Mein Doktorvater

I had a very meaningful interaction at the conference last weekend with my college senior thesis advisor, Prof. F.! I've always adored him, and I had a really good (if challenging) experience writing my senior thesis under his supervision. I wrote my second junior paper with him, in which he forced me to articulate my own theory of the proper method of interpreting a Greek tragedy; it was very painful, and the final product was not very good, to put it mildly. I then asked him to advise my senior thesis, which I wanted to write on Euripides' Bacchae. He told me no, he did not want to read a senior thesis on the Bacchae. Hahaha! I look forward to the day when I can say that sort of thing to my own hapless students. After some wandering in the desert, I ended up working on the Christus Patiens, the Byzantine passion play and cento written out of modified lines of Euripides. I cried many tears in my thesis carrel, and somehow wrote 120 pages in the final month. And lo, now I'm an academic.

Sadly, I also always felt like Prof. F. never really remembered me and didn't really care about what happened to me after I left for graduate school. We'd see each other briefly at conferences, but he never stopped to chat or ask me about my progress, etc. It's possible that he simply didn't recognize me (though I am constantly told that I look exactly the same as I did x years ago, which may or may not be a compliment).

Now that I have a job in the field, though, he stops to talk to me! And this year, at a reception, he told me, "I've never liked the term Doktorvater [the German term for a male doctoral supervisor; mine, though, is a Doktormutter]. It's too patriarchal, patronizing, and all of that. But I feel differently when I think about your thesis. See, at minimum, a supervisor is supposed to read an entire thesis and make sure there are no glaring errors. That's the minimum. At the maximum, the supervisor adopts the same quellen ["sources"] and treats the problem as a joint problem between professor and student. And that's what I feel like we did with the Christus Patiens. We were digging through the language, which I'd never read, digging through these French articles, wondering what it all meant...that was fun."

I was so moved! I still remember this college experience so vividly – hitting the library when I woke up, breaking for meals, packing up at 11:45 pm; wading through my own mental mush and the frustration of not seeing how the ideas would add up; finally turning in something that I thought might have accomplished something. In some ways, I still think that my senior thesis was the most original work I've ever done (mostly because no one else bothers to write on that text). I'd like to turn it into an article someday – and I'll remember to thank Prof. F. in the first footnote.