My Very Own Carrel

Well, sort of. Actually I have to share it with two other people. But this is not to be underestimated. I’m a real man now, or at least, a real graduate student. Even though I’m a lowly G1 (Gadfly Level 1) just starting out on my path to enlightenment in a history Phd, I have been granted a Carrel on the second floor of the musty stacks of Widener library. A Carrel, is defined as, “A partially partitioned nook in or near the stacks in a library, used for private study,” but I have always thought of it more as meaning something similar to the “sitting at the back of the bus” in graduate school terms.

The way I understand it, I now get to check out tons of books with my very special “Carrel library card” and then put them on my “Carrel shelf” (both on the desk and behind it) for my indefinite personal access. That is, until, of course, someone comes along and presses the “Recall” button in the online catalog of the library. Then I, reluctantly, will have to return to book to the control of mere mortals.

I also get a little combination lock controlled locker, just like high school! Ok, so I have to share that with two other people too. But I think there is more at work here than just a need to fairly distribute the carrels amongst the thousands of graduate students here.

I think that forcing us to share a carrel is part of a mental health program. You see, I think grad students can potentially become so isolated and asocial in the later years of their dissertation writing that they may no longer know how to deal with other human beings, much less the complex interactions of society. Thus, sharing a carrel forces us to face the power relations, group ethics, and other social conventions that we must again tackle when we enter our careers.

In more immediate terms, I must overcome the first social hurdle of establishing my presence in this carrel that has up until now been shared by only two graduate students. They probably don’t like the idea of me, a mere Gadfly Level 1 coming along and claiming 1/3 of their book and locker space. As you can see in the picture, they have already occupied all three of the desk shelves, posted some baby pictures, and the locker too is half filled with their scattered items.

I will have to slowly establish myself as the new occupant of 221A and put a few books labeled such, so that B and C will know that I am now among them. I’ll choose strong masculine books—thick, solid, and one or two with weighty titles. However, they will have to be from my current reading, otherwise they will wonder why my books have changed topics in the future. I think I’ll start with two muscular volumes of Modern Europe After Fascism, the old classic by Charles Maier: Recasting Bourgeois Europe on the aftermath of WWI, and then throw in a few more theoretical books like two I’m looking at this week, Modernity and Politics in the Work of Max Weber and Max Weber and Michel Foucault. That will show them.

The only down side to the carrel being in Widener and not the Harvard-Yenching library is that most of the Japan/China/Korea history books are to be gotten in the latter. I can’t keep books from there in my Widener carrel. There are carrels in the H-Y library but they are really tiny in comparison and looked horribly uncomfortable. I’ll just have to use the Widener for all my Early Modern Intellectual history and “War and Aftermath” (focusing on issues in the aftermaths of modern war like repatriation, treason trials, occupation regimes, memory issues etc.) fields (2 of the 4 fields I will be tested on next spring) both of which will have a lot of non-East Asia reading.