Initial Constraint

Hello soon-to-be-faithful readers (I hope)!

My name is Natalie, and I'm a PhD student at Princeton University. I just finished my third year, successfully defended my dissertation proposal, and will soon be off to Paris for a year of research. I'm hoping it will be productive, and to keep you family/friends/random readers informed of my whereabouts and progress, I'm going to write a blog! I've done this before (see my other blogs: first from studying abroad in Paris in 2010, then from last summer in Paris/Urbino, and finally a little blog I made to write about Broadway musicals), but this one will be a little different.

While I do want to write about interesting experiences like I did in the other study abroad blogs, this time I actually want to focus on the studying. For that, I'm going to write about the books I'm reading, the scholars I meet, the OuLiPo meetings I go to, the transcriptions, the library visits, etc. While this may not sound interesting, I promise to make it as exciting as possible. In fact, I'll be participating in several fascinating projects, doing research on two different centuries, trying to bridge math and literature, and interacting with great scholars and authors. What's more, I'll be in a great cultural capital, where there are always museum exhibitions, concerts, operas, ballets, plays, and other things to do that, while perhaps not immediately applicable to my work, will no doubt enrich my work as well as my time abroad.

So, I think the main topic points for the blog will be as follows:

1) Life in Paris—this begins now, as I try to decide between staying in the free room that the ENS will provide me despite its obvious flaws (disgusting, co-ed bathrooms) and getting an expensive apartment or finding a roommate to share an apartment.

2) Academic life at the ENS—whether or not I choose to live there, I will be a pensionnaire étrangère, which is a fancy way of saying I will be affiliated with this Grande école. I'll not only have a student card, but I will probably attend a seminar or two, participate in their student groups (I believe they have an orchestra), their parties, their strange bar (k-fêt...I believe there is a blog post about it in my first blog), etc.

3) Library culture—this includes writing about books I'm currently reading (I think I'll write them like book reviews, so that anyone who is interested could read them as well and tell me what they think—in fact, please feel free to do that and comment!), some aspects of my dissertation, and also of course the library experience (which is quite different in France).

4) Conferences and Talks—I will be going to OuLiPo jeudis (monthly meetings) of course, but also hopefully presenting at conferences (so far, I know of one in Puerto Rico that I will be attending in October!), and also attending talks. The intellectual life at Princeton is incredible, but hopefully in Paris I will be hearing new ideas, new methodologies, and a different style of academics. Some talks in Paris when I studied abroad literally changed my life (George Steiner and the Oulipo jeudis, specifically).

5) Trips—I'm hoping to travel when I'm there. First, I'm going to Berlin, which will be a new linguistic experience (my German is nowhere near as good as my French or Italian). And from there, I can see a new part of Europe I don't know very well (Berlin is the only German city I've ever seen, and I've never been east of there).

And, that's the plan! I'm sure it will be an exciting year, and hopefully I'll be able to write this as often as I'd like!