Editor’s note: Hundreds of Ph.D.s (or soon-to-be Ph.D.s) flock to annual national conventions of academic associations where, if they’re lucky, they’ve been invited by participating universities to interview for coveted faculty positions. This is the diary of one candidate.

Shortly before I left Salt Lake City for the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Washington, D.C., I opened Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It begins with the invocation, “My soul would sing of metamorphoses,” and I thought then that it offered an apt motto for the way I’d been feeling
while I conducted my job search and continued to work on my dissertation [in English literature]. My search has yielded two interviews from the 33 applications I sent out: the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and Western Illinois University. I made a special effort to search for positions at Midwestern colleges and universities so that I might return to where I once belonged. But it all depends on what happens at the MLA.


At 5:56 p.m. I make my way to the Job Information Center at the Omni Shoreham to meet with Professors Marguerite Helmers and Jordan Landry from Wisconsin-Oshkosh. We discuss my dissertation project, which concerns William Wordsworth’s poetry and politics, and then consider contemporary trends in British Romantic literary criticism. As we talk, I can’t help but notice how engaged I am: as I listen, I’m simultaneously considering what information the questions might be
designed to elicit from me as well as an appropriate response; as I respond, I modulate my voice and monitor my physical gestures. This hyperconsciousness is, well, sublime, to use a Romantic
word, but also a bit crazy. As I describe the methodology behind my project, I notice a fellow sitting at another table, gazing at me intently. Is he “participating” in the interview as well? Did I say sublime? Maybe I meant paranoid....The Wisconsin profs then devote a considerable portion of the interview to a discussion of their literature and composition curriculum. Their presentation strikes me as odd, since I’ve visited their Web site and familiarized myself with it already, at their urging. Prof. Helmers starts describing a comp course that I know is introductory, but she speaks of it as if it is an intermediate one. I casually say something along the lines of, “Oh, I thought this was the introductory composition course...” and she catches herself. It’s then I start wondering whether this presentation is just designed to see if I’d studied their Web site. Why don’t they just ask what kind of teacher I am? I leave the interview thinking I did as well as I could, despite what I took be some disingenuous questions. As I ride the Metro back to Arlington, I replay the interview in my mind, so absorbed that I transfer over
to the wrong line.

As I step off the Metro near the Capitol Hilton, I check the time once again. It’s 3:15 p.m.; I’m due to meet Professors Syndy Conger and Terri Simmons from Western Illinois. I don’t know if it’s possible to be any more hyperconscious than I was during the previous interview, but it sure feels like it. They ask about my dissertation project initially, and I speak again about my interest in Wordsworth’s poetry and politics. Prof. Conger then mentions other important writers of the Romantic age, including novelists Jane Austen and Walter Scott. She’s probably curious about whether I can teach more than poetry, but I wish she would ask about the Age of Sensibility; she’s edited an anthology of the literature of Sensibility, and I’d like to emphasize our shared interests. Just as I think of a way to broach the subject, Prof. Simmons asks “what kind of teacher” I am. So much for Sensibility....I leave thinking I’ve done pretty well overall, even though I have no reason to believe one way or the other.


Western Illinois wrote me in mid-January to say that they enjoyed speaking with me at the MLA and that my application was still under active consideration. They wrote again in late February to say that they had offered the position to another candidate. Wisconsin, in turn, wrote in early March to say they had completed their search as well. As I awaited these results, I interviewed (via telephone) with Prof. Elizabeth Davidson and her colleagues from the University of South Carolina-Spartanburg. I was among their top five candidates, but I learned later, in early April, that all of their searches had been cancelled because of budget cuts and hiring freezes. It looks like I’ll be on the market for awhile. The chair of my committee has encouraged me to consider other alternatives besides teaching at the university level, including junior colleges, community colleges, prep schools, and high schools. I’m not excited about some of these alternatives, but who knows? As much as I would like to “gain a place that’s higher than the stars,” as Ovid writes in his epilogue, I can teach wherever, I think. “I shall have life” then.

—Jack Vespa will complete his doctorate in English literature in 2001. Continuum will post updates on his transition to faculty.