When I was finishing up my dissertation in early 2019, I wrote about laying the groundwork for the next phase of my academic career. I submitted two project ideas, one about mega-events in Paris and Los Angeles to be hosted at the University of Lausanne, and the other on urban geopolitics in eastern Ukraine at the University of St. Gallen. At the time, I wrote:

There’s actually something interesting going on here and I think it’s worth unpacking for a second. Part of the value in keeping a journal – privately or publicly – is going back. Putting myself back in the headspace of a person who legitimately didn’t know if he could defend his dissertation, much less even finish writing it. The value here is for the future, of course. At this point, those worries seem quaint to me. But reading my own words about it brings back at least some of the uncertainty and existential fear.

There are two lessons, one for the outside, and one for me. For the outside, my goal is to remember those PhD-era anxieties not as something quaint, but as very real uncertainties and threats. I want to be the kind of advisor that takes seriously my students’ concerns, and personally for me that means remembering the visceral fears that can arise during this process.

For me, the lesson is to keep cool during whatever uncertainties I’m currently facing. If I can look back, with the luxury of a few years, and see how well things have turned out despite my worries… then the goal is to quell my current worries with the idea that I’ll just give it a few years and be able to look back with fondness at the problems that – right now – seem so large.

I ended up getting both of those postdoc projects, by the way. “An embarrassment of riches,” I know. I felt very grateful. I ended up choosing the Lausanne project. It wasn’t an easy choice but it was the right one.

But of course our line of work is filled with temporary stays and too-early goodbyes. My time at Lausanne is already at an end. Longtime readers know that I applied for a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione fellowship and I’m still waiting for news on that front. Should be soon though!

But I have news nevertheless: I submitted a shortened version of the Ukraine project for the University of Zurich Forschungskredit postdoc scheme. Yes, I submitted this before the full-scale war. My timing’s not really the best in this way. Anyway, the good news is that I got the postdoc! I feel so lucky to be given the chance to do work that I consider important. And now, fortunately, I’ve secured at least a short-term stay in Switzerland, and it will be so good to come back to UZH for a spell. It’s always felt like home.

The ongoing insanity of the Russian invasion makes the project a bit irrelevant, of course. What is the point of interrogating the intimate nuances of the nearby-but-faraway war when that war is now immediate and those nuances have been obliterated? Fortunately the UZH commission gave me the chance to adjust my project and encouraged me to change my research questions. I’m extraordinarily grateful.

So I have a modified project now and a little bit of opportunity to give a platform to some very worthy scholars at risk. Which is exactly what I’m planning to do. Watch this space.