A Don’s Life

Mellon lectures and the Border Agency and HR

Thank you to all who wished me well, and thank you to all who came. The first lecture went fine I think. It was helped (audience, and other-wise) by a very nice article in the Washington Post. But perhaps this over-achieved, as there weren't in the end quite enough seats -- and I know some people had queued and were turned away. (I think that there will be a podcast in due course, and there is a video showing on Thursday lunchtime at the NGA for anyone in Washington.. but I am sorry for the frustration.)

I hope it doesn't put you off coming next time, when I am sure that the audience will have thinned. I shall be talking about the bottom line of Roman imperial representation and its discontents, but also about why the Renaissance and the early modern rich splattered their palazzi with emperors. Didn't they see that they were a load of ghastly autocrats, who came to sticky ends... ? I shall argue that they did..but . .

Anyway, this is all huge fun. But news from home is not good. Biggest on todays email agenda was the new ruling of the HR department (sorry "Division') about paying one-off lecturers, or external examiner.. or whatever.

Now apparently, before we can make any payment, we have to get a photo-copy of their passport, to show that they have permission to work here.

Powerpoint war....

I mean the war between me and the powerpoint. OK I know that I am lucky to live in the 21st century, and that only 15 years ago I would have had to order whatever slides I needed at least a week before my lectures (and if you only finish them 5 days in advance, that's a problem). 

But this new technological world means that I reckon that I have spent as much time making the damn powerpoint as I have spent writing the first lecture. Or at least it feels like it.

Why so long?

Lent?

I have been in the habit of giving up alcohol for Lent ... except when abroad (a territory which starts, on the Beard definition, after security at an airport). The trouble is that I am in Washington for the whole of Lent this year -- and my conscience (aka publisher) emailed me the other say to say that he didn't think that this long term transatlantic location let me off.

Well, I dont either. But it is quite difficult to give a series of lectures, with dinners and receptions, and to forswear the grape entirely (come to think of it, it is quite hard to write a series of lectures without the occasional snifter). So what is to be done?

I guess we are celebrating a reduced Lent.

Writing lectures

I am now in the middle of writing my first Mellon "emperors" lecture, for the National Gallery in Washington. I'm always surprised how little is written about the processes of writing. You read any number of autobiographies of academics, and they will almost never share the struggles of getting the words on the page and into the lecture hall. They just seem to have an idea and it pops into writing. Or on the other hand, they are blocked.. but they dont ever quite explain what the unblocking mechanism is.

I am now pretty clear about what I want to say in my first lecture. It will start from a curious story about a Roman imperial sarcophagus refused by President Andrew Jackson as a burial place, and will end up (by a logical path!) thinking about the ways, over the last 200 plus years, we have identified (ancient) portraits of Julius Caesar. My line here is that each generation finds a new image of Caesar for themselves... and new "real" images are identified, as each generation passes.

So far so good. But how do you go about putting this over to a mixed audience of 300+ (lets hope!) all of whom are smart, but some of whom are specialists, some not.

BA cabin crew: the militants in the skies?

As I am in the USA, and going to be crossing the Atlantic a couple of times in the next few weeks, I find I have become more interested in the BA cabin crew dispute, and whether their new strike ballot will lead to a walk-out that will affect me.

This is, I am afraid, the self-interested approach to industrial relations -- and it is rather shamingly like my intense interest in the possibility of a federal government shutdown in Washington DC (if it closes the National Gallery, then I wont be able to give my lectures, after all this work . . .). Yes, I know this approach is unworthy, when other people wont be getting their pay-checks and the their Social Security payments and I will be the least important casualty in the grand scheme of things, but it's also human.

But as I have said before, the whole BA dispute is a bit of a mystery to me. Frankly the cabin crew don't look like militants; in fact, they seem more like Daily Mail readers than Guardian. And if you had to offer a crude stereotype (to which I KNOW there are hundreds of exceptions, before you lash out at me)... it would be a combination of men in more or less stable gay relationships, and women who are, well, rather like Kate Middleton's mum.

So how do we explain their apparent intransigence?

The mystery of Caesar's ears

I have been back in Europe for a few days. The real reason was to go to the European Research Council in Brussels, where I am on a "Starting Grants" awarding panel... which gives large grants of more than a million euros, to young scholars in all research field (mine is 'The Study of the Past"). Interestingly the EU has not contracted these awards in the face of the recession, but expanded them, on the grounds that research is vital investment for the future.

Anyway after a bit of a rocky start 4 years ago (when the bureaucracy seemed to live up to all those Daily Mail style EU parodies.. but they still couldnt get the wi-fi to work),the whole process is now very smooth, thanks this year especially to our two EU administrators Volker and Frank (nice kids -- as they are bound to seem from my age -- who appear to speak most EU languages going).

It's a huge time commitment, but it has become one of my favourite jobs -- largely because of the chance to meet all the other people on the committee and work with them. Sure, I might have come across Carlo Ginzburg or Przemyslaw Urbańczyk at conferences... but you get to know then in a completely different way if you are working with them, and discussing the relative merits of research proposals.

Universities, despots and plagiarism

I have been in Washington DC, and have only seen the obvious bits of reportage about the resignation of Howard Davies, after the Gaddafi funding row.

I have to say that, nasty as Gaddafi is now proving himself (again?) to be, I feel rather sorry for Davies. Every government, for the last thirty years at least, has urged universities to chase outside funding; the chances were always going to be that some of it would come from dubious (or worse) sources.

For the fact is that people who make a very very great deal of money (the kind of money that would significantly fund a university) are often not particularly nice. I know there are exceptions, but you know what I mean.

Latin -- in Jamie's Dream School and elsewhere

I don't know how many of you watched the Jamie Oliver's Dream School, episode one. As I have been i Washington working on my emperor lectures, I havent seen it. I believe that there was about 5 seconds of me, before the whole thing moved into the Starkey strop.

It's funny that the programme is billed as if it were the kids who are the reality tv characters here. But actually the spotlight is on the teachers -- with Starkey playing the Jade Goody part (lippy and off message, but brilliantly celeb status even if you end up hating him).To be fair, not everything he says is wrong (I could never quite understand why the head allowed the kids to take mobile phones into class.. or why they all came into my lesson with their shiny new laptops .. woudn't you have played with them? And he did say some nice things about me...and about why you might want to study history, and how you might want to understand the Middle Ages, etc)

I have to say, though, that in the "staff room" Starkey was the only one who didn't fess up to any nervousness or uncertainty about his ability to wow the kids -- unlike all the other celebs I met. So there is a certain satisfaction in seeing him in a bit of trouble.

Except that I think .. me next. It all depends how kind or cruel the editors of the days'worth of film have been.

Meanwhile, Latin hasn't had a bad press from all this. I wrote a piece for the Guardian about the whole Dream School idea, and a load of the comments came out very much on side.

And there are other great initiatives afoot to get Latin into schools at all levels. One is a new clasical magazine, Iota, for younger kids, published by the excellent Iris project. This mgazine needs funds to keep going, so if anyone has a quid or two to spare, you could always send it to Iris.