Jarrod Hayes (Romance Languages)

I guess even though this panel is focused on the job talk, I think I’d like to begin by situating the job talk in the overall interviewing process. Since it hasn’t been that long since I gave my job talk here at Michigan, it’s interesting now – also after having sat on a couple of hiring committees – to compare what I was thinking, feeling, going through when I was on the market to the different ways I look at it now. When I think back, I imagine myself always at every step in this fierce competition with people who were just absolutely brilliant, and wondering what they were going to see in me. From the other side of the interviewing table, I’ve been surprised at how often you do a first round of interviews and you’re actually very disappointed in a large number of the candidates. So, it’s been interesting for me to think about it in a different way – not as this kind of race, but when you arrive at one stage of the interviewing process, you’ve already managed to impress a committee enough for them to want to see more. What you need to think about doing is keeping up that momentum and not disappointing the people. I think it’s not necessarily an easier task but it’s a different way of thinking about it. 

In my field – I’m not that knowledgeable about other fields – but we have a first round of interviews at this huge convention, the Modern Language Association, which we refer to affectionately as “the meat market.” So, it’s fairly uniform across the various humanities – at least literature, modern literature – departments. And then we may – in our department – interview 8 people, and it’s not usually difficult to decide the 2 or 3 that we’re going to invite to campus. This is particularly at the assistant professor level; it’s slightly different in senior hires. So, when I think of it that way, the same way of thinking about the job talk I think also applies. One of the major tasks is not to let down, first of all, the hiring committee but also the whole department, because a larger number of people are going to be looking at you as a candidate at this stage. 

Another thing which I think is really crucial advice: you’ve done all this hard work, you’ve made it so far, I think you should relax and enjoy it. You’re going to be wined and dined; you’re going to meet really interesting people. So if you think about sort of enjoying the process and I certainly enjoyed most of my experiences, not all of them, it will help you relax, I think. You’ll be less nervous when you’re giving the job talk and you’ll make an even better impression. My advisor – to add to what someone said about looking for a colleague – my advisor put it this way, she said, “They’re wanting somebody new to play with.” And so you want to show them that you’re going to make a good playmate. 

One of the things were were particularly asked to speak about was how to balance what may seem to be contradictory demands: sophistication, accessibility, esoterica, generality, depth, breadth, on the one hand detailed methodology and data and on the other larger issues and implications. It seems sort of like an impossible task. Particularly in a research institution, you’re being asked to show off your brilliance. Yet on the other hand, you have to show – as the other panelists have mentioned – you have to show that you can present your ideas to a wide audience. When you think about it the reason – particularly in departments that tend to be smaller, such as mine – the reason there’s a job search in my field – say, francophone literature – is because you’re going to be the person, hopefully, to fill that position. So your perfect audience, in terms of a scholarly community, is not going to be in the room. That’s why there looking for you or someone like you. So, never is the case that you will be speaking – or rare is the case that you will be speaking to fellow scholars in your field. In my department, for example, we have French, Spanish, and Italian. So you’re speaking to people in slightly different disciplines, and those people have an equal voice in terms of who is going to get hired, so that is one thing you should keep in mind. 

In terms of balancing between impressing your audience as a scholar and impressing your audience as a teacher, I think those seem to be kind of contradictory demands but one thing I noticed as I was preparing the job talk that I would eventually give here. I started to think about my teacher version. I’d worked on it and I’d made it clear, and then I sat down and I said, you know there’s no reason why I can’t say the same things at a research institution. I hadn’t sacrificed any of my ideas, I had only made them clear. So the only difference between my teacher version and my research institution version was actually that one was longer and one was shorter, because often the length corresponds. The smaller institution tended to want a 20-25 minute talk and the research institution tended to want more like 45 minutes. So, I actually had the same talk which I used 4-5 times with orange brackets around what not to say when I had to give a shorter talk, so I think the sophistication/accessibility dichotomy is a false one if you’re in a really good job talk. 

In my field – and I really always hated doing this, and I don’t know how many disciplines have this – for smaller institutions, I was asked to give a sample class. This is a very difficult thing to do. I was given a number of offers at institutions that required it, so I must not have been that bad at it, but this is also a kind of tricky thing. It’s like the question and answer session but for a whole hour. So, one way of preparing for that is to think about all of the things you’ve learned in your teaching methodology courses and how you are going to fit all of those things into a single class. That’s a very difficult task, I think, and I’m not sure that I have many easy answers. One reason I’m glad that we don’t do that here in my department at Michigan is it seems – at least for professorial searches – there seems to be a bit of hypocrisy involved. The hiring department expects the candidates to be fabulous teachers, often better than they themselves are. There’s a set of unrealistic expectations and you have to figure out how to meet those. 

I won’t add anything else to what my colleagues have said about writing the job talk, about presentation. I think they both made very important points that you will need to keep in mind. I will relate one anecdote, a sort of confession or a mistake I made in a job talk I gave on my first year on the market. It was a sort of difficult situation. Actually, before I describe that anecdote, I’ll mention as you go on the market – in my field at least – you’re asked to provide a writing sample. You might think about why you’re choosing your writing sample. You don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket. So if you give away all the goodies at the very beginning at the job process, you won’t have anything left to impress the department with when it comes to giving the job talk. So that’s something you might keep in mind. 

In the particular case of the institution where I gave the bad job talk, I had given a writing sample – I wasn’t quite finished with my dissertation yet. I had given another chapter that was perhaps a stronger one at the MLA so I couldn’t use that. I think it’s sort of bad to use a talk for a job talk that already appears somewhere else on your CV. So the same job talk in a single year before you update your CV or before other people have heard about it, that’s fine. But once you have given a talk at the MLA and it appears on your CV, I think it’s – at least in my discipline – it’s sort of bad form to recycle. It says to your audience, “Well, we’re not good enough to get something new.” So, I’m not totally in disagreement with the statement about doing something that’s polished already, but in some disciplines at least, there can be a contradictory demand being placed on the job talk. 

So, again back to my anecdote. At this particular institution, I had given a good part – what I thought was a strong part of my dissertation – in another form. The committee wanted an extra chapter of my dissertation, so I was sort of running out of things to use for the job talk. It was a very prestigious public institution – which I won’t name – also known for being quite liberal so I thought what I will do is something that will distinguish me from the other candidates. It’s a job on post-colonial studies, francophone studies. It was split between Comp Lit and French. So, they don’t need to see how I’m like every other postcolonial scholar. What I need to show them is what I’m really good at. My work has been at the intersection, so to speak, of queer theory and postcolonial theory, so two contested fields already, but I started to realize in the market that once you put two contested fields together you sort of get double jeopardy, a double whammy. People who might not be uncomfortable with one or the other get very uncomfortable when they start to see things put together in that way. So the talk I decided to give was entitled, “The Joy of Castration: Maghrebian childhood narratives and the demise of masculinity.” So I thought to sort of set the tone, I would begin with a clip from a Tunisian film that shows a circumcision. The talk was about circumcision and childhood narratives. I think this was sort of a mistake – probably a big mistake – because I made my audience quite uncomfortable and I ended up not getting that job. But on the other hand, I used that same text as a writing sample the next year and it worked very well. So, that’s another thing, in writing without the visual, it was less threatening but also effective. So those are little things you have to think about and my one piece of personal experience that I hope will be useful in some way. Anyway, I think I’ll end there and we can have questions. 
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