Anon Asks: Your Education

What led you to choose the educational path that you did?

When I was in high school, History and English were my two favorite subjects, so I knew I wanted to major in one of those in college, and I didn’t want to do any more math ever. 

So when I went to college, I took a bunch of courses in both. But while I liked the courses I took in English, I came to the realization that I don’t like most modern literary fiction, that my interest in poetry had been a passing phase, and that I wasn’t good at writing novels.Also, at the time, deconstructionism and postmodernism and post-structuralism were absolutely the rage and I couldn’t stand that stuff. Overall I had the sense that if I went into English as my major, I would be both very old-fashioned and very unhappy, and I didn’t want that. (Now, if I had known I could write about genre fiction or even comic books instead, my life might have gone in a very different direction, but that wasn’t really a thing at the time in the dept)

At the same time, I was taking courses in all different areas of history – ancient Greece and Rome, medieval and modern Japan, American history, early modern and modern European history, labor history, intellectual history, economic history, history of social movements and the left, etc. – and enjoyed pretty much everything I was taking. I also found that writing about history came naturally to me in a way that writing fiction didn’t, and that I loved the treasure-hunting nature of archival research. So that basically sold me on history.

It also helped that I was getting very into politics – in fact, I almost tried to go to law school because I rather naively thought that you needed a law degree to do politics, and thank the gods I was got sick as a dog when I sat my LSATs – and in my History Department there were a couple of people who belonged to the then-relatively-new subfield of the History of Public Policy. Once I started reading Public Policy History and comparing what I was reading to current politics, my entire worldview shifted and I knew I wanted to do this more than anything else. So I applied to History PhD programs according to how many people in those departments did Public Policy History, got into one, and now I teach public policy for my day job.