PhD Update

Since September 2013 I’ve been enrolled as a PhD candidate in the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Last year I moved to Poland to focus on my dissertation, among other things. Though I decided to pursue a PhD several years ago, I came to understand that it’s a massive undertaking that would be very difficult to balance with full-time work, not to mention a social life, so moving to Poland was the way to streamline my efforts. Thus far I’ve written close to 50 pages of my prospective 300-page dissertation on “Herbert Hoover and the American Relief Administration in Poland, 1919-1922“. The first steps are always the most challenging, and though I would have preferred to have written more by now, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made and the thousands of pages of documentation and sources I’ve reviewed and digitized. Now that I’ve gotten a good handle on the sources involved in my project, the type of scholarship expected of me and the process of writing, I’m aiming to complete the rough draft of my manuscript by summer 2016. While writing my dissertation is the focus of my work, part of becoming a historian also involves interacting with other scholars and students while learning about the craft of history. I attend weekly seminars as a member of the Zakład Historii Społecznej XIX i XX Wieku (Workshop of 19th and 20th Century Social History), where I presented papers on the progress of my PhD last November and in February, on the work of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, negotiations for U.S. relief to Europe after World War I and the American Mission to Poland in January 1919. Sometimes I meet people who say that they don’t like history as a subject. I can’t blame them, since they probably had teachers that drilled dates and facts into their heads, so they think of history like I probably think of mathematics (one of my weaker subjects in school). What I love about history though are the stories. I try to empathize with the individuals who I learn about, trying to relate to their struggles, challenges, successes, hopes and dreams. Everyone loves a good story and once my dissertation is finished, I know it’ll be good history from a scholarly perspective, but perhaps more importantly, I want it to be a damn good story as well. It’s definitely one worth telling.