Close to year twenty

I arrived in Fall '99, which makes this my nineteenth year here, I do believe. (Or twentieth, depending on how you look at it. If I get an invitation to the annual twenty-year landmark dinner, we'll know which one the college thinks it is.) Instead of being one of the youngsters, I'm now one of the senior faculty, which feels rather alarming; my youthful starry-eyed visions (well, the stars were always rather blurred) have given way to the realities of everyday life, like assessment and periodic program review. (Guess what we're doing this year?) In any event, after nearly two decades of telling students that they must read The Pilgrim's Progress, probably to no avail, I decided to put the proverbial money where the proverbial mouth is and teach a course on TPP and some responses thereto--Bronte, Dickens, Hawthorne, Alcott, DuBois, Plaatje, and Vonnegut. (There will be some additional reading options for the papers, some of which I may swap in if I teach the course again.) Meanwhile, I went through my British Literature II syllabus and...shortened it. We've now had several years to acclimatize to fifty-minute classroom sessions, as opposed to one hour, and it's taken me this long to resign myself to the fact that losing those ten minutes really does affect what you can do in the space of one meeting.

I've probably done my fill of conferences for this year, as while I'm not so overcommitted to writing projects as I was in '16-'17, I still have enough deadlines that I don't think I can fit in yet another paper. It doesn't help that the new tax code has made the prospect of spending another $1K or more out of pocket on conference travel somewhat, shall we say, unappealing, given that we can no longer write off unreimbursed business expenses. (I do think that there will have to be a reckoning somewhere about what the changed fiscal realities mean for expectations about conference participation, especially for graduate students, adjuncts, and junior faculty. Perhaps this will help stimulate a turn to virtual conferencing or other alternatives?)

Meanwhile, yet another installment of what a full professor at a regional comprehensive does with her semester:

Teaching:

Two courses, Rewriting the Pilgrim's Progress and British Literature II. I have a course release for administrative work (see below). TPP is a new prep. Right now, my Brit Lit II is overloaded, so it currently has 46 students; the other course is much smaller, but will probably get some more students next week during final registration.

Service:

I'm now officially Associate Chair. In the Fall, this means helping to coordinate PPR, along with the more usual duties (being in charge of undergraduate registration, assisting transfer students, wrangling faculty for events, and helping the chair with whatever the chair needs to be helped with).
Curriculum Committee. The department has acquired two new major tracks (long story) and a new minor (for which I'm partly responsible), so there will be a fair amount of work involved in getting them off the ground.
Professional service-wise, I have an article to referee.

Research:

I'm finishing the first "r" in an r-and-r that I got over the summer; this has to be done within the next couple of weeks. I'm mostly finished with it, but the article is in the "let me cut out all this material/wait, now I need to put in this other material/arrrgh, now it's too long" phase.
I'm writing a short article about Mrs. Humphry Ward's Eleanor, which is due at the end of October.
Another short article for a Cambridge Companion, this time on early 19th-c. religious fiction. This is due at the end of the school year.
Two book reviews.
A book proposal, of which more anon if it's successful. (It's not Book 3 1/2, which is, yes, still ongoing--the r-and-r above is part of it.) Most likely to be finished towards the end of this semester.