Idler in the Garden of Knowledge

PP. 22. University of Chicago, 2016. Aspiring historian. Pretend Parisienne. 

[universal-invariants]

[capacity]

This is the most legendary tweet I’ve ever read to this day

[amormundi]

can u believe i got into not one but THREE PhD programs (so far)?! 

tbh i actually can’t. and i got into my ~dream~ program i have literally been smiling like an idiot for the last 48 hours nbd

[amormundi]

Okay so we have (in no particular order):

a) the history of memory in 19th/20th century France (i.e. psychological, biological, philosophical, etc. theories of memory)

b) the history of the human sciences (mainly psychiatry, but anthro/sociology too) in 19th/early 20th century France

c) the problem/puzzle of the reception of Freudian psychoanalysis in early 20th century France

d) the history of history in 19th/20th century France (i.e. how do we get from Romanticism to the positivist école méthodique/institutionalized professional history/to the Annales school), but in a way that moves beyond just a disciplinary history to the more practical, big-picture implications of this shifting relationship to the past.

e) The development/refashioning of French republicanism post-1848, during the Second Empire, and its subsequent, fin-de-siècle institutionalization (i.e. the Third Republic). In particular, questions of republican identity/notions of a republican self and/or sensibility (perhaps we could even talk about this as a perceptual regime?)

f) French anarchism–particularly in terms of cultural politics/as something trendy and/or fashionable to the intellectual/artistic elite. More broadly, how trendy/fashionable was radicalism as a cultural phenomenon throughout the 19th century, and how did that change?

g) Intertwining rhetorics of science and law//the influence of science on late 19th/early 20th century French law (and vice versa?)

The challenge: put them all together in a coherent way, get into grad school, become badass lady historian. SOS.

[amormundi]

8 months later & my brilliant solution is to try to write about the history of conceptualizations of time in modern France LOL

[amormundi]

yoooooo what’s up with a department requesting an interview barely more than 24 hours in advance??

What do I do?? How do history PhD program interviews work?? What does this mean?? Literally have been so busy/preoccupied with my country going to hell in a goddamn hand basket that I haven’t thought about my 20th century French dudes in ages. 

SOS. 

[anaesthesia4aesthetes]

[nemophilies-deactivated20190428]

Andrew Wyeth, Gone Ashore

[amormundi]

what i am supposed to use my historical knowledge for: analysis of historical events and the people and places involved in them, trying to understand why certain historical events happened the way they did, applying knowledge of the past to the present so as to create a better future

what i do use my historical knowledge for: flying into a Bitter Historian Rage whenever a tv show or movie is wildly historically inaccurate

[fxairy-blog]

[salmalmaghrabi-deactivated20180]

Jardin de majorelle, Marrakesh, Morocco

[cruciform-solidarity]

There is in Benjamin a persistent reference to himself as a monk; in practically every room in which he lived alone–his ‘cell,’ he liked to say–he hung pictures of saints.

Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life  (via days-of-reading)

[silenceformysoul]

Sir Francis Bernard Dicksee (1853-1928) - The confession

[christiesauctions]

[nevver]

Edvard Munch

[themountainlaurel-deactivated20]

Abbie Melle

[babesinarmor]

“Two Edwardian women fencing, 1908.”

[amormundi]

I want their pants tbh

[lanuitestpleinedepromesses]

[gnossienne]

[just-art5]

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, In the Salon of Rue des Moulins, 1894

[fawnvelveteen]

Françoise Hardy by Jean-Marie Périer, 1960s