Rebecca Merkelbach
@beccamerkelbach.bsky.social
Doctor of trollology. Saga fangirl. Assistant Prof of Old Norse at Uni Tü. Lefty nerd💚 Powerlifting yoga teaching harpist. She/sie🏳️🌈 #SkandiRetten
This afternoon I'm doing an interview with the Saga Thing podcast about my new book, and my brain is currently empty. What did I write about? What are sagas?😵💫 I hope it'll all come back to me when I'm talking with the hosts.
This is exactly what I did with my first book. The first set of proofs hat over 800 comments and corrections from me because it was so badly done. The index is still unusable, sadly. Completely different story with book 2, or the edited volumes I've done with smaller publishers.
Like, "The copyeditor introduced a ton of new errors into the text, so this whole thing needs to be re-done; I don't care that it's in proofs."
And/or: "6 days is totally unreasonable as a timeline to do an index, when industry standard is 30 days. I'll have this back to you on [date]."
Today was a good day. I pretty much finished the draft of a handbook article, spent two hours campaigning with the Greens, received promising Saga Conference abstracts from both of my PhD candidates, and now I have a chill evening with my partner ahead of me. I wish there were more days like this.
Mal abgesehen davon, dass Vorgesetzte auch nicht hellsehen können. Eine Person kann ja durchaus "geeignet" für die Wissenschaft sein (was immer das bedeutet), aber Berufungskommissionen verfolgen im Zweifelsfall andere Interessen.
Highlight of the week: no meetings, no appointments, just me and the undead.
Check out the series website here: www.aup.nl/en/series/co...
Contemporary Studies on Premodern Scandinavia
This series seeks to bring together a complementary mix of traditional and more modern methodologies, combining established fields of study with innovative research on newer or more controversial topi...
www.aup.nlMassive news: there's a new series called Contemporary Studies on Premodern Scandinavia with AUP – and I'm heading the editorial board! Together with some amazing people, Shannon Cunningham and I will be looking for all your weird, new, and different takes on premodern Scandinavian Studies.
I've finally finished marking all of last semester's student assignments. Now I've only got some peer reviews to get through before I can maybe start spending some time on my own urgent and overdue stuff instead of only reading other people's work.
Dein Deutsch ist super! Und genauso geht es mir eben auch.
Pause fürs Hirn, gut für den Körper, perfekter Ausgleich. Und auf ausreichende Pausen versuche ich bei der Orga von Tagungen o.ä. immer zu achten. Vllt ist einem das als chronisch kranke Person aber auch bewusster?
Im 1. Semester meiner JunProf habe ich meinen Job über alles gestellt und viel vernachlässigt, inkl. mir selbst. Aber dann habe ich gemerkt, wie schlecht es mir geht, wenn ich nicht regelmäßige schwere Dinge hochhebe und wieder abstelle, und seitdem priorisiere ich das Training.
Wissenschaftler_innen bestehen nicht bloß aus Köpfen! An den Köpfen hängen auch noch Körper dran - und die brauchen Bewegungsfreiheit. Mein Plädoyer für weniger Sitzen, mehr Pausen & mehr Selbstbestimmung im wissenschaftlichen Arbeitsalltag: Heute in #ArbeitInDerWiss! Und ja, ums Laufen geht's auch.
I Like to Move It: Für mehr Bewegungsfreiheit in der Wissenschaft
Wissenschaftler_innen bestehen nicht bloß aus Köpfen! Sie haben auch Körper -- und die brauchen Bewegungsfreiheit. Ein Plädoyer für weniger Sitzen, mehr Pausen und mehr Selbstbestimmung im wissenschaf...
open.substack.comGenau, STVO abschaffen, Führerschein ist überflüssig, Anarchie (für Reiche)!
Die Frist für die Einreichung ist nächsten Mittwoch! Kommt mit uns zur ATdS und diskutiert über die Darstellung und Rezeption von Emotion in der altnordischen Literatur!
Ich möchte nochmal an unseren Arbeitskreis zu "Emotion in der altnordischen Literatur: Darstellung, Überlieferung, Rezeption" bei der diesjährigen ATdS in Bonn erinnern. Einreichungsschluss 1.5.!
www.iglk.uni-bonn.de/de/nachricht...
Instead we're basically trying to negotiate with a system that cannot be talked to, convinced, or impressed by people quibbling over the tiniest changes to emission limits (looking at you, German FDP). Blows my mind, but not in a good way.
Reading ecocritical work from the 90s, it's wild to realise that 30 years have passed without ANY real action on the one issue that threatens all life on earth.
... until you've lost all your passion and turned into an administrator
Academia is a great way of making a career out of something you're passionate about and shackling it to something that drains it of every last drop of joy
And I’d love to come on the podcast sometime😊 Let’s set something up!
My book has been spotted in the wild for the first time! How exciting!
Hot off the presses! Rebecca Merkelbach's latest book offers some much needed fresh readings of the so-called "post-classical" sagas. I plan to read this immediately.
If we're lucky, @beccamerkelbach.bsky.social might even pop up on a future episode of Saga Thing. 😉
#medieval #Vikings #oldnorse
OMG you have it already?!? I can’t believe it! Thanks for sharing!
Teaching the Introduction to Old Norse literature is like 1.5 hours of cruise-ship style animation, but with incredibly complex academic content, while half the people in the class room are falling asleep. Now I need a nap too!
Ich freue mich sehr, in zwei Wochen Reinhard Hennig für einen Gastvortrag in meinem Seminar zu Ecocriticism und altnordischer Literatur begrüßen zu dürfen!
No of course not! I'll have enough trouble marking the 200 worksheets my 20 students will produce this semester...
If you haven't pre-ordered your copy yet, you can still do so. Remember to make use of the discount code in the flyer!
boydellandbrewer.com/978184384666...
Story, World and Character in the Late Íslendingasögur - Boydell and Brewer
Argues for new models of reading the complexity and subversiveness of fourteen "post-classical" sagas.The late Sagas of Icelanders, thought to be written in ...
boydellandbrewer.comI've just been informed that my new book will be published a bit sooner than anticipated, and that it will be exhibited at Kalamazoo! If you're going, I'd love to hear if you've spotted it in the wild (please send pics)✨
Unusually many! In the past I've had 10–15 students. 20 is the absolute maximum I can cope with for this particular seminar. 36 is😱
Just taught the first session of my Introduction to Old Norse Literature with 20 (!!!) students. Wow! This will be an interesting semester.
Today is a good day: one of my student research assistants has won a scholarship for her master's in Iceland, and my Argentinian colleague, who will be visiting professor in my department this summer, has arrived and signed his contracts. Go Scandi Studies at Tübingen!
This will be a bilingual workshop so contributions in English are also welcome :)
Ich möchte nochmal an unseren Arbeitskreis zu "Emotion in der altnordischen Literatur: Darstellung, Überlieferung, Rezeption" bei der diesjährigen ATdS in Bonn erinnern. Einreichungsschluss 1.5.!
www.iglk.uni-bonn.de/de/nachricht...
My PhD students are on their way to a grad conference and sent me a selfie they took on the train🥰
Only 39 years and WW3 until Zefram Cochrane shoots the Vulcans😔
Back in the office after 10 glorious days of leave. I wish I could have taken even more time off, perhaps then I'd be excited to come back... Anyway, 20 students signed up for my introduction to Old Norse literature this summer, and 14 for a seminar on ecocriticism. This'll be interesting.
Aaand I’m crying within the first 10mins of Horizon: Forbidden West🙈
Leider ist das wohl insgesamt ein sehr seltenes Konzept – dringend ausbaufähig, wie ich finde!
Ich wünschte, es gäbe hier Apotheken, die den Homöopathie-Anthroposophie-Mist gar nicht erst verkaufen. Aber da bin ich in Tübingen definitiv falsch.
Lots of things happening today! Just had the first supervision meeting with my new PhD student, who will be working on kaleidoscopic narration in the fornaldarsögur as part of our CRC project. Very much looking forward to seeing her and her work grow and develop over the next couple of years.
Finally received the contract for the Storyworlds volume! It’s going to be a hefty tome at 380 pages, and I can’t wait to see it in print some time later this or early next year.
I've written 300 words for an overdue article and those are the first 300 new words I've written since I finished my book in September and it feels good to be getting back into it.
Fuck all of this. I booked an appointment with a careers advisor to evaluate my options outside of academia, because I'm done with this shit.
Leider im Ausland auch oft ungünstig. Deshalb ist das Motto für Geisteswissenschaften: "Ja dann mach halt was anderes".
Hard same.
Geschrieben aus der Pause zwischen Vortrag und Lehrprobe beim Vorsingen des Monats März.
Ich hab Urlaub. Eigentlich. Später halte ich 1 Online-Vortrag zu #IchBinHanna. Vormittag verbring ich mit Bewerbung, zu der mich W1 ohne TT zwingt. Mit 4+2 wär ich längst raus aus der dt. Wissenschaft, ich war 5 J. Postdoc. Wissenschaft als Beruf in D: Überlegt Euch das gut. #IchBinHanna #WissZeitVG