“Your dissertation has become a trade press blockbuster. It’s on a display table in the bookstore. What else is on that table?”
It is day 1 of a three-week workshop in Chicago, and Andrew Benedict-Nelson, from Greenhouse Consulting, is leading twenty-nine advanced PhD students in the humanities through some exercises designed to move the mental furniture around. Starting from their own work—he had boned up on the students’ dissertation projects—Benedict-Nelson (a former PhD student in the history of medicine) is getting everyone to take unlikely moves from their starting point. What would it mean for my book to be popular? (A big jump forward.) Then, what would popular mean—what’s on the table?—if my book is popular? (Now a jump sideways.) The exercise is like a knight’s move in chess. Suddenly, the horizon has changed.
Read the rest of Johnathan Elmer's post at the MLA Commons.
