What was your favorite part of MAPH? What do you remember most fondly about MAPH?
MAPH gives you a lot of time to do things you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise, and think about things you’re unlikely to think about later. A lot of the overarching goals of my work – finding persuasive ways to express the value of human dignity, analyzing how people interact with institutions – was something that Andre Bazin, the person I wrote my Master’s thesis on, wrote a lot about, even if it was in an entirely different context.
What experiences and/or choices led you to where you are now? (In other words, what would a brief sketch of your career trajectory look like?)
AfterMAPH(TM), I went to the Czech Republic because I was chasing after a girl (who I would later get married to). I took a job with a local business magazine covering banking and finance, mostly because it paid me money, but I quickly found that I was fairly good at getting information from strange places and explaining it in clear words. When my wife finished her schooling, we relocated to Beijing, where we both spoke the language. I covered China for about seven years, first as a journalist, then as an economic researcher with the Economist Group, until I joined the Foreign Service in 2014.
Can you say a bit about your book project?
When I got to China, I quickly realized that A. China didn’t have a functioning financial industry. B. China was rapidly reducing poverty in a real and substantial way. The decline in poverty in China – 753 million people over a bit more than 30 years – is easily the largest reduction in human misery ever. If you were to tell a group of development experts that you could achieve this reduction in poverty while systematically redirecting money from the country’s poor towards State-owned enterprises that often went bankrupt, rarely made a profit and supported widespread graft, they would almost certainly not believe you, and perhaps assume that you were drunk.
And yet, it happened. There is really no questioning the fact that China is an exponentially better place than it was 30 years ago, despite still having a wildly dysfunctional financial system, and a tax system that’s partially dependent on violent land seizures.
A number of things contributed to Chinese growth during this period, but the explanation I really hit on in the book, is that development experts tend to systematically underestimate the value of migration as a tool to alleviate poverty. Over the past 30 years, the population of China’s cities have grown by half a billion people, driven by more than 260 million migrant workers. These people found better jobs in the cities, learned new skills, bought food, goods, places to live, developed new ideas, started new businesses. The standard estimate in the Chinese growth accounting literature, is that moving people from farms to factories contributed slightly over 20% of GDP between 1990-2010, or roughly 1.1 trillion dollars, an economy the size of Mexico. At times, building housing for urban residents accounted for 1/3rd of total GDP. Measuring the productivity gained by skills built in factories is somewhat more difficult, but the evidence suggests that it’s in the same realm.
The books looks particularly at the impact this mass migration has had on China’s political economy, and how China’s leaders have been forced to adapt in order to, in the words of Hu Jintao, “create 25 million jobs a year,” and deal with the concomitant strain on social services. The hope being that China’s experience could provide insights to policy makers in other countries dealing with similar problems, or, more broadly, convince policy makers to think of migrants as an asset rather than a problem.
The book also has some great stories in it. The first chapter starts with a kidnapping.
What do you find most rewarding about your work?
When I was a journalist, my magazine used to do a regular feature, where we asked people 4-5 questions about how they make money and published it alongside a large photograph. A bit like Humans of New York with a business angle. I always walked away from those interviews with a deep respect for whoever I was talking to, an understanding of how work fit into their broader life plan, and usually a completely unexpected insight into their business.
For example, I once interviewed the owner of a store in Beijing selling American vintage clothes, which largely focused on the complicated shipping route he devised to minimize tariff costs. I also interviewed two women who were paid commissions to convince men to come to the bar they worked at and buy drinks (you can read between the lines). It was like talking to two accountants. They had their predicted turnover worked out two-three months in advance, including how many hours they would have to spend online after work to build relationships with their regular and new customers, and where they saw their careers heading in the future (one aimed to go back home and start a business, the other wanted to be the mistress of someone wealthy). My book includes a long segment about a high school drop out who is now the majority owner of a clothing factory.
I like being able to walk up to people, ask them a few questions, and get a general understanding of how their life works. What resources they are using to attack what problem. I am always impressed by the general ingenuity of people when you start digging into this.
How does your job relate to MAPH? Do you see connections between MAPH and where you are now?
My core skills in any job are:
While MAPH wasn’t great for my writing skills (you can’t teach Lacan and writing at the same time, you get to choose one), it was probably the best entry point to the world of research you could have. I’m largely self-trained in economics, yet I somehow managed to crank out a book with a 17 page bibliography that was endorsed by a Nobel Prize winner in the field. MAPH deserves a share of the credit for that.
Do you have any general advice for current MAPH students, including those interested in a career in writing?
Writing isn’t really a career. It’s a useful tool for doing other things, but it’s important to have those other things that you want to do.
The first few years after University are spent trying to integrate yourself into institutions (at least if you were like me and weren’t smart enough to do it during University). It’s a really difficult process, and one that often takes unexpected turns, but once you find whatever group institutions you end up working with things get a lot easier. Figure out how the institutions around you work, and use your writing to sell your ideas.
If you really want to be a professional writer, look into technical writing. You can make a ridiculous amount of money.
Bradley Gardner is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, and a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department of State. The opinions expressed are his own, and not necessarily those of the U.S. Government.
The post Meet an Alum – Bradley Gardner (MA ’06) first appeared on afterMAPH.]]>
AlumniU offers a variety of ways to learn online. Quarterly classes give you several weeks to explore a topic or text with UChicago faculty and fellow alumni. Ongoing programs, such as book clubs and career discussions, recur throughout the year and provide shorter, more focused learning opportunities.
Keri Asma ‘13 will be running a weekly reading group to discuss key texts in queer science fiction, including works by Samuel Delaney, Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler and more. The reading group begins on October 3rd. To participate, log in to alumniu.uchicago.edu now to access readings and join the conversation.
Additionally, deputy director Hilary Strang will begin a weekly lecture series on “Connecting the Curious: Love, Belonging, and Other Surprising Concerns of Science Fiction.” Join in, beginning November 29th, to discuss the history and implications of science fiction.
If you have questions, please feel free to contact Keri Asma at kerith@uchicago.edu
The post AlumniU first appeared on afterMAPH.]]>My internship with Illinois Humanities, working particularly with The Odyssey Project, took place over ten weeks during the summer. I worked out of the Illinois Humanities office in the Loop, where they gave me the flexibility to set my own hours. The Odyssey Project runs during the school year, providing free Humanities education to low-income adults, and much of the work needing to be done was in preparation for September. I worked exclusively with the director of the program, helping where needed to design and proofread ads, compile lists of organizations to help us with outreach, and return phone calls to prospective students. This year, for the first time, the number of applicants greatly exceeded the number of seats available for the course, which gave me an opportunity to weigh in during the admissions process.
Many of the students who graduate from The Odyssey Project continue to stay involved through an alumni advisory board, and through summer workshops taught on a volunteer basis. The largest part of my internship consisted of designing a syllabus and teaching one of these workshop one evening each week. During my interview, I let my supervisor know I would be interested in teaching on Poetry, and I ended up developing a five-week course on the history of the sonnet in English. This was my first experience as the main facilitator in a classroom, and the students made it a rewarding one. They remained excited and engaged throughout the course, and contributed a genuine interest in learning the material. Every now and again, my supervisor asked how things were going, and we discussed the main successes and challenges of the course after the fact.
While I got to contribute many aspects work around the office, teaching the workshop was by far the most rewarding part of the internship. I would highly recommend this internship for anyone interested in getting some classroom experience, especially in adult education, and in a low-stress environment.
– Andrew Miller ’16
The post Odyssey Project Summer Internship first appeared on afterMAPH.]]>Mornings at the Gratz Center were lively, to say the least. The Gratz Center is the annex to Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church, right in the middle of Magnificent Mile. Surrounded by insurmountable amounts of pedestrian traffic, the Gratz Center provides a place of respite from the 90-degree weather. Even their WiFi password is free. During the summer, Gratz is home to many church-related projects: religious summer school, food programs for the homeless, and a small three-week workshop called Humanities Without Walls.
Humanities Without Walls (HWW) is an annual workshop intended to provide advanced PhD students with career tools and options outside of academia.The workshop is one of many programs Chicago Humanities Festival (CHF) runs outside of their regular programming.
At the core of the workshop is a meaningful anxiety. Thirty PhD students ponder whether or not they can succeed in the saturated academic job market. They wonder if perhaps they have made a mistake in pursuing a PhD, and they want to obtain valuable skills in order to transition into the world of business. The workshop assuages these fears by letting them know they already possess the skills necessary to make the transition, if they desire.
“I am so grateful,” said one student leaving her PhD program, “to be making this choice on my own terms, without bitterness, and with wonderful, supportive people in my corner.” But not all students leave their programs. In fact, most choose to finish their respective programs and obtain their degree. However, now that they have been exposed to different career paths, they do not feel tied to obtaining the elusive tenure-track position.
HWW took most of the time during my MAPH internship at Chicago Humanities Festival. By the time I began working for CHF, another fellow had dutifully planned most aspects of the workshop. I was charged with making sure everything was prepared—mostly food and coffee deliveries—for the workshop to run smoothly. During the three-week workshop, I handled all kinds of logistical issues, from transporting students using public transit to managing tech issues for presentations.
Though my time at CHF was brief, I dipped my hands into several projects and began to understand how a reputable nonprofit works. As I make my own transition to professional work in Daytona Beach, Florida, I intend to support organizations who support humanistic thought. As I’ve learned from MAPH and HWW: “Science can tell you how to clone a t-rex. Humanities can tell you why this might be a bad idea.
– Stefano Cagnato ’16
Contact Stefano or follow him on Twitter.
This summer I got to intern with Critical Inquiry, a peer-reviewed, critical theory-driven academic journal, published by the University of Chicago Press. I was most excited to experience publishing on the Journal side of the Press, having worked in Acquisitions in the Books department throughout the year. This internship has given me insight into the nitty-gritty, ins and outs of academic publishing, and has been an eye-opening experience into the day-to-day agenda for editors of the journal. The staff is small and intimate, composed of Jay and Hank primarily, with several graduate students to help manage editing the 8-10 article-range published in each issue. Both are delightful iconoclasts, eager to engage in stylistic debates over lunch, all-the-while dedicating themselves to producing the best journal possible.
My main responsibility was fact-checking the articles in order to ensure any quotations were cited correctly, and that the endnotes were in proper Chicago Manual Style. For those of us who have written papers, this process will sound familiar. Any future MAPHers about to experience the thesis-writing process, this task can more whimsically be described as a textual scavenger hunt- all you need is a sharp pair of eyes and a dedication to detail-oriented practices. I also got to help edit pages, which are articles that are soon-to-be-published. The content is produced by some of the finest minds in their respective academic fields, and it was thrilling to get a firsthand read of their material.
While MAPH instilled in me the thrill-seeking attitude needed to dig through online publications and scour the library stacks to find original texts to fact-check against, the CI internship was my first real experience working with CMOS (Chicago Manual of Style), as, coming from an English background, MLA was my go-to citation choice. The CI summer internship gave me a comprehensive tour into the world of academic publishing, specifically publishing a journal, and it really sharpened my editing skills for the better! This internship is a great chance to learn more about publishing at one of the finest universities.
– Madeleine Michaelides ’16
The post Critical Inquiry Internship first appeared on afterMAPH.]]>Hello MAPHers! I’m Sarah, MAPH ’16, and this summer I worked in a MAPH sponsored archiving internship at the Newberry Library.
For those of you who don’t know, the Newberry is a highly respected private research library north of the Loop. It’s non-circulating, so you can’t take any materials out with you, but if you have a driver’s license, a respect for books, and you want to learn, you can study just about any material in their collections that you’d like. The Newberry is a hub for genealogists and Midwestern studies, and its primary focus is in the humanities. It holds the Pullman records, big dance collections, and other fun things like the first Best Screenplay Oscar and Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Federalist Papers.
[the Oscar and the Federalist papers]
I’ve been interning as an archives assistant in modern manuscripts, so I’m back in the stacks every day. My floor’s stacks smell spectacular because many of the volumes are leather-bound. My focus has been on a more recent collection: I’m helping process the MoMing Dance Collective’s papers.
MoMing was a dance collective and studio active in Chicago from 1974-1990. They were extremely avant-garde, focusing primarily on postmodern dance, performance art, and believe it or not, clowning.
[mystic clown letterhead, clowning at Wrigley Stadium in 1977]
I like working in the archives because I never know what I’m going to run into on any given day. I have worked with tickets, financial records, performance files, press kits, photos and slides of performances (including the aforementioned clowns), and videos of classes and performances. Archiving takes a lot of patience, especially when you’re trying to reorder files in chronological order and you can’t find any dates, or when you know you’ve seen a performer in a photo before but can’t seem to find the related files. I’ve been sold on the job, though — I’m considering going back to school to get an MLIS degree so that I can do it full time.
If you’re interested in the Newberry, or in the MoMing Collection, come check us out! The Newberry is free and open to the public, and there will be a presentation on MoMing and the other dance files processed recently at a colloquium at the Newberry at 4 PM on August 31. Hope to see you there.
From the American Academy in Rome:
The post Danielle Simon, MAPH ’11, Wins Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize first appeared on afterMAPH.]]>Rome Prize winners are selected annually through a national competition process by independent juries of distinguished scholars and artists in one of the 11 disciplines supported by the Academy, including: Literature, Music Composition, Visual Arts, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Design, and Historic Preservation and Conservation, as well as Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Early Modern, and Modern Italian Studies. Nationwide, almost 900 applications were received from 46 states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico.
Founded in 1894, the American Academy in Rome is the oldest American overseas center for independent study and advanced research in the arts and humanities. It is the only privately funded not-for-profit institution among the national academies. In addition to the Rome Prize and Italian Fellowships, the Academy invites a select group of Residents, Affiliated Fellows, and Visiting Artists and Scholars to work together within this exceptional community in Rome.
To learn more about the American Academy in Rome, please visit: www.aarome.org.
Rachel Kamins (MAPH’15) was awarded the Torch Fellowship last summer and agreed to write a blogpost for us about her experience working with Universidad Popular.
~Your Mentors
One of my goals going into MAPH, after having been in a career for a few years already, was to use the program to help me shift to a different line of work. I had been editing academic manuscripts for scholars and publishers. I wanted to move into a position where I could edit a bigger variety of work, where I could be involved in projects that called more on my own creativity and interests, and where I could feel like my work was making a positive impact on a broader piece of the world. I figured that working for a nonprofit would help me tick those boxes, especially at a small organization where I could more easily play a range of roles and take on various responsibilities
One of my particular interests was working with learners of English as a second language. A lot of my editing clients have been nonnative speakers, and I focused on ESL acquisition via studying linguistics in MAPH in order to better understand these learners’ experiences and challenges. I saw the Torch Fellowship as a great opportunity to put all these pieces together by working on writing and editing projects at a nonprofit that serves ESL learners.
I Googled ESL nonprofits in Chicago, reached out to a few of them, had informational interviews at a couple, and ended up being very excited to work with Universidad Popular. Headquartered in the Little Village neighborhood on the west side, UP is one of the organizations helping the large community of immigrants to Chicago from Central and South America feel at home in their new country, through social services, cultural events, and community centers. I was bowled over by the immediately obvious warmth, friendliness, energy, and courage of the staff and volunteers at UP as well as of their participants.
UP’s mission is not just to serve but to empower community members to help themselves and each other, and the good faith and ceaseless effort that all parties put into this mission is inspiring. In another unexpected tie-in to my MAPH year, UP serves this mission by pursuing participatory learning, a method I had learned about in the Teaching in the Community College course.
Through meetings and emails with staff members at UP I designed an internship that centered around a project to gather, analyze, and report qualitative data on the outcomes of UP’s adult English literacy program; I also signed on to conduct writing workshops for the staff (largely nonnative speakers of English themselves), and to help out with any writing and editing projects that came up during the summer. I brought this proposal to the MAPH staff and they liked it—in particular, I think, the way that it connected to my previous work, my studies in MAPH, and my future career plans all at once.
Working at UP would have been worth it for the food alone—participants often brought in homemade tamales, enchiladas, chilaquiles, and more, and when I couldn’t scrounge food in the office I could walk out into the eaters’ paradise that is Little Village. Most mind-blowing was the Fería del Mole, the homemade mole cookoff that takes place at UP every fall. But I also did work! The qualitative data project gave me many opportunities to learn from the staff about how their English literacy programs are funded, what outcomes the funders care about, why participants sign up for them, what the important outcomes are for them, and how these different interests are managed and integrated.
In developing new measures for the program I focused on how to highlight UP’s mission of empowerment—how to illustrate that when participants take an English class there, they are learning not just vocabulary and grammar but how to be in control of their lives and improve their community in this English-majority city. This involved exercising the writing and research skills and the knowledge of second-language acquisition that I had already as well as gaining a deeper understanding of the participatory learning method, the history of the community, and current political and economic issues. Through the other aspects of the internship I also had opportunities to do some editing, curriculum design and teaching, social media work, grant research and writing, event management, and other activities useful for building my resume in nonprofit communications.
After the internship officially ended, I was welcomed by the UP staff to continue volunteering while I applied for full-time jobs. (They were especially open to volunteers at this point on account of the defunding of many of their programs by Governor Rauner’s budget cuts and the continuing, devastating state budget impasse.) I helped some more with grant writing and data analysis and reporting, and I also got to take on the role of facilitating discussion groups with participants in the English literacy program. After a few months, I found a job in communications at another nonprofit in Chicago—the Higher Learning Commission, located in the Loop—no doubt thanks to the experience, exposure, and connections I gained at UP. In a just world, one where the state of Illinois provided adequate funding to the social service agencies that keep its communities and large chunks of its workforce afloat, I would love to be working at UP still.
Especially in light of the current need for volunteers, I encourage any MAPHers with a car or a Ventra card to visit UP’s locations in Little Village and Chicago Lawn (which is nearly due west from campus) and learn how engaging with this organization and these communities can add to the quality of your life and your studies, not to mention your current city of residence. To make an even broader appeal, any MAPHer with career interests that don’t quite fit the other internship offerings and/or aspirations of getting paid to do mission-driven work should absolutely apply for the Torch Fellowship. Nonprofit organizations with tight budgets will be delighted to see you coming with your skills and your own funding, and you will leave—or with luck, stay—with a wealth of new knowledge and friends.
The post My MAPH Internship Experience – Torch Fellowship with Universidad Popular, by Rachel Kamins first appeared on afterMAPH.]]>Ikumi Crocoll
I had been looking forward to the summer internships since I started MAPH. There are, of course, many amazing organizations to work with, but, as someone with a previous library degree, I had my eye on the Newberry Library from the start. My summer experience there did not disappoint and was fulfilling in unexpected ways.
I worked specifically with the archives at the Newberry. While I had done some prior coursework and volunteering in archives, I did not have a great deal of processing experience (basically, arranging and describing papers and records in an archival setting), something pretty important if one wants to become an archivist (while I am still exploring career options, this is one of them). Most of my work at the Newberry revolved around processing two Midwestern collections: the William Edward Parsons Papers and the Elbert Ozial Taylor Papers.
Parsons was a Chicago architect, who specialized in city planning. He worked on plans for cities from Detroit to Manila. You might also recognize his work in Grant Park’s Buckingham Fountain. Elbert Ozial Taylor, on the other hand, was a minister who became a national temperance lecturer. He was also a graduate of the University of Chicago. Unfortunately, most of the materials do not deal with the sins of alcohol, but they do give a sense of how Taylor thought through his sermons and perhaps a key to his philosophical and spiritual origins prior to his prohibitionist calling. Working with these collections gave me historical insight into figures, time periods, areas, and vocations of which I had little knowledge, especially revealing some facets of the Midwest in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Deciding how to organize items (knowing that there is not just one way!) proved challenging, and the entire process of getting a collection ready for public consumption often took a long time. However, I felt excited and proud to see the final products of my efforts: the papers neatly organized and labeled and a finding aid available online so that people could start requesting the documents immediately.
One of the aspects I appreciated the most about this internship – in addition to the experience of working at such a prestigious library, of course – was the amazing people with whom I had the opportunity to work. Right from the interview, I knew that the staff were warm, funny, friendly people. They helped me in terms of my daily tasks and by giving me career advice. Furthermore, they have allowed me to stay on as a volunteer since the summer ended and have continued to be incredibly supportive of my endeavors to get a job in libraries/archives. I also had the privilege of working with one other MAPH person and a few other grad students, a lovely group of people with whom I could discuss work or enjoy gelato. These are people I still consider friends.
Naturally, there are many perks to working at a great library like the Newberry, and I would feel strange not at least mentioning some of those that one might expect. Toward the end of the summer, we (the archives interns) were taken to the vault to see (and touch!) some of the rarest and most valuable items that the Newberry owns. Highlights included an Oscar (I did get a picture holding it), a signed Chopin piece, a Thomas Jefferson letter, and a Shakespeare first folio. There were also various sessions designed just for interns on getting to know the Newberry’s resources, as well as weekly colloquia that we were encourage to attend, during which various scholars and librarians would present some aspect of research based on the resources they had found at the Newberry. Basically, we had the opportunity to see how incredible the Newberry is for humanities work.
As I mentioned before, not all was fun and games; processing, in particular, could take a great deal of work and patience. Sometimes you had to label and stamp hundreds of folders; sometimes you had to sort through many, many photographs without really knowing the subjects. The list of time-consuming tasks could continue on and on. Yet this was also an internship that exposed me to the Newberry’s approach to archival processing (both similar and not entirely the same to what I had experienced elsewhere), interesting historical documents, thought-provoking research, wonderful people, and, of course, a stand-out humanities library. I am exceedingly grateful for this. And yes, still hopeful that this work will somehow help me find a job.
The post My MAPH Internship Experience — Newberry Library, by Ikumi Crocoll first appeared on afterMAPH.]]>Frank Guam just reviewed Michael’s work for n+1 magazine, which you can check out here: https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/book-review/ride-the-lightening/ The review provides insight into both Michael’s journey to where he is now as a poet as well as his poetry itself.
Congrats on your successes, Michael, and keep up the good work!
The post Michael Robbins’ Poetry Reviewed in n+1 first appeared on afterMAPH.]]>