By Andrew M. Richmond
When the pandemic forced faculty and students to abandon college and university campuses this past spring, Andrew M. Richmond, an assistant professor at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, faced the challenge of keeping his research activity on track. Like the rest of us, his numerous coping strategies focused on working with established support systems (such as online databases and interlibrary loan) and discovering previously underutilized supports (such as webinars and group calls). In addition to these, though, Andrew turned to ad hoc networks for help locating articles, and he helped create avenues for supporting the research of other early-career scholars.
I log into the website for my institution’s library. I dig through database after database; ultimately, one lists the reference I need, but provides no access. I request a copy through interlibrary loan. A few days, maybe a week passes; then the request is cancelled: no partner libraries are able to provide the text. Now it’s on to the stage of emailing friends, checking old database subscriptions, scanning used book listings for old journal issues and essay collections. Finally, a friend comes through or a new search bears fruit, and I have the article in hand. One down; a bibliography’s worth to go.
I have been incredibly lucky, overall, when it comes to performing research in the pandemic. Just as news of Covid-19’s severity broke in the US, I received the second reader’s report on a long-term project; it, in merciful agreement with the first, recommended publication. The next few weeks were a flurry of signing contracts via email while life in isolation began. As with so many of us, I had only a few days’ notice to grab everything from my school office as I made the transition to working from home. I tried to grab every book that I thought would be at all relevant to completing the final edits on my project; my home is a four-hour drive (and a state away) from my job, and family health conditions meant that I would not be able to return in person until there was a vaccine. All of this, of course, while moving my four courses online and doing my best to reach out to and support my students in whatever way I could, now that I was at a distance. We all did as much—and many had to do much more. Honestly, all thought of research went out of my mind once spring moved online. Teaching and student care (and, of course, service) took center stage in my attention, and remained there until the last grade was submitted.
My summer work plans—presenting and moderating at conferences, researching at archives, and photographing medieval sites in the UK—all had to be cancelled or postponed, so it was only finishing my project edits that held my focus. But of course that wasn’t actually the case: the US was in the throes of (maybe this time actually) facing yet another long overdue reckoning for centuries of systemic racism, violence, and oppression, and that meant helping to support protestors—in my small upstate NY town and across the country—in whatever way I could. Flurried bouts of writing when sources finally arrived, then, had to be sandwiched between more immediate concerns of supporting my students, my school, and my community. Those other concerns have not and will not go away, nor should they. More than anything else, amidst the exhaustion and the stress, this pandemic has laid bare for me even more starkly just how much privilege I have as a researcher.
I’m a tenure-track assistant professor, who still has the chance to be paid for my research. My position, tenuous as it may now feel in the face of the inevitable debates over higher-education budget cuts, is infinitely more secure than those held by my adjunct and graduate student colleagues. Despite not being paid for it, despite often holding down teaching positions at numerous schools all following different protocols in the midst of a pandemic, they nonetheless continue to produce incredibly vibrant, insightful, and necessary research.
Therefore, over the last year, I have found it most rewarding to help facilitate the presentations of my fellow early-career researchers. This past summer, for instance, I worked with a graduate school colleague to design an upcoming conference panel that will showcase the work of early-career medievalists. At my institution this fall, an adjunct colleague and I cohosted an adjunct faculty creative activity and research forum. Moving forward—and on so many fronts, I hope we finally are—those of us on the track towards or with tenure need to continue supporting and collaborating with other early-career researchers. This work is important: and I cannot wait to see how such new analyses of medieval texts and cultures can illuminate more thoroughly both the nature of our pasts and the answers to the most pressing concerns of our present.