! Feels real and substantial. So much so, in fact, that during my 1:1 meeting with Amanda Visconti I slapped the bundle on the table in front of us.

“Check this out!”

Amanda is an incredible mentor, collaborator, and friend. They’ve been hugely supportive of my work, but especially so about my writing process. I knew they would be excited to see the result. What I couldn’t expect was that Amanda would take my print manuscript, hold it to their chest, and say, “Thank you so much. Getting this has made my day so much better.” I hadn’t intended the printed draft as a gift, but I couldn’t really take it back after a reaction like that. I went back to my laptop and printed out a second copy for myself to replace the unexpected gift.

We should all be so lucky as to have friends and mentors who react to our work like this. The moment was especially meaningful to me as somebody who has all the associated anxieties and imposter syndrome about their project not being good enough. It is so easy to see something only for its flaws and not to see the impact it might have on others even with all its messiness. I wasn’t ready to share my manuscript with Amanda, but I did so anyway.

With the world such as it is, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it’s all for. Why do we write? Why do I write? Who is reading? Does any of it really matter? We all hope that our writing can have some sort of impact in the world, but it’s so rare to see its effect in a tangible way. The same day, Dr. Emily Friedman posted to Bluesky about social media as a space where one can find comfort in “the stars of hope on the far horizon, as here night seems without end.” Friedman’s post resonated so much, in no small part because I find them to be such an inspiring scholar. So often we quietly take hope and inspiration from people that we never meet and they never hear about the effect they’ve had on us.

So I share this small moment for others who might be struggling with their own motivation or with their own perception of their work. Whether you see these kinds of reactions or not, your work matters. You matter. Keep writing. You never know who might clutch your manuscript to their chest when they find it. You might be sharing an unexpected gift someone needs.

For those us of finding hope in the work of others, may we all be more vocal about it.

Filling the Cup of Each Writing Phase

2025-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

Given that I work with graduate students at different stages of their PhD journey, it’s probably no surprise that I have many versions of the same conversations.

How do I write my dissertation?

How did you write yours?

In my experience, students struggle to maintain a sense of progress while writing their dissertations. Those perfectionist tendencies that got them so far in life can cause real problems when working on a two-hundred-page document. I had a very careful process for my dissertation writing and for managing those frustrations. Process can be one of the things that saves us from the tyranny and the blank page, so I thought I would share two things that students seem to find inspiring: how I wrote my dissertation and how I go about writing now.

My dissertation process

I often say that I wrote my dissertation at five in the morning. There is some truth to this: I used to be teaching assistant for a study abroad program in London each summer. When I came back to the States, I always found myself jet-lagged and awake at five in the morning. Each summer I kept the jet lag going as long as possible and wrote before anyone else was awake. This sleep habit eventually evolved into a broader strategy: write in the morning and research in the afternoon. Each dawn I wrote until I hit a fairly modest writing goal. After lunch, I spent whatever time I had remaining researching the material that I would then incorporate into my writing the next morning. This schedule was obviously impossible to maintain during seasons of the year when I had meetings and other obligations. But one consistent through line was that I always had a clear goal whenever I sat down at my laptop.

In the afternoon, I didn’t feel the pressure to write because I had already made progress in the morning. And I knew in the afternoon that I my only goal was to set myself up for success the next day, to provide material for when I next sat down to write. I started each morning confident that I knew where to begin. Writing in this formulation felt like riding a train and constantly refueling it to keep it moving. This past week our Praxis student Jimga introduced me to the saying “you can’t give what you don’t have,” an idea that describes the core of my dissertation writing process. The most important part of my process was ensuring that I had more to give.

My process now

I don’t have the luxury of much unstructured writing time with my current full-time gig, but I have clung to and refined certain pieces of that process-oriented approach. In Molly McCowan’s Great Course on Effective Editing, she divides editing into several different phases: developmental editing, line editing, copy editing, and proofreading. The discussion helped me to see my own writing as stepping through a finite set of moments: brainstorming, drafting, developmental editing, proofing, and finalizing. One of the most powerful things you can do for your writing is to recognize that each phase is distinct. Even writers who are fairly advanced might sit down to the page without a clear goal in mind, without knowing which phase they are in. It’s even more challenging to keep your brain from wanting to slide between phases. You might well think you’re sitting down to proof, but before you know it you find something that you need to change. So you make one small edit. Then another. And another. Before you know it, you’re back in the drafting stage. You feel stuck and like you haven’t made tangible progress.

Whenever I find one comma out of place while proofing I suddenly feel as if the whole page is destabilized. I feel like I have to reread the whole thing again. I need a way around this sense that things are always changing, and my way to do so is twofold. First, always sit down with a clear goal when getting ready to write. Second, differentiate the phases of the writing process by actually making them feel different. I mean this quite literally: I have gotten in the habit of using a different tool for each of the stages of the writing process. Most of my drafting I carry out by dictating into my phone while driving to work. When I sit down for the next stage—developmental editing—I have some material ready to go that I work on in a fairly typical word processing environment. When I am ready to proof, I actually print the document out and do so by hand. I find that if I work with a pen I just cannot make the kinds of edits that might come if typing on a keyboard. Instead, I wind up with a very targeted set of changes for my last step, when I go back to my laptop and integrate the handwritten changes into a final document. I have a to-do list, something finite. I know exactly what needs to change, because I have those ink marks on the piece of paper rather than an infinite sea of possibilities.

Each prior phase fills the cup for the next one. I end each session with what I need for tomorrow, a gift for the writing to come. When I sit down for a new phase I find that I now approach it with purpose and gratitude for my past self. Does the system look like chaos to the outsider? Maybe. But I also think of writing as an encounter with chaos every single time you sit down with a new document and expect to find some order in it. My system helps ensure that the page never stays blank for long.