Abandoned Histories

Daniel Story
I’m Daniel Story, and this is History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. Something nearly every historian has, but almost never discusses, are abandoned projects—historical quests that for one reason or another didn’t pan out. And with the pausing or ending of those projects, a host of tensions and emotions can flood in. But what if we didn’t keep these experiences to ourselves? What if, instead, we found community around these moments of questioning and struggle? Those possibilities are what a small group of historians explore in this episode. Reprising a session they conducted at the AHA Annual Meeting in 2025, Danna Agmon, Carmen Gitre, Sue Peabody, Christy Pichichero, David Sartorius, and Bianca Premo dive into their experiences of abandoned histories and what they imagine could be gained by bringing these things into the light. Danna led that 2025 AHA session, and she also took the lead in the conversation that follows.

Danna Agmon
My name is Danna Agmon. I’m the American Historical Review‘s consulting editor for mentoring and engagement. Today’s conversation follows up on a panel that took place in the AHA annual meeting in 2025. It was titled “Abandoned Histories: Work We’ve Left Behind.” And the panel, which was co-organized by Bianca Premo and myself, was motivated by a desire to think through a particular set of emotions, regret, shame, fear, embarrassment, and confusion occasioned by what we termed abandoned histories, those projects that every historian has, which, for a complicated host of reasons, never made it to fruition. Sometimes this is just an idea that never matured into a project. But on some occasions, an effort that involved years of thinking, archival trips, tens of thousands of words written, nevertheless has been set aside. When we all first met, we wanted to explore two sets of questions. First, what are the different categories of obstacles—the ethical, financial, disciplinary, linguistic, technical, political, institutional, and personal considerations that lead us to leave behind work in progress? We were curious if understanding the causes and the effects of these various challenges would help us better understand both our discipline and our profession. Second, we wondered, how do abandoned histories stay with those who abandon them and seed themselves into our subsequent work? How does this phantom work shape future methodological and theoretical commitments, and by extension, our fields of inquiry? I’m really excited to revisit this conversation with five scholars from different fields and talk about how sharing their experience with other historians last year helped them think in new ways about their projects. Thank you all so much for being here, and I’d love to have each of you introduce yourselves and your abandoned, or in some cases semi-abandoned, projects.

Carmen Gitre
Well, hi, I’m Carmen Gitre. I teach Middle East history at Virginia Tech, and my abandoned project was a book project on humor in Egypt.

Sue Peabody
Hi, I’m Sue Peabody. I research French colonial history and teach early modern Europe at Washington State University, at branch campus of Commuter College in Vancouver, Washington. And I’m going to talk about several different projects that I’ve sort of begun and abandoned over a fairly long career at this point. Yeah, I think I’ll leave it at that right now.

Christy Pichichero
I’m Christy Pichichero, and I teach at George Mason University. I am a specialist of the French Empire and its connections to the African diaspora and also of military history. And I’m going to mention, like Sue, a couple of projects. The first is a digital history project on the rise of early modern journalism in France, and then in Europe more broadly. And then another project that I abandoned, which was a biography of someone who I’ve been researching from sometimes Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, who was a black composer, a fencer, and military officer during the 18th century.

Bianca Premo
Hi, I’m Bianca Premo, and I’m at Florida International University where I teach Latin American history. I began as a colonial Latin Americanist, but I’m now working on the 20th and 21st century, and that’s germane to my project, because it is my current project, which is about a five-year-old mother in Lima Peru, made me reflect on the fact that I had abandoned an earlier history of an abused enslaved girl in Lima in the early 19th century. I had decided not to include her in a monograph that I was working on.

David Sartorius
I’m David Sartorius, and I’m a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of Maryland. I study Cuba specifically, and what I abandoned was as much an approach as a project. And I’m thinking back to the summer after my first year of graduate school, and I went to Cuba for the first time to do archival research, and I went with the goal of understanding the experience of the enslaved through their daily lives, so looking at plantation registers, correspondence and logs, really kind of on the ground histories, and specifically provision grounds and garden plots. And on seeing all of these lists of enslaved people on various sugar plantations, I was so taken by the vastness that I just began writing down names over and over and over. And so what I abandoned was as much what would have been a long term, sort of probably multi-decade project, but also an approach that was going to be hard to do anything with. But, yeah, I’ll stop there.

Danna Agmon
So the first question I wanted to ask each of you is, what led you to abandon your project, and then what do you understand that abandonment to mean? Carmen, would you want to start?

Carmen Gitre
Sure. I should say that I came to this project because it was sort of the idea of working on humor in Egypt was sort of an outgrowth of previous work that I had done, and I just hadn’t explored fully, and I liked the idea of being able to sort of dig into more of the things that I care about, which is providing a more holistic view of the Middle East, beyond the typical war, extremism, and so forth, and to get at voices of everyday people who are often neglected in formal documents. And also, it would be fun, and that’s a big part of it for me, you know, making sure that we retain interest in what we do. So what ended up happening is I realized, as I was working on this and I had done some writing (I published an article about it), but it became increasingly clear to me that really to understand humor and to understand its nuances, the internal references, all of these things in Arabic, I had to have mastery, not just of the cultural, political, you know, and social context for all of the things that the performances that I was looking at, but I had to better understand the Arabic language at a level that I just wasn’t at when I had been in graduate school in Cairo. That was probably like the peak of my Arabic knowledge. It was before children, before teaching classes and having administrative responsibilities, and also, let’s be honest, when language funding still existed. And so I had the time and cognitive space and opportunity to be immersed in the language. And I also had family in Egypt who encouraged and motivated my desire to communicate in Arabic. So that was all like part of the story. And since then, you know, over time, the challenges and obstacles to continued immersion in the language have increased in every way. There are the things that we all face, increasing workload, increasing responsibilities with family, family illness, I mean, all these things that happen and kind of, you know, get in the way of the ambition that you may have had in the beginning, and they’re part of the story. But when we were talking about our abandoned histories, it helped me realize that the overwhelming explanation, or one of the overwhelming explanations, for why I abandoned that history is more emotional and psychological than rational or practical, and that is because it has to do with my own relationship to the Arabic language, and I realized that it was complicated. So besides the fact that it takes a lot of work, and we all know that with second language, it’s long been connected to my identity as a scholar, I found that to be a really important part of what I do. It’s also connected to political commitments that I have regarding who gets to speak and who’s been forgotten and who needs to be heard. But more deeply, it’s also about my connection to my own family. And as time has passed, those members of my family have aged and many have died, and as I’ve lost and grieved them, the urgency and motivation to nurture my language study started to slip away. So I realized that it’s not just an issue of time and space, which is huge. It’s not just about money, which is enormous, the funding problem is very real. But for me specifically, it also had this other kind of underlying emotional component.

Sue Peabody
So this is Sue, and I started with an original dissertation project. So this would be 35 years ago. I had this idea that I wanted to work on French colonizers and South Asian women, based on my master’s thesis research and my thesis advisors dissertations suggested that that was not a good idea. It was going to be too expensive to do the research, and finding all of these individual references to women scattered all over the archives was also going to be really challenging. So they advised me to pick something that was really solidly in France, and that was how I ended up with my dissertation that became my first book. There are no slaves in France. And then in the course of researching that, I found a legal case that took place in the 19th century, about a man who sued for his freedom in the Indian Ocean world. And for the dissertation, I decided that was way too much of an outlier. I would have to narrate the French history of Free Soil all the way through the revolution, which seemed complicated for an early modernist, and so I put it aside. And then about 10 or 12 years later, I came back to that same legal document, and I thought, gee, there really is something in here. I think this would be really interesting. But again, I’m not a 19th century specialist, I can’t do this. So I actually handed it off to a colleague and said, here, why don’t you do something with this? And then about six or eight weeks later, I Googled this guy’s name, and I realized that there were documents available out there that I didn’t know about, and that my information was not available to the general public at this point. So I went back to my colleague, and I said, excuse me, may I have that back? And she said, oh, sure, of course. And so that ended up becoming the book that won three prizes and, you know, a film is being released this week about it in France. So it ended up being a very big deal. And I think the reason I abandoned it at the outset was I didn’t feel like I had the wraparound expertise at that moment to really bring it to its full realization. So I have other thoughts, but I’ll leave that for now.

Bianca Premo
I wanted to pick up on what Carmen mentioned about the emotional part of the abandonment process. For some context, it’s a case, because I’m a legal historian, but the case that I abandoned involved an 11-year-old girl by the name of Liberata Sanchez, who had been raped by the overseer of a panadonia, which is like a workhouse bakery that was often used to punish enslaved people. And she reached out to older enslaved women for advice about what to do. And this was, you know, quite, you know, moving. They informed her that this was just a fact of life for enslaved women, that she should go with him when he called her in the night, which she did for three more nights until she finally ran away and found a local judge and filed a complaint against him. In my research on the history of children in colonial Lima this was one of the very few cases that I saw in which a child brought a suit against an adult without adult representation, and it was the only case of a girl, or a girl of African descent. So I included this story in my dissertation, but I decided not to include it when I wrote the monograph, and only in reflecting now from the perspective of writing about a very difficult case of child abuse in the 20th century, where I’m bolder but also more cautious, I realized that I was afraid to include this case in the book. I had decided that the payoff wasn’t worth the risk, the risk being to sensationalize the case, to use it because it had automatic interest and it had a kind of very clear moral or story, and I wasn’t prepared at that time in my career to sort out my own feelings about recirculating these histories of violence and vulnerability, so.

Christy Pichichero
Yeah, I can jump into the discussion here on the theme of emotion, because that was certainly a part of it for my digital humanities project, in the sense that I came in with a lot of enthusiasm and it turned to fear. So I already at the time was really interested in taking on research projects that really brought together literary and historical concerns, and so the notion of collecting a lot of documentation from Early French newspapers in the 17th century, and then being able to compare, do analyzes across broad data sets of titles and content of the different articles, and really track at that close level of language, so the literary part, the culture of what was newsworthy, and who was celebrated, and how does that change over time, in the context of an evolving French Empire. So I was really excited, and I got to my university, George Mason, where we have the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, this super important digital history powerhouse. And so I said, great, here it is, like, I’m here. I’m starting my first tenure track job, and I’m going to jump right in with this signature project that brings together literature and history. And it’s going to marry with the interests of my new home. And I pretty quickly realized that I was going to be way in over my head, that the reality of a digital humanities project is nothing like other types of research projects at this scale, you know. They take years. They are necessarily collaborative in nature, because you may start with entering data into a Microsoft spreadsheet, but after that, really structurally, it’s principal investigators, it’s coders, it’s designers, in some cases, it’s community collaborators. And so when I really got an understanding of what it is to do a good digital history project, and one that was going to have the impact that I hoped, which is, while my expertise was France, and I think this also connects to a theme here is that for this to be powerful in the way I wanted it to be, I was hoping to connect with other scholars who had this interest, who could analyze the growth of news and journalism in other countries, so that ultimately we could create sort of this big, global database. So the more ambitious I became, the more clear it was that there was no way that I was going to do this. And so I dropped the project cold turkey, because I was like, there’s no way I can get tenure. I don’t have time to do this. I don’t even know some of the people I would need to know. So even in excellent circumstances at George Mason University, you know, with the with the Center for History and New Media, there was just no way I felt at the time that I could do it. And as I’ve been engaged in digital humanities since then, I kind of think I was right that that was just not the project to take on at that time. And I think I haven’t picked it up again, because I still find it intimidating to do this with my time, to do the project the way I would want to do it. And that also ties to my other project that I abandoned, kind of like you were saying, David, in approach. It was an approach to a project that I abandoned, which was the approach to writing the story of the Chevalier de Saint-George, was born enslaved in the French colony of Guadeloupe in 1745 and then was one of the first Black celebrities of the Atlantic world. He just seemed to lend himself, at least in the eyes of publishers in trade presses and in academic presses and in the eyes of literary agents, to a wonderful, perfect, great man biography, and so I wrote a proposal and started writing away. So Danna, what you’re saying about all the words written. And then I realized this is not at all the book I want to write, and I’m feeling so much pressure, sort of, from the market and the moment in time after 2020, with George Floyd and Brianna Taylor and global Black Lives Matter really launching again, like, do it now, do it now. And I just had to put the brakes on it entirely to hear myself think and to, you know, chart a path again, toward a scholarly work that may be consumed by a broader public, but that will be based in a different way of talking about people who lived in the past and the way that, you know, I don’t believe in superheroes. We all come from a network of people helping us, from families, and that’s the story that I wanted to tell, and that’s what I’m working on now.

David Sartorius
It’s rare that I dive into a great man biography, but I absolutely would have of the one you would have written. But more importantly, I want to hear your thinking about that project and that person in whatever form it ultimately takes. I think what you were saying about time echoes my own experience, that I think the seed of abandonment came when I realized that the research questions I had in the archives that I was exploring versus the methods that I had at my fingertips, there was a yawning gap between them, and that the time that it would have required to answer the questions that I was asking wasn’t feasible for a graduate student career. It wasn’t feasible for a dissertation that could get me tenure. So part of this was I, fortunately, had mentors who said, you know, this will be a great book when you are, you’ll complete it when you’re 80, but it will be a great book after you do this needle in a haystack approach for decades. But it’s not one to start your career out with. So there was a professional side to that that was time related, but there was an emotional and kind of a political concern that was nagging me as I just kept writing names down. I will say that I did own a laptop computer at this point, but I was cautioned on my first research trip to Cuba to leave it at home. And one reason was that, I think, they still had some mentors who thought that you took better notes and were more present in an archive when you’re writing by hand. I think there might be some truth to that. But the other was the to think about the ethics of slamming down your laptop at a table when your Cuban colleague next to you is sharpening their pencil with an old razor blade and writing their notes in between the lines of an old newspaper, right? This was a time when there was no ink, there was no paper, and the idea of just sort of hoovering up data, that extractive model, next to these scholars who are—it was life and death for them, and they were at great cost—sitting in the archive and taking notes like I was, but there I was. I don’t want to undersell the experience of seeing one of these documents, right? This was in an era of like quantitative histories of slavery that really kind of treated the enslaved as aggregate groups, as populations and readings of censuses that might look at change over time through large scale numbers that just bunched everyone together, and the experience the first time of opening a file and seeing a list of names of the enslaved that was written down by someone who was encountering these people on a daily basis, and presumably in the moment that they were writing this down, really was overwhelming to me. And I didn’t have a method on hand as I saw that to deal with it, right? So I sort of assumed that there would be some social history approach when I got back to the United States that would let me connect names across documents in order to sort of build enough evidence to talk about an individual. The problem with that, of course, is that the enslaved don’t have surnames, or when they did, they were the surname of the man who claimed to own them. And connecting six men named Juan in a population across many documents just wasn’t possible. But what the other sense I was guided by, I think Walter Johnson in his very famous essay on agency, has talked about this, this kind of ethical and moral responsibility that historians of slavery can feel to memorialize or repeat or record the names of people who are often lost to history. There wasn’t a clear sense of what I was going to be restoring by copying down lists of names for months and months at a time on these limited research trips to Cuba. So I realized pretty quickly that the methods that I was, that I needed, and that I wanted were alluding me. So what I eventually abandoned was the approach. It was also a project. But I will say I never really have abandoned the desire that animated it, right? There is still something in me that my whole career has been guided by a tension between trying to see the aggregate, the full experience of slavery as a colossal global event, and also to see it at the individual level, as lived by people.

Sue Peabody
I just want to pick up on that real quickly, because I think my my approach is very similar, David, and I think what happens is, after a certain period of time, you can recognize the value of a really good documental find, and without the key documents, the other project that I may or may not abandon, I simply don’t have the ego documents, as they would say in Germany, or the the “I” statements that will allow me to get into the subjectivity of the enslaved people in this next project that I’m working on. And so I haven’t, the jury’s still out, as I said before, you know, never say never. It’s really good to have developed the project as far as I have, but then you kind of have to, as you all are saying, have the emotional resonance and the moral conviction that the story that you want to tell can be told with these documents. And that is right now a struggle that I’m really wrestling with.

Danna Agmon
Hearing you all talk about your feelings, about leaving this work behind, the the emotions that are attendant on it are very painful, difficult ones, right? You’re talking about anxiety and grief and fear, and I think it’s so important to make room for the admission that these emotional experiences are part of our career and our research. I’m curious if there are also emotions that have to do with feelings of relief or rightness or even joy about leaving behind work that doesn’t serve your interest or doesn’t align with your needs or desires.

Christy Pichichero
I feel that way. I certainly feel that way about my digital humanities project that I felt relieved because it was just going to be such a colossal undertaking. And as I learned more about the discipline of Digital Humanities and its challenges, even after a successful project has been brought to fruition, the fact that programming languages change, that there can be issues of hosting a site and a database and and so the more that I’ve learned, the more respect I have for my colleagues who who make this happen, and I still do, you know, continue to be active in the in the digital humanities world. But I’m really glad that I was relieved to walk away from that, though it did mean that I had to decide what was going to be my tenure project and turned back to my dissertation, I think in some ways, with new eyes and with new ambitions for the project that I was really fortunate to be able to pursue and to have support in doing that from my publisher, and then from some mentors at George Mason. I think that for my other abandonment, that one felt probably back to the conflicted side. Because you said, you know, people will tell you, if you sign with a trade press, if they think it’s going to be a really good book, you can get a quarter of a million dollars up front and, boy, you know, that’s me and my family at the beach, you know, or a down payment on a pied-à-terre. So definitely there’s a sort of dodging the wealth bullet thing that we scholars do so well. I have a placard sitting next to me here on the desk that says, “I became a teacher for the money and the fame.” So, you know, keeping up with that by dodging the very sellable, readable, great man biography. But you know, ultimately, I do feel maybe proud. I feel proud that I decided that I wasn’t going to write a book for money, and I wasn’t going to write a book for some imagined or projected audience. I was going to write it for the Chevalier and for his enslaved mother and for his father who supported him, his white father, for his half sister, his white half sister, who also supported him. I was going to write it for them, and I was going to write it for me. And as a mid-career scholar, arriving at that point feels like a triumph in some way.

Bianca Premo
I would really like to follow up on some of what you said, especially the idea of in any way profiting off of our histories. In my particular case, this is precisely at the at the core of what makes writing about violated and vulnerable girls in the past so conflictive for me, and I know Danna wondered whether or not we had some relief or positive ideas or positive reactions to abandoning the project. For me, in recognizing that I had done this, I felt some guilt, and I think that the guilt is a marker that I had not worked out why I had abandoned the project in any way that was satisfying to me. It was an avoidance. I was avoiding the project because I was avoiding doing the hard work of figuring out for myself what the ethics of circulating these stories, and for me in particular, to be the person writing them was. And so that recognition, I think, can be very productive. I think the unsettled feelings that we have when we walk away from a project might be as instructive as the relief, or the idea that we’ve cut ties and we made it a very rational and good decision for our careers. And I think that the enticement to write about things, because they’re going to gain readership, is, you know, there’s a lot of pressure in our profession at this moment to write for a broader public. Writing for a broader public when you’re writing about the questions of sexual assault and violation and about a population that we accept has no ability to consent generally, when we’re talking about children is, you know, really a complicated endeavor, and you have to be very clear about whom you’re writing for and why. And it’s strange to me that I became more comfortable with those questions and more willing to think about accountability and harm when I was writing about a more contemporary subject and a woman who today may still be alive and has refused to engage in any publicity through most, not all, but most of her adult life. So the much more complicated case of the five-year-old mother actually led me to greater boldness about my purpose in either telling a story or not telling a story.

David Sartorius
I think maybe on a separate register, the advice that I often give students when it’s time to revise their work comes from Toni Morrison, who once said, “Don’t love it just because you did it.” And it’s perfect advice, and it’s completely gutting. But there is a lot of guilt knowing that you spent a lot of months in the archive doing this work, and then you’re going to set it aside. There is something, you know, I went thinking that I bore some responsibility to the people whose lives I was trying to understand, that setting that aside was really hard, but that early lesson helped me along. I mean, there are file cabinets full of documents at this point in my career that have never made it into my footnotes, right? That much of what we do as historians is kind of maybe micro abandonment, right? When it’s time to decide, do I need to write down all 25 of these cases to where you say these names over and over, and it sounds like a speech at the Democratic National Convention where they’re just naming, or is there a better way to condense? But there’s a loss involved in that. I think that’s kind of elemental to our research and writing, and I am glad I learned that, however painful it was.

Danna Agmon
Sue or Carmen, I don’t know if either of you wants to jump in here.

Sue Peabody
I’ll jump in. There’s another project that I abandoned along the way. What I thought was my second book project was going to be about women of color in the French Caribbean. And I got funding for some of that. And I did do some preliminary research, and I wrote an article. But what I came to recognize—at that stage I was in my early 30s, I had two kids, one had a health condition—I was not able to go and do the archival research that would be necessary. And again, like the previous project, looking for the needles in the haystack, that is a huge project, and it requires an enormous amount of labor. And what has been so gratifying, and this is actually the moment when Danna, I think, asked me if I would be on this panel, was being at the recent conference, and there were probably a dozen papers about women of color in the French Caribbean, really rich, really thoughtful. And I realized that this is really a collective labor. There’s no way that at that stage in where the scholarship was, at the time, in what I was able to do at that point in my career, you know, logistically, there’s no way I was going to be able to write a meaningful book about that. So I’m just kind of thrilled that I abandoned that project, maybe put a few signposts out there to folks that came later. But I really, to me, it’s been very a huge relief to realize that I don’t have to do it all myself. And in fact, you know this collaborative element of what we can do as historians. I know a lot of us are sort of trained to think of ourselves as the monograph writers and working alone in our little cells, which we do, but I’ve gotten the most joy and the most rewarding elements in these relationships that I developed with all kinds of colleagues in working collaboratively. And that’s something I really appreciate about having abandoned that particular project.

Carmen Gitre
I’ve been thinking about this question of relief, and it’s interesting, because I did feel a layer of relief, but it wasn’t all the way through. It’s conflicted relief. And something interesting, though, that I’ve noticed in my own work, not specifically with this project, but with other pieces that I’ve tried and I haven’t really gone anywhere with them, David was saying that we seem to do a lot of micro abandoning, and I definitely agree with that. What’s interesting, or what I’ve found occasionally, is that there are times that I have worked on something, done some research, not really knowing where to go with it and set it aside, and then somehow it comes back later. And I think it might be because even though you might abandon a certain project, the questions that are behind it, the kind of desire to know that motivates you to look at something, that doesn’t really go away. And so I think that things tend to converge in interesting ways and unexpected ways. When you’re able to let stuff go, it’s just being able to let stuff go is hard for people who work hard, and it’s in their character to follow through on things. I mean, it’s a really tough decision to make.

Sue Peabody
And Carmen, there’s also the experience of, you know, there are funders who paid for me to go do this research, you know. Don’t I owe them what comes out of it? And the piece that’s been very helpful to me there, particularly, is about sabbatical. Sabbaticals, if you if you’re fortunate enough to have them, my philosophy is take every single one you can, but don’t over promise what you’re going to deliver, because every time what has happened for me is a pivot. So I’ll start with one thing I’m very, you know, interested in, and then I’ll get into something, and then I’ll meet somebody, or I’ll I’ll have some encounter in the archives, and then suddenly I’m off and running. And I can feel it my heart, this is the project I really need to write. And so if you don’t over promise in your proposal and you deliver something, you deliver an article or whatever, but then from each one, the next big project has come out of that. And it’s been very productive to have that, and also to have even multiple projects going at any one time, because sometimes there’s energy behind one of them. But all of this is what develops over time. It’s not kind of how you start as a graduate student. As a graduate student, you really do need to find a project that you can get out but meanwhile kind of keep in the back of your mind, oh, this might be useful for something later.

Bianca Premo
It will be interesting to see whether the productivity pressure that is coming outside of the tenure system, research assignments for faculty who are not on a tenure track, post tenure review for those who are, ends up producing fewer abandoned projects, which I think in some ways we might agree, is something of a shame, since what we’re all discussing is part of a creative process, the regular vicissitudes of trying something and having it not work and trying something else. And I also think that one thing that’s quite interesting that you all have said repeatedly is that it’s not only abandoning a project because it’s not right or because you’ve lost interest or it’s not feasible, oftentimes it’s abandoning a project for now, that projects can be appropriate to where you are as an individual, as an intellectual, and to your career. And that’s just the fact, right? You cannot do a dissertation like you can write a fourth book. And so I think that knowing that, hoping that there will be time for larger projects down the road, and that there is something of a mercenary attitude to some of those earlier projects, is just a fact of life.

Danna Agmon
After our conversation at the AHA, a few people came up to me and remarked on how notable it was you all were so open and vulnerable in talking about this, and how rare it was to have people admit to, you know, detours or dead ends or, you know, projects that didn’t quite work out. And I think that openness and vulnerability it’s also a hallmark of this conversation today, which I really appreciate. And I guess the last question I wanted for us to consider is, first of all, how does it feel to be so open and vulnerable in a professional setting? And do you have any thoughts on how that vulnerability helps you process or integrate or think in different ways about your abandoned projects?

Carmen Gitre
I could start. I think that this experience of being vulnerable both in front of a crowd and in a podcast is uncomfortable, but it’s honest, and I feel like it’s the only way I can be. I remember years ago, I was doing my dissertation research, and I was in Cairo and met this respected Middle East scholar. And I confided in him then that I was like anxious about my language skills. And he said to me, oh, we all worry about that. We just don’t raise our hands and announce it to everyone. And I was amazed, because he is very good, you know, he’s very strong. And I’ve remembered it since, because it’s kind of that was a vulnerable moment too, right? He was very honest with me. The thing is that I don’t know for my specific case, but, I mean, it applies more broadly, I don’t know how we can talk about productivity and then, in my case, in foreign language research, and in many of your cases, actually in foreign language research without talking about the language component. For me, like maintaining your language is kind of a dull topic, but it requires so much time and continuity. It requires a lot of money, so if you have set amounts of money, or decreasing amounts of money, or no amount of money, and you’re having to make decisions about how to spend the time that we keep bringing up, we all are talking about time. Do I spend it on the research, or do I spend it on the language, because it’s very difficult to do both, even though we we have to right. The opportunity to practice all of these things are in short supply as we move through our careers, especially in mid-career. And I don’t know how you produce excellent scholarship if we don’t have that discussion and kind of honest reckoning with what it means to have to be able to maintain skills and practice these skills, and we don’t have as many opportunities to do so. So I feel like it’s just a conversation that needs to happen, and I really agree that for me, that idea of abandoning, it’s a really permanent sounding word, but I don’t, and I think that may be why it seems, you know, but I, for me, it really isn’t permanent. I agree with all of you saying that this might this is a time thing. So we keep talking about time, but I think there are different ways of thinking about it there’s not enough time, which is like, yes, there’s not enough time. But there’s also, like, the beauty of if you have this gift of taking time away and doing other things, you can come back to something when the time is right. So there are lots of ways of thinking about time.

Sue Peabody
To your question about vulnerability, Danna, I think I feel there’s a huge liberation of being towards the end of my career. I feel like I can kind of say whatever the hell I want, and nobody’s going to get me, you know. I think I would have felt much less comfortable with that, you know, at earlier stages, particularly at the really critical points with the small children and the, you know, how am I going to, you know, make it, as it turned out, five times, to the Indian Ocean to do these research trips over 10 years? My French actually improved Carmen, to your point about language. I’m much better in French now than I was when I was in graduate school, partly through like writing with colleagues over there and forcing myself to write an email and whatnot. But that sense of vulnerability, first of all, that’s a hallmark as a kind of person who bleeds all over the table. So you just know me, who I am. But also, I think there’s a strength in that, and just kind of owning that, and also hopefully it helps other people feel more comfortable in the honesty of the feelings that we’re talking about, of the difficulty at these different times in our careers.

Christy Pichichero
Yeah, and I’d just like to add that you know, as one of your mentees, Sue, that indeed the real talk, the vulnerability, it does uplift people. It does encourage people. It takes us out of the cave of the lone academic producing their monograph. We’re all going through similar things, and having mentors who understand and who don’t give you the sense that because you’re managing family and research all of these things at the same time, yeah, that it’s really hard, and that it does mean that sometimes it isn’t the right time for something and that. And, you know, my AHA presentation talked about the pause. You know, maybe this is just pressing pause and I’ll revisit this at another time, but I agree also, Sue, that I’m quite sure that if you had asked me a few years ago when I walked away from the digital humanities project, I would have been really intimidated to just speak about it in public, because I was still in the phase where I felt like I needed to prove myself, where I was still an unknown entity in the field. And I think now for us, and why we’re doing this podcast, why the AHR wanted this podcast, why you know that there are so many new structures at the AHA and in the journal of the AHR is because we’re trying to embody the profession as we’d like to see it, and to be those people who come to one another and say, yeah, actually, there are sacrifices and there are difficult things, but it’s okay to choose something else and and it doesn’t mean that you’re a less capable scholar, and that, yes, sometimes you have to work a lot on language skills or other types of skills, and that’s okay. And I think, you know, we’re all going to have to go through this together, also now with AI, which is assisting people, offering new opportunities, but also depriving people, in some sense, of certain skill sets that enable us afterward to reach new research questions and possibilities. So I hope that we will all continue to be together in that vulnerable openness about the work that we do and the things that are presenting themselves to us as challenges.

David Sartorius
I do remember in graduate school, a professor bringing his cassette tape of an interview he tried to do with a Jamaican taxi driver while he was in the taxi, asking this taxi driver his thoughts about class consciousness, and he brought that tape to let us listen as we were taking a sledgehammer to the reading the week before and criticizing that, you know, this person doing oral history was not playing enough with Marxist categories. And he brought this in to show us maybe there’s a mismatch. And you know that vulnerability, it’s stuck with me ever since, and I also realized he, like the six of us are speaking from a position of tenure, with the protections of tenure to do that, what like that sense of embodiment you mentioned Christy, was something I took from the panel that we did together that it just felt like the atmosphere in the room changed, and the people who came up to me afterward were very grateful to feel like in community with people who can admit this. And I think this is also about time. This is after a pandemic when people, for all kinds of reasons, had to abandon projects. Right? I simply didn’t have the bandwidth to teach and continue my research. That sense of abandonment, I think, is really palpable right now.

Danna Agmon
Well, I feel really grateful to be in community with all of you, and I’m so thankful to you for this conversation.

All
Thank you for organizing it. It’s been really, really wonderful. It was wonderful. Thank you.

Daniel Story
That was Danna Agmon, Carmen Gitre, Sue Peabody, Christy Pichichero, David Sartorius, and Bianca Premo discussing their experiences with abandoned histories, and what it is we as a profession might gain by speaking more openly about these vulnerable moments. History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review in partnership with the American Historical Association and the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This episode was produced by me, Daniel Story, with transcription support from Samantha Valencia. That’s it for now. See you next time.