So, we're finally settled into our new home in South Carolina. The move went swimmingly and we had no snafus along the way. Kirsten and I ended up getting a place in Central, South Carolina, which is about two miles east of Clemson, back towards the Greenville direction. It's in fact no where near centrally located in the state and is called Central because it is exactly halfway between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. The town grew up here because it's right along the railroad line between the two cities. It is fairly small at only a few thousand people, and outside of the downtown area, it seems to be primarily a town for Clemson University upperclassmen and graduate students who commute to school. One other notable tidbit about Central: it's the hometown of Senator Lindsey Graham. So, yeah, there's that, too.
The first week of graduate school hasn't entailed a whole lot just yet. I currently feel like I'm living through the calm before the storm as I have my reading list (22 books long, plus 5 for my TA class, plus thesis research) and am theoretically supposed to start doing some preliminary research for my thesis this semester, which begins in earnest next January. So far, it's mostly been attending meetings and getting acquainted with the faculty, staff, and campus. I am taking three classes this semester, though in a sense one could argue that I'm taking as many as four or as few as two (ah, the grad school factual argumentativeness). I have Historiography, which is essentially a history of history, and this will explore historical methods, modes of historical inquiry, phases through which the idea of history has passed, and how past and present historians have regarded the craft, beginning with Herodotus and Thucydides and wending our way all the way to the 20th century. My "substantive" course is on witchcraft, and considering that I wrote my writing sample for the department, in part, on witchcraft, this felt like a natural choice. I have to admit I was a bit reticent about taking this course because it is taught by an American postmodernist historian of women and gender, and I am neither an American or postmodernist historian. However, after looking at the reading list, at least the first half of the course seems to focus on witchcraft's European origins and tracks its development from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe before it jumps the pond to America. This seems like it is, in a sense, going to be another historiography course, in that the methods and interpretations of witchcraft history will be studied even more than the content of the historical record, but for a topic with such scant historical evidence and even less historical consensus, I think this is a fair approach. The third "course" I have is thesis research, which is entirely independent research I'll do on my own about whatever topic I want my thesis to be on. Since I probably won't sit down with anyone to discuss this in any major way until January, this will be less like taking a class and more like gathering materials I may want to use down the road. Presumably, when I'm not reading and researching for my other two courses, I'll be scouring the library looking for resources for this future project. However, I have no idea yet what I want to write my thesis on (actually, I have several, but don't really know what I'll pick).
The final "course" is the course in which I'm a teaching assistant. It's a freshman level lecture called "The West and the World Part 1" and essentially it's Western Civ. meets world history from prehistory to about the late 17th century. So, this is exactly along my lines of interest, and since TA assignments tend to be random, I'm very lucky to have gotten it. The course looks like it will be, as its name implies, about integrating the traditional study of Western history within the global context and looking at its unfolding comparatively with much of the rest of the world. It's lecture-based (there are about 125 students) and the professor said that almost the entirety of the tests will be based around his notes. My role, along with the other TA, will be primarily supportive: attendance taking, paper and test grading, student advising, running review sessions, etc. So, I'll certainly treat it like a "real" class that I'm taking, in that I'll take notes and read all the books so as to better serve the students. Plus the reading list actually looks very interesting and includes brand new books on, among other things, the formation of the polis in ancient Greece, the most recent archaeological studies on the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the theological, philosophical, and political motivations behind the Gothic cathedral of Chartres.
Although I don't want this blog to turn into a "here's what I did today" type of blog, I think that I might be writing more of that in the coming months as the bulk of my time will be spent with my nose in a book and conducting research, for which this blog may serve as a "rough draft of thoughts" so to speak. Coming soon, I anticipate I'll write about the organization of my library, as it was an ordeal that was much more difficult than I thought it would be, and to bounce a few thesis topics around. And in the slightly more distant future, I will likely post some of my papers or versions/edits of them. So, if you don't like history, now would be the time to stop reading.
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