Professor of Sherlockology and Advanced Snape Studies

The story about God sending two boats and a helicopter to save a man during a flood is one I one I heard a lot growing up is on my mind today. 

A friend from Dublin reached out with information from his uni called the Global Talent Program designed to target the recruitment of outstanding international researchers in areas including digital technologies and AI (which is a possible fit for my research). He asked if my husband and I had ever considered moving to Ireland...

I shared that I had thought about moving back to Sweden but I know that will be a struggle and perhaps there are no jobs for me and my husband. And also that I don't think my husband would flourish outside the US. He is happy here - despite the growing authoritarianism. He hasn't given up on the US and wants to stay and fight and support the systems that are here. I told my friend that if I were a younger scholar in an earlier stage of my career and if I had children, I might feel different. Right now I feel that there is not enough life left ahead of me to make this move worthwhile (in many parts of Europe I would only be able to work a maximum of 12-14 more years before mandatory retirement) and I don't know if I feel right taking an job away from a younger or more local person who has not had the opportunities in life that I have already had. 

He understood and told me to let him know if I knew of any colleagues where making a move would make sense. If that includes any of you, let me know (this is Trinity College, btw). 





Anyway, I'm not sure if this is one of the boats or helicopters that I am going to regret not taking or if I am just wallowing in doomerism.

This weekend I will be presenting at the national conference of the American Association of Teachers of Korean (AATK). I, of course, am not a Korean teacher so you may be wondering what the hell I am doing there. It turns out the conference organizer is a faculty member at my uni and saw a talk I gave about fan practices and language learning over a year ago in which there were some interesting developments coming out of Korean fans and their language learning. 

A mix of strange feelings today. 

I received a letter from the Provost supporting my promotion to full professor. The next and final step is a letter from the President. This is pro forma. Once it is done, I will become Full Professor as of July 1, 2024. This is a big deal and one can say I have been working toward this for 17 years, ever since I earned my PhD and took my first faculty position in 2007.

I am not as happy as I should be. I feel like I do not deserve it. I felt like I deserved tenure and really earned it both times I got it. But I don't feel that way about full professor. 

This feeling is compounded by a few things. The past few weeks, we have had faculty candidates come to campus for an assistant professor position. It was so exciting hearing their work and the new projects they are doing and their new knowledge and skills. It made me reflect on the quality of my own work and question whether I have anything relevant to say to this next generation of language teachers, researchers and students.

Today, I  finished writing my faculty annual report and one page application for merit pay. And updated my CV. This is due Friday and it's always a headache to do because you have to put everything into it, including every journal article you reviewed over the past year, every committee you served on. 

The merit pay request is optional and only pertains to work done in 2022, so I had to go back and revisit the kind of year I had in 2022. I did a lot of teaching that year. So much more than this year. Even my own research is down this year. I can attribute some of that to my health and to the extra service (like leading the job search which was like a part-time job and took some 10-15 hours per week in February and March). But that is also a part of getting older. I have to look after other people. it's my turn to keep the institution going. And ageing means dealing with more health issues than in my youth as things change and wear down over time.

I drafted my merit request and only indicated that I deserved the second highest level of merit pay for service and research and the highest for teaching. This might mean I don't get the maximum amount. But I don't think I deserve the maximum amount. I really question what I have contributed to this university and if I really deserve to be a professor here and to cost so much money. 

I am thankful that so many people have supported my promotion and I would like to be full of gratitude and joy when it happens.

I need to get to a therapist for many reasons, but one of the big ones has to do with the fact that I have developed a lot of coping strategies that stem from past trauma or my own innate low self-esteem that have become counter-productive. I am now at the stage of life and career where I can see this leading to a crisis or breakdown of major proportions and I need to get ahead of this before it happens. 

One of my big coping strategies is overfunctioning. I'm glad there is a word for it, but it is exactly what I was trained to do in my family. I was the oldest child and only girl and my father would explicitly tell me it was my responsibility to help mom, to look after her and to keep my three younger brothers in order. When my brothers would misbehave and fight and break things (as kids do, I suppose) and mom would begin yelling at them and before dad would come home and scream at us and threaten to put our heads through the wall (his favorite threat - but he never did anything physical to us), I would run around in a hurry putting things away, tidying the best I could so at least my mother had less mess to deal with.

Then after my father sexually molested me and told me not to tell mom because it would hurt her, I accepted this and swallowed my history in silence. I made the decision to not ever tell anyone ever because I knew the information would only hurt people. (I was 11). I knew/believed that because my mother was a stay at home mother, if anything happened to my dad, she could not support us and so four kids would probably be sent away to different places, probably to live with our different godparents. So to keep the family safe and together, I decided to be very good and not say anything.

This is something I still do, I realize. A lot of my motivation for taking on certain roles right now is to keep things safe and stable because people and institutions around me are falling apart (or at least this is my perception). But I don't think all of this is in my head.

In 2016, the US finally elected a president who facilitaed the overturning of laws and policies that respected human dignity and bodily autonomy and which I had come to accept as the norm. We did just endure a pandemic that shut down many things and led to many deaths and so much burnout and overwork. Since then, there have been two ongoing wars/violent conflicts that have inflamed attention among the young and the policy makers in the US and universities are now folding under congressional and wealthy donor pressure to retaliate in ways I don't comprehend. And there has been so much dysfunction in my own university, particularly at the department level that has overturned all stability.

My response is to step up to tidy up this mess even though it is not what I want to do, even though it means giving up (for years) things that give me joy, and my very real fear is that it means failing in the most spectacular way possible because I am not capable. For example, I may or may  not post about the ongoing struggle with Belgian tax-law that is consuming some of my time. But why should a US-based professor of applied linguistics need to know anything about Belgian tax law?

I see myself doing this in my marriage too and as a result of what I perceive to be my own husband's burnout and by the fact that we also work in the same department. When he cannot function either at home or at work, I step in.  I realize I have made several decisions that directly stem from trying to take the weight off my husband who I see as falling apart for his own reasons. I want him to get help, but I don't know how to make him see he needs help.

So because I cannot control or assist him or control other people around me or the institions around me, I turn to overfunctioning to quell my panic and to try to make things better. But it's getting dangerous.  And it is making it very hard for me to say no to things that are time-intensive, difficult and extremely stressful, so that I can do the things that I AM good at, enjoy doing, and will do well and effectively (like my research, teaching, running). 

I hate thinking about the future now because all I see is hard work and no joy left, at least not for a good decade. I am looking back on my 40s with such longing and nostalgia as the peak years of my career where even though I was massively overworked in Sweden, I got to do a lot of the things I loved. I feel like my time is over and the long slow winding down of my career and life is all that is ahead of me.

I had planned to submit an application to a leadership mentoring program that my university offers. It would entail shadowing and training - a lot of stuff I need. I think there is a huge leadership vacuum at my uni and I have started positioning myself to take on the task. The deadline for this mentoring program is today but it also requires a letter of support from my chair and it's just too much (I think) to ask for something like this at the last minute. 

I have struggled these past two weeks identifying a path forward. There is so much I need to do and also it is complicated by my marriage. My husband is burnt out and I really need to take over his leadership role, but I think that this training would skip me ahead to higher administrative work, which I am not sure I am ready to do. In other words, I felt conflicted about the obligations. Basically when you move into these leadership positions, you sacrifice your research. You take on the grunt work so that others can be free to research. I would also be sacrificing having a sabbatical. Technically, my husband and I will be elligible for sabbaticals at the same time but that would be really detrimental to the program. He is the one who probably needs it most because he is so burnt out and his burn out is affecting his ability to lead our program. 

But our department needs leadreship. And so does our uni. And to be honest, I need therapy to deal with my negative thinking that gets in the way of my ability to lead. And I am still president of this NGO for two more years. And I just got elected VP of Faculty Senate.

Anyway, all these problems run through my head when I sit down to write this application and I can't resolve them. And I have so many other tasks to do. Yes, I did see a movie last night instead of working on this application. I did draft things before the movie but I got stuck.

And now I have a bunch of other deadlines I have to see to. This is what is happening - I had so many other things come up (like prepping my classes, grading a backlog of papers, travel, jetlag, dealing with my breast health, handling the chaos of planning campus visits for the job search, online and in person meetings, etc.) I just kept putting this aside and ran out of time.

I feel stupid for this. It is probably a mistake but my thinking is blocked. But taking it off my plate also frees me up to finish planning my lessons and to maybe work on my book a little. 

My poor book!

I am officially on Spring Break and I am going to gloat and savor it. There's a lot of negativity around academia and more broadly life in the US, so I want to show appreciation for the good things. Because there are good things!

One really good thing is having an entire week off in the middle of the semester when things are starting to get warmer and nicer and you can use it to relax, catch up, spend more time outside, travel, take care of important appointments, clean all the things, or just veg out. I am going to do all of those things except travel because I travel so much normally. (I was in Spain in February, Canada a week ago, and I'll be in Sweden in April!)

I missed Spring Break when I lived in Sweden. There, you get a long Easter Weekend, but that just means a free Friday and Monday and because it's a holiday, stuff is closed. Like you have to go to the liquor store on Thursday because it will be closed Good Friday through Easter Monday. 

My Spring Break started Friday afternoon with a visit from drinkingcocoa who stayed overnight and let me play hostess (which makes me happy). We visited an art exhibit on Trans Joy by a friend of hers in Rockville, had a lovely Indian dinner, a nice lie-in on Saturday and then went to Baltimore for and art and craft exhibition at the Convention Center. The day was stunning and we were able to have lunch outside at a pub. It was soooo nice.

I did zero work for more than 24 hours. 

This year, my spring break also aligns with St. Patrick's Day (Today!) so I will be going to my little town bookstore to have a Guinness on the Patio to celebrate not being Irish.  I will do a little work today, but it's with less pressure. I can catch up and I will also be running and enjoying the spring warmth. 

I love Spring Break!

On Friday, I received an email from my department's tenure and promotion committee supporting my application for promotion to full professor. The letter of support was 22 pages long and included data collected from student members of the committee and quotes from the 7 external reviewers both from the US and outside the US (probably Europe) who wrote in support of my promotion. My chair, who also needs to write a separate letter, emailed me yesterday for a few points of clarification. This then goes to the Dean who needs to review everything and then write her decision letter by mid February. (This then gets reviewed by a university committee before being sent to the Provost and finally the President so the the final decision is expected in May/June). 

Anyway, this first step is important because my department is embroiled in a major power struggle (mainly between the former chair and current chair who are both full professors and on the promotion committee) and I have been doing everything possible to stay out of things. This has paid off. 

In other news, I am the president of an organization for Virtual Exchange that is based in Brussels. We have decided to give our first award for service to the field this fall. The board voted unanimously to award it to the founder of our graduate student SIG and co-organizer of our research series who happens to be a PhD student. She is impressive and we hoped that such an award may help her on her job search since she is in the final year of her studies. 

That being said, she is a Palestinian-Jordanian studying in Canada. She is understandably beside herself right now, and as president, I would normally be the one to notify her of this award. However, I can understand this may not be welcome news to receive from an American. 

If she accepts the award, we plan to announce it at a conference in February, which she won't be attending, so we need to find a different way for her to accept, probably through video. The conference organizers have been apprised of this and are considering what is best., There will be several Israeli colleagues in attendance and we are trying to anticipate how best to feature her acceptance speech (in which she may want  to speak from the heart about Gaza) without alienating other members of a small community we are trying to grow. 

I spent time thinking about how this award could be interpreted (as a bid in support of Palestine and against Israel) and this line of thinking frustrated me. I know people will think this. But it seems the wrong decision to avoid recognizing someone who has really gone above and beyond because her ethnicity makes it too political.

So I'm writing a book. I need to write more about that and not just my in law drama. In any case, a happy update!

I just received an email from the publisher I submitted my book proposal and two chapters to back in April (Routledge). The external reviewers were extremely favorable (and based on what they wrote - I think I know exactly who they are and I am grateful to them for their feedback). I can easily make the changes being suggested, most of which amounts to an additional chapter that breaks down things for teachers and the reordering of chapters to front load the theory before I get to the good stuff. 

The next step is to take the reviews and my acceptance of the feedback to the editorial board. If they are happy, then the next step is a book contract. I am keeping ALL MY FINGERS CROSSED. Will update when I hear more.

A little bit of a cheerful update to celebrate my move to Dreamwidth. My first review article on online fan practices and computer-assisted language learning was just published in the latest issue of the CALICO Journal. I had a lot of fun writing this article even though the deadline I was given for it meant I was writing it during my Christmas holiday (in Gran Canaria).

If you're desperately curious and want to read it but don't have a subscription, send me a message and I'll get you the PDF.

Back in January, I was invited to give a talk for the local Creative Mornings branch here in Malmö on the theme of language. Since I've been doing work on fandom and fanfiction, I decided to talk on the transformative world of fandom and fanfiction and the many different kinds of learning (language and otherwise) I've seen in it.