My Project is Awesome, Bitch.

This is what I told my friend to say to her committee.  Sort of.  She was really nervous about meeting her entire committee for the first time and of the possibility that they would shoot down everything, so I told her to say everything like she was going to say “bitch” right after it in her head.  It at least lightened the mood so that she wasn’t freaking out so much before meeting with them.

I’m not quite to the committee-assembling point yet, but I feel like I’ve made significant progress in the past semester.  Part of this was taking an amazing class in Victorian Lit with the senior Victorianist here, and part of it was the fact that all these thoughts that have been floating around in my head over the past year finally coalesced into awesomeness.

I met with her earlier this week to talk about the paper I wrote for her class and about the conference to which I’m going to submit an abstract.  She really liked the paper, and she said that I’m doing interesting things with Badiou and Levinas.  The paper was on a really obscure novel that has absolutely nothing published about it anywhere, and I’m really hoping to put a chapter about it into my dissertation, so we talked about what I would do and expand on if I wanted to do that.  (And who knows, maybe I could find an archive somewhere and make a research trip out of it.)  The best part about it was that she said that no one is doing this, which is basically like hitting the merit-based lottery that you have to work your ass off for.  I was really excited.  The conference I want to read this paper at is in November, so I’ll have the summer to work on improving the paper and lengthening it a bit.

At this point, I feel really confident about my long-term project and its prospects.  It took me some time a boat load of reading to get to this point, but I’m on my way.

In other news, I was accepted to a conference in Amsterdam.  The paperwork for funding is working its way through four different university apparatuses right now, but I’ll find out soon whether or not my department, my college, the graduate school, and the international studies program are going to pay collectively for it.  I can’t really go if they don’t, but there’s a good chance that most of it will get covered.  I’m going to cross my fingers, because I really want to go to Europe, bitch.