AMA Q&A

How do you figure out how to describe your interdisciplinary work? How can you structure your time after you’ve finished a thesis or other big project?

Welcome back to AMA Q&A, where subscribers can have their most pressing questions answered!

Before I get to the latest round of subscriber questions, two things:

First, I would like to say thank you so much for helping me reach a whole **700+ subscribers**!!! I love watching the PBP community grow, and am so grateful to you all for reading and supporting my work.

To celebrate this milestone, I’m offering 25% off paid annual subscriptions to PBP through 14 April! This is your chance to get access to every single PBP post, including sample application/proposal materials and everything in the archive, for only $45! Paid subscribers also get to join the weekly writing check-in chat every Monday, which helps us all keep our projects on track.

Second: I’m thinking of running a 4-week paid online course on the fundamentals of grant-writing (probably with one or two free ‘scholarship’ places available), and would like to get a sense of how many people might be interested.

Okay, let’s get to this week’s questions!

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I’m an academic who works at the intersection of a couple different fields, and I’m not sure how to describe what it is I do! How do you figure out how to describe your work if it’s really interdisciplinary?

(Anon.)

Well, hello there, fellow interdisciplinarian! You’ve come to the right place!

As someone whose academic work straddles such fields as literary criticism, medieval studies, gender studies, obscenity studies, reception studies, the history of emotion, and the history of the book, I know exactly how you feel.

And those are just the big-picture descriptors. If I’m being a bit more specific, I can also say that my work focuses on Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, fame, shame, disgust, and the taboo. ACK.

Figuring out how to describe one’s academic work succinctly is a skill, and like any other skill it takes a bit of practice. I remember being so jealous of a fellow PhD student who could simply say he was working on ‘fairies’ (he was) when I was wittering on about how I was ‘writing a thesis about the concept of fama in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes’, which felt much less punchy.