2013 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

HISTORY I Jesus College Annual Report 2013 19
On Being a Freelance Historian
Dominic Sandbrook and Lizzie Collingham
Two Jesuans, a former graduate student and a former Fellow,
reflect on their lives as historians without a university base
Ten years ago [writes Dominic Sandbrook],
I had an email that changed my life.
At the time I was working as a lecturer at
the University of Sheffield, my first job after
finishing my PhD at Jesus. I’d been there for
two years, and to be honest, I was bored.
On the day I got the email, I had been
teaching a class on historiography, a
compulsory element on almost all history
courses but one that very few lecturers
genuinely enjoy teaching. Left to our own
devices, I suspect almost none of us would
have volunteered to do it, but we all had to do
it anyway. (It always amused me, by the way,
how it rarely occurred to the students that
their lecturers were just as grumpy and
reluctant as they were.)
That afternoon, as the rain poured down
outside our dingy 1960s-style annexe
building, I had been running a seminar on
‘Representations’, about how historians
represent the past. The students seemed
bored, listless, depressed. I was pretty
depressed too, to be honest. So that night,
when an email appeared in my inbox with the
subject heading ‘Representation’, my heart
sank. I didn’t recognise the sender’s name; it
was probably one of the quiet ones, sitting at
the back, with a question about the reading
list.
But as my eyes travelled down the screen,
I realised I was looking at something very
different. It was from an agent, asking if it
would be possible to discuss my literary
representation. I Googled his name, and
then, my heart suddenly thumping, I realised
I did know it after all. “Nicknamed ‘the
Jackal’”, said the first website I found, “he is
best known for securing Martin Amis a
£500,000 advance for his novel The
Information”. Oh, I thought, my mind numb.
Not a student after all.