Jenny Davidson, Professor of English & Comparative Literature

 

92-174 Jenny Davidson

 

Will Bachman  00:00

Hello, and welcome to The 92 Report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Jenny Davidson. Jenny, welcome to the show.

 

Jenny Davidson  00:16

Thanks so much for having me.

 

Will Bachman  00:18

So, Jenny, tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Jenny Davidson  00:23

In many ways, I’m much the same person that I was when I graduated, obsessed with literature, reading, and writing, fully consumed with what happens in classrooms, and when I’m alone reading a book, or now, fortunately, writing books as well. So, in that sense, I think it’s been a pretty straightforward journey. On the other hand, I have some hobbies now, and other activities that I really would not have imagined. I became really excited about fitness-related pursuits in my mid 30s. I’m sure that there were others in the same boat who neglected their physical health as they, as they built careers, but I took up running and swimming and triathlon and powerlifting and yoga, and that’s certainly a big part of what I enjoy in life on a day-to-day basis.

 

Will Bachman  01:15

Okay. Amazing. Well, let’s jump around a little bit. I’d love to hear about the fitness and Tyler Cowen just gave a talk yesterday that I saw, where he talked about how with advances in AI likely to advance a lot of healthcare and solve a lot of diseases, there’s higher returns on staying fit than there might have been previously, because you know a lot of diseases might be cured, but we need to, so there’s higher returns on fitness. Tell what’s your fitness routine like today, over a course of a week or a month? What are you doing?

 

Jenny Davidson  01:55

I guess I’ve got four regular things that I’m running currently. I’ve had a longstanding injury that’s, I think, of more in light of a disability than as an injury that’s going to be fixed. It has to do with my sacroiliac joint and some stuff that just doesn’t quite work right. So I’m no longer doing triathlon in a big way. I just don’t have the wherewithal to do that high volume aerobic training like I once did. So I’m very excited about all four of the things that I do regularly. First of all, I power lift with a small group at a great lifting gym called JDI Barbell in East Harlem. I go there Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 6:30am They do the programming, and there’s a really wonderful coach. It’s just a few of us, and there’s an optional fourth session that you can go to as well. So new to me this year was that I competed in my first two powerlifting meets, which was pretty darn cool.

 

Will Bachman  02:52

And the powerlifting.. just tell us a little bit about that. You know, what are you kind of focus on a particular goal or exercise, or is there a particular lift that you specialize in? Or

 

Jenny Davidson  03:09

I’ll just say, for those who don’t know this sport already, power lifting is distinct from Olympic lifting. It’s not the dramatic, highly mobile power sport that you see in the Olympics, where those lifts are clean and jerk and snatch, and so forth. That’s not what I do. The power lifting is more of a real nuts and bolts basic kind of fitness, where there are only three lifts that you do competitively. The first one is the squat, you squat in a rack, whether back squat or

 

Will Bachman  03:41

front squat,

 

Jenny Davidson  03:42

a back back squat is the competition lift, although you’ll do front squats and training, obviously, as well. The second lift is bench press, and the third lift is deadlift, so you’re lifting off the floor. I would say that my favorite lift is probably deadlift, but you, you train all three, and they complement each other really nicely, and and you work in some other lifts as well, like overhead press or squat variations, other kinds of other kinds of exercise to build volume without during the kind of heavy sets that you might do for the three main lifts.

 

Will Bachman  04:20

You want to share your numbers with us, of you know what you’re.. I was

 

Jenny Davidson  04:24

pretty happy, I am. I was, if you remember me from college, I was not an athletic person. In fact, I ignored many therapists who said you will be less depressed and anxious if you would exercise, and in the late 80s to a non-athletic person, that just seemed like a very far-fetched piece of advice, but I did find once I was in grad school that exercise did indeed improve my mood and my keep me on a more even keel. So I don’t have any background from childhood in any sports, and I’m pretty pleased with how I do. I’m, I’m in, I’m in my mid 50s and my last. Eight, I squatted 90 kilograms, I bench pressed 55 kilograms, and I deadlifted 115 kilograms. So I hope that I can keep those numbers going up, but both because I enjoy it and from a health standpoint, it’s this is clearly like a good thing, a good thing to be doing with my time,

 

Will Bachman  05:21

wow. Okay, and for someone who’s listening, who’s, yeah, I’ve been thinking about, I know I should do some strength training or weightlifting. What would you, what from your experience, what’s the way for maybe someone who’s been running periodically but haven’t really been doing weightlifting? What’s your advice on how to get into it, you know, and safely and in a way that doesn’t turn you off, like what’s what’s a good way to sort of get into this weightlifting

 

Jenny Davidson  05:48

that’s going to look different for every person, but for me, and I think for anybody who doesn’t have a background where you’ve had coaching on form and technique stuff, you know, for strength and conditioning, it’s quite a good idea, if you can, to start in a situation where you are somewhat supervised, so maybe have a few sessions with a personal trainer. I very much like lifting in a small group, so not just lifting by myself at a gym, but I used to lift at the powerlifting club at Chelsea Piers, which is the big New York City gym, and the setup that I have now, they run a program that’s called Strength Groundwork, where you know the head coach creates the training schedule and sort of eight week blocks, but you also show up and there may be only three or four of you, so when you’re lifting, your coach is watching, and is going to be able to say, oh, you know, you need to have more internal rotation at the hips when you do that. Lift, you know, your, your, your, your knees are splaying out in a way that isn’t conducive to, like, keeping a safe, safe load pattern, or is impeding your technique, you’re leaning forward too much when you’re squatting in the rack, so a little bit of supervision at first can really help increase confidence. We’re in a golden age for technique-based sports, however, because there’s so much good quality footage online in terms of being able to see see different people with different body proportions lifting, and see what that should look like. I still don’t think there’s any substitute, though, for having a true seasoned professional have an eye on you and give you those personal tips.

 

Will Bachman  07:36

Okay, and what’s it been the impact for you personally on days when you, I mean, just not only obviously you’re getting stronger, but does it just walking about, does you get, you know, sort of feel more energetic on the days you lift, or does it just sort of feel lighter on your feet, or more creative, or what’s been kind of the impact on you? The rest,

 

Jenny Davidson  08:03

whenever you’re doing some serious exercise, people say that their exercise makes them more energetic, but you know, if I leave it shortly after 6am and I get home at like 815 and I’ve jogged over to the gym and I’ve worked out for an hour and I’ve walked home, honestly, once I’ve eaten and showered. The thing that’s most at the top of my mind is not going and being productive. It’s like lying down, you know. I don’t know that it makes me.. it doesn’t.. I don’t think it makes me more energetic on a day by day basis, but it puts me in a great, great mood. Just the biochemical results of doing a sort of focused and mindful exercise, I find are pretty much unbeatable. There’s nothing else like it, so it, it gives a shape to my days. My job is that I’m an English professor, I teach at Columbia, and the nature of that work, in many ways, it suits me very well. I’m a quite solitary person, I like spending a lot of time by myself, but even the most solitary person may go slightly off the rails if they have no schedule and are working at home, and so forth. So I really treasured the people that I meet through the fitness stuff, too. I, for instance, I also have an amazing yoga teacher, and there’s a little group of the three of us who did a lot of yoga together online during the pandemic and really became a sort of three musketeers type group, so that’s my, I would say that’s my main human contact that isn’t related to work, and I really appreciate it.

 

Will Bachman  09:37

So you got the lifting three days a week and you’re doing yoga as well.

 

Speaker 1  09:43

The other two things I’m doing currently are jogging, I mean, I won’t call it running, it’s more like a shuffle most of the time, but it, there’s again, it’s there’s something very special about going out there, no music, no data collection, even just doing, you know, easy outdoor. Our aerobic activity very lovely, and I also have a weekly private Pilates session that’s more therapeutic than everything else. We work on the stuff that has arisen from my SI joint problems, and whatever is whatever’s given me a problem that week, it’s usually something to do with the right side of my back, you know. We work on on twisting and torso rotation, and try and make some kind of intervention to counter whatever bad thing is going

 

Will Bachman  10:29

1. Very cool. All right. Well, so that’s fitness. Tell us a bit about literature and your career, you know, in literature, leaving from Harvard. Walk us through. I imagined grad school, and then walk us, walk us, what’s your specialty?

 

Jenny Davidson  10:45

I went to grad school at Yale, studied in the English department there. I am a person who likes underdogs and underdog type things, so that may be partly why I gravitated to what is probably the least well known of the historical periods of British literature, by which I mean to say 18th century British literature. Often people then say, what even is that? So I studied 18th century literature there, and I was very, very fortunate. My first year on the job market, I got an assistant professor position at Columbia, so I expect my professional profile is a little bit unusual in the context of our class. I was hired in the year 2000 so I have had 25 years with the same employer, and essentially, you know, the title changes, but the job remains more or less the same. So, I, I really love the mix of teaching and writing, I feel most myself in a classroom, and the students at Columbia are simply fantastic. I have never taught a class that I did not enjoy. I teach a lot of different things. I like to teach the classes that are for everybody, the intro to the English major, the, you know, the required MA seminar that all the MA and PhD students take. I enjoy, I enjoy thinking broadly about what all students need to learn. I also teach 18th century literature, my specialty. So I might be teaching a class on the comparative 18th century European novel, where I’d be teaching French novels like Manon Lescaut and Dangerous Liaisons alongside English classics by people like Richardson, Fielding, Stern, maybe going to some Goethe or some decide at the end, so a mix of seminar and lecture teaching, and increasingly what I one class, one type of class that I find I particularly enjoy teaching is not something that I did at Harvard. It’s more like what I did in grad school at Yale, where I teach a class that’s just on one big book or a single author. So one of the classes I like that I do like this that I’ve been teaching for a long time, we read Richardson, Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa, or the history of a young lady. It is a novel written entirely in letters, an epistolary novel, and it is literally a million words long. So, I sell the students on it. None of them have heard of it, you know. Most of them, you get the occasional oddball who’s read it three times, you know, because they’re an eccentric like me. But mostly people really don’t know about it, so I lure them in with the promise of a demented and transformative reading experience, and then we essentially just plow through it, and it serves as a way of learning about voice and narration and 18th century culture in all sorts of different dimensions, the condition of women, legal constraints, habits around burials and mourning, you know, all sorts of things like that. So a newer class like that, that I have, that I’ve rolled out, that I’m looking forward to teaching again, is a class that just focuses on Moby Dick. We read it at the beginning of the semester, slowly over about five weeks. There, there are some students who’ve read it before. It’s such an iconic book, but we take it at the pace for someone really unfamiliar with it. We read that, we then read some other Melville, some other works, sort of about Melville, or coming out of the same culture that Melville was, and then at the end we come back and we read Moby Dick again, this time faster, over two weeks, so that we can revisit it, so that everybody is rereading, and there’s no doubt that with these complex literary texts, being able to read something twice in the same classroom with the same group is really fun.

 

Will Bachman  14:43

I will give a shout out since you brought it up to the New Bedford Whaling Museum that runs the Moby Dick Marathon every January. My son and I went to it this january 2 and third of this year, and they read Moby Dick out loud, end to end. And call me Ishmael all the way through, and you can sign up and take turns. I think this October is when it opens up, you can sign up for a reading slot, and you get five minutes to read part of a chapter. It was super fun. I highly recommend an

 

Jenny Davidson  15:14

amazing phenom. Yeah, I love it.

 

Will Bachman  15:17

Yeah, there was like 3000 people there, and so you really, if you want to go, you really need to sign up early, because it sold out. I mean, it was free, but it sells out, so that was fun. Okay, so how did you get drawn to the 18th century? The 18th century, yeah, the 1700s right? How did you, how did you, you know, what did you test out different things, and like, what was that story?

 

Jenny Davidson  15:42

As an undergraduate, I did some work in the 18th century, but I was really more focused on 19th century novels, and still, if you asked me for desert island books, you know, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, those are just great novels to reread, and you know, read and reread in a way that I don’t know that I would say that about Henry Fielding’s novels, for instance, I, but, but I found, you know, that the 19th century novels, Dickens is a good example, they, they’re pretty accessible, I mean, I know we talk about how no one reads anymore, but they’re really pretty, they’re, they’re straightforward narrative, realist narratives that have a lot of the same pleasures that a series of television of the kind that we all do watch now has, character development and voice. They’re, if you’re a reader at all, they’re relatively accessible, and I found myself more interested in going towards works that were going to be harder for students to understand without more of a framework or more assistance from me, it gave me a clearer sense of purpose about what I was going to do in the classroom, so I’m drawn to the 18th century, sort of late 1600s through late 1700s partly because, unlike the early modern period, the Renaissance, as it is, was what’s always called, I think, from about 716 90. You really feel like you’re in the company of modern imagination, so you read something like Locke’s essay concerning human understanding. Let’s say you’re reading it fresh off the press at 1797 at 1690 1691 you know you’re really in the presence of a way of thinking in a form of language that feels you have, you have the shock of recognition, and at the same time there are parts of Locke’s thinking that will then sort of shoot you back out of living in the book, because they’re so strange, an example that I’ve often used with students, Locke wrote a little book called Some Thoughts Concerning Education that was based on a set of letters he wrote to a friend who went to his advice for child rearing, and so you know, you’ll, you’ll come to, you’ll move from something that sounds completely rational, you know, to something like, oh, and you’re, you make sure to clothe your children poorly in winter and give them shoes with holes in them, because their health will benefit from contact with the cold air and water, you know. So, and you just think it’s such a wild mix of the recognition and then the sense of strangeness, that’s the thing that really sold me on that period, and students don’t come in with any, with usually with much knowledge, or with many expectations, or rather, maybe I’d even say they come in with low expectations, so it’s easy to captivate them with how interesting the books are that I teach.

 

Will Bachman  18:40

Okay, so you mentioned Clarissa. For those of us who maybe are not deeply embedded in 18th century British literature, what would some.. what would maybe some of the top five or six that come to mind that that would be good entry, entry points for those of

 

Jenny Davidson  18:59

us, the 18th century book that everyone should have read is Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Okay, sort of know of it rather than having actually read it. It’s absolutely brilliant. Swift’s other prose satires are extraordinary as well. A Modest Proposal is the one that’s probably best known, but I would also recommend an argument against abolishing Christianity, and I would enormously recommend if you have some reading stamina and don’t mind reading something where you’re going to have to tolerate the sense that you’re not understanding everything. Swift’s Tale of a Tub, it’s a book that comes out of the early years of enlightenment, it’s anti-enlightenment. The persona who narrates much of it is a modern projector who is clearly mad in certain respects. In Swift’s mind, you know, if you read Descartes a lot too much, like you’re really going to go absolutely mad. It’s a way of thinking that. Contravenes all of classical traditional values, but the genius of Swift is that his impersonation is so vivid and so intense that he actually almost becomes the modern voice that he is trying to expose, you know, there’s a sort of attraction to the brilliant madness that the text can’t quite keep in control, so Swift, I think, is a great place to think of going. The novels of Frances Burney are less well known than they should be. She published four in her lifetime, and everyone is worth reading in different ways, but her first one, Evelina, is probably the most accessible, a really delightful read that anticipates some of the things that we’re more familiar with in the writing of Jane Austen, and I’ll just give one more recommendation, because it’s a book that I have been wrestling with and trying to write my own book about for many years now. I think I finally have a solution and a plan, and that this book is really finally going to be finished. And this is Edward Gebben’s history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. So I think it’s, it’s interesting in terms of the contributions that Gibbon made to the historical method. He crystallizes a number of different 18th century trends about, you know, how you, how you theorize evidence, and what really constitutes evidence, and how you, how you can, how you can use certain kinds of modern, maybe even statistical thinking, or, you know, to, to build a world picture that is probable, that that makes sense, even in conditions where you, where you have imperfect knowledge, but it’s also just a masterpiece of English literature. The writing style is to me irresistible, and you can’t go wrong. You don’t need to read the whole thing from start to finish. There’s a good edition, Penguin did a very affordable, great edition of the whole thing. You can buy the whole three volumes as a set, but the editor, David Walmersley, also produced an abridged one volume version that that has a very wise selection of what are the things that you really wouldn’t want to miss. So, anyone who’s looking for a serious reading project for the summer, for some other time, I think you couldn’t, you couldn’t do better if you want something that’s not a novel, especially then go to Gemini’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,

 

Will Bachman  22:32

and then there’s Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, Wealth of

 

Jenny Davidson  22:34

Nations is another fantastic read, Smith is such a great prose stylist, I love the non-fiction prose of the 18th century, Burke’s reflections on the revolution in France is another favorite of mine, and Burke’s prose is extraordinary too.

 

Will Bachman  22:49

Yeah, I mean, actually, one of my goals for this year is reading Adam Smith, about a third of the way through, and it was much more – it’s actually quite readable, more than some, a lot of modern economics, like papers, for example, but, but Tristan Shandy is that Tristan

 

Jenny Davidson  23:07

Shandy is another book that I teach, and again, I don’t assign it in its entirety, because it’s a bit of a doorstop, and to me, actually, the whimsy grows old. I think that you can get the point of Tristan Shandy by reading the first three, as they’re called, volumes, they’re shorter than you would normally think of a volume being, and I have a tried and true set of extracts where I then say, okay, make sure you read these three two-page segments that come later, because you will want to know about them at least, but a little goes a long way, Stern’s Stern’s fiction, a sentimental journey, is actually in some ways more accessible, and is a very lovely window into 18th century ideas about sensibility and bodies and sociability, and how people are connected to each other. So, for someone thinking Stern, but not quite ready to do Tristan Shandy, you could just read the first few pages of Tristan Shandy, get the idea, and then go and read A Sentimental Journey.

 

Will Bachman  24:07

Yeah, you won’t miss a whole lot of the plot, that’s for sure. You

 

Jenny Davidson  24:11

won’t miss a whole lot of the plot. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. And I would be remiss if I did not also mention Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones, which is just one of the most perfectly crafted fictions I think of all time. It, I don’t, I don’t love and passionately identify with Fielding, but anytime I read something by Fielding, and especially when I reread Tom Jones, I’m just staggered by the craft, the intelligence, and the the grand, but also meticulous craft that he has in that novel.

 

Will Bachman  24:47

Tell us about the reading public in the 18th century. Who was reading all these, you know, million word books? I mean, were these published serialized, so that they were getting paid by the word? Or tell us a. About the reading public, you know, the

 

Jenny Davidson  25:01

late 17th into the early 18th century is one of the moments when popular print explodes. There’s a succession of sort of technological developments that make it, you know, and they’re better roads, so pamphlets can be distributed to more cities more cheaply, you know, so a lot of different factors contribute their start being political pamphlet bestsellers. Richardson’s novel Pamela is often thought of as the first European novelistic bestseller, as opposed to some kind of a short prose tract, and one one historian of reading estimates that each copy of Pamela may have reached as many as 18 different readers, because there’s a sort of initial reader who’s the perhaps young woman of some affluence whose family buys the original copy, but then she might be reading it aloud in the family circle to a family of six, and then after she’s read it, it might go to her personal servant, who might similarly, you know, read and share, and so forth. So literacy is rising over the period, and as in any time and place, more people can read than can write. Right, writing is a less accessible skill set than reading, so, so the there’s quite a lot of evidence about reading in this period, books that survive with marginalia, people’s letters, and so forth. More evidence from the point of view of elite readers, but plenty of evidence, increasing evidence about working-class readers and writers as well.

 

Will Bachman  26:42

Okay, I have a question, and I’ve always wanted this for literature professors. Take not just one day, but let’s take a month. What does your reading look like? Are you reading modern novels? Are you reread, redoing a lot of rereading of stuff to prepare for class, are you reading? Oh, this is an 18th century novel I never read yet. Are you reading a lot of literary criticism? What is your kind of.. I’m reading, probably

 

Jenny Davidson  27:09

a little bit anomalous, because I find in general that I find in general that a lot of humanities professors read less outside their field than you would think, and that there are many literature professors who find that they don’t have the time to read, say, contemporary fiction, or, or, whatever it is, so I don’t know that I’m as absolutely voracious a reader as I was 15 years ago. I wrote a book that’s called Reading Style: A Life in Sentences, that’s actually about my life as a reader.

 

Will Bachman  27:41

Okay,

 

Jenny Davidson  27:42

I have an unusual relationship with reading. I’m a very fast reader, and I will be, I will be very happily reading like five books every day. You know, it’s a little bit ridiculous. It’s more of a problem finding enough fodder when I’m in a demanding time of the semester. I’m, I’m rereading the books I’m teaching, or reading for the first time sometimes, but I’m also coming home and devouring several novels about vampires or crime fiction, or whatever. Where more people have television these days, I think, for their, for the story and voice in their lives.

 

Will Bachman  28:14

So, you’re wait, so you’re a fast reader? Are you hyperlexic, or are you?

 

Jenny Davidson  28:18

I mean, I could read when I was three years old. I can’t remember, no one taught me, and I can’t remember not knowing how to read. I was just reading compulsively in a story that I tell in the book, as my English grandmother came to visit the summer I turned five, and she was actually worried I was reading so much, and thought that mother should take me to the doctor, so it’s really, you know, it’s always been a very special thing for me. In fact, recently I’ve taken something up that comes exactly from from childhood reading, when I was maybe seven or eight. I found a copy of Jane Goodall’s book, In the Shadow of Man, on my parents’ shelf, and I read it, and I became completely obsessed. I figured I would be a primatologist. I have all these pictures where I’m like with binoculars, you know, Jane Goodall style garb. It ended up that I think human language and literature and culture are probably more interesting to me, as much as I love animal behavior and primates. But two years ago I was lucky enough to go with my partner on a vacation to Tanzania. I picked the place we were going to do safari. I picked the place and planned the itinerary. The first place we went to was Gombe National Park, where God all did that original research. I absolutely fell in love with it, and I came home from that trip. Just all of the force of the original obsession had returned to me, and since then I’ve been learning Swahili, and I went back last year, and I just got back from another trip where I was able to record 12 interviews with in Swahili, of course, with 10, with, with, with 12 of. Men who were the Tanzanian field assistants who Goodall hired to do a lot of the observational research in the forest, you know, in the 70s and 80s, they were often like young men or even boys who started working for her. Then that was the upshot of my first trip. I thought, you know, there’s so much writing about this research and these chimpanzees, but what about these men who were really doing so much of the, of the footwork on this? Like, we just don’t get their, you know, they’re acknowledged. I wouldn’t, in any sense, imply that Goodall didn’t treat them with enormous respect and serious consideration, but their voices aren’t in the record. So, this I’ve been pointing towards it for the last two years, and I’m very happy that I’ve now taken it to a next level.

 

Will Bachman  30:46

So, you were so inspired, you went and learned Swahili.

 

Jenny Davidson  30:50

I mean, you can’t do a serious oral history if you’re a language and literature person without being able to, you know, my Swahili is not as good as it needs to be. I’m keeping on working on it, but we, we did, I had a Tanzanian partner who was asking questions in Swahili, and then I could understand, depended how clearly people spoke, sometimes less than half, sometimes rather more than half. It really was variable, and could ask follow-ups or make sure that we’d covered things I was interested in.

 

Will Bachman  31:19

And what’s the plan for these? These tapes, are you creating some kind of output from this, or

 

Jenny Davidson  31:24

they’re going to go as an oral history digital repository at the library at Columbia? But yes, I am hoping to publish at the very least some essays, and maybe even a small book that will be about this. The other, the other thing that got going on this last trip, when, when Rama was our guide at Gombe at the through the hotel that we were staying at when we first went there, and he is just an extraordinary person. His father had worked for Goodall, so he really grew up in the park and around these chimpanzees, extraordinarily knowledgeable. It was his stories that made me think, oh, wow, there are stories that need to be preserved out there. So he has been a really wonderful partner in this enterprise, but when I asked him last year if he would be interested in doing this with me, I’m very aware of the power and wealth imbalance that comes when you’re working with somebody, sort of a regular person in a country like Tanzania, not part of an elite, not with the kinds of access that I have. So I asked him then whether there was a project that I could help him with that mattered to him, and in fact he had a dream of many years there. Jane Goodall Institute runs a big program that’s called Takari, that it’s a broad, broad-based environmental protection program. They do forest management, and they do all sorts of things, and they run a big worldwide children’s organization that’s called Roots and Shoots, where people come up with conservation-related projects from the local community, and then pursue it, you know, and get and kind of document it as a Roots and Shoots project, so when Roots and Shoots was first operating in Kigoma, which is the city in Tanzania that that Gombe is close to, they part of the program was that they were doing primary school education that would involve actually growing plant seedlings, tree seedlings in a tree nursery and bringing them to the school and giving them to children to plant in their homes, and as you know, for early childhood education the tactile is king, you know, like give somebody a real actual thing that they can do something with, like that’s the way that the message, you know, gets across, that trees are so important. Now, the foundation really moved away from doing that kind of work, because they found that making larger scale, you know, it’s great to plant trees and villages, it does to some extent affect, you know, affect the landscape, but really, larger scale forest management techniques and water engineering projects, and so forth, are more relevant. So it’s many years since they last were giving away seedlings and going into primary schools to do this kind of education. And Rama’s vision was to get that started again in, in this region, like this is where he grew up, he knows everybody and all the villages, so, so on the final day before we went to Gombe, when we finished our interviews, Rama and his friend Hudu, who has started an NGO in Tanzania called the Green and Humanitarian Organization, but that doesn’t have a way of contacting American donors or anything like that. I did a great meeting with them. We inspected this, the site that they proposed for the tree nursery, and I wrote up a memory, memorandum of understanding, you know, committing some money to them, but also to start up a nonprofit in the US that will be able to. Take donations and have them be tax deductible and funnel the money to them, so it, I guess, again, if I think back to how I was when I was an undergraduate versus now, I always was a really obsessive, like I always was all in on whatever I was doing, like theater or reading books or whatever crazy thing I was doing, that that part of me, I feel very lucky that I’ve been able to keep alive, and just, you know, I really feel like I can, I can pretty much do any crazy thing I want to, within reason.

 

Will Bachman  35:30

Okay, I admit, I would. I was not expecting interviewing a literature professor that we would get into the Tanzania, and that research that’s amazing. Tell us a bit about your current take on the guidance that you’re giving to your students about how to use AI when they’re reading this 18th century literature. What would you encourage them to do, and yeah, how do you find it’s a useful aid for someone trying to engage with that literature?

 

Jenny Davidson  36:11

It’s a, it’s a complicated question. If you don’t mind, I’ll give you a few different components of answer to it. Please, please. First of all, I should say a lot of humanities professors are desperately against AI because of one specific kind of AI, which is to say a lot of students will use Chat GPT, etc. To it’s fair enough to call it cheat on assignments, where we get, we give assignments where the point of the assignment is for you to put in the time grappling with the concepts and putting thoughts into words, and so forth, like it’s real skill-based education, where if you use a Chat GPT or a Claude to do that, you’re really missing the point of it, because it’s not about the end product, like it’s not that you had a deliverable that you need to give to somebody, like the point was to put in the hours, like the same way that at the gym, like you can’t cheat that, like the point is to do the work, and I had an interesting experience because I was sitting in as an auditor in the first and second year Swahili on campus, and I really saw firsthand how devastating reliance on things like Google Translate can be in a language class. It’s very hard to resist the lore. I myself found, oh, wow, like I had to stop using Google Translate as a dictionary and get a paper dictionary. And in this day and age, and when it’s a language like Swahili, like paper dictionaries are not as easy to come by as you might think, you know, it’s not like you’re learning French in their million French dictionaries. So it, what I saw myself was how very easy it is. Oh, you know, you’re going to say, like, my sister, and you’re going to look up sister, but then you start putting in my sister, and then you don’t learn the personal pronouns, like, because there’s memory and drilling involved in learning a language, and for writing, the same thing goes, like the, the what I always say to my students is, I’m, I’m not really trained, I am helping you become a better writer, but what I’m really doing is training you to think so clearly that you can transfer, translate those thoughts into language with relatively little, you know, friction or effort, and so forth. So, in terms of student writing, or indeed student reading of literature, or reading of a, you know, a simple literary work in a language that you’re learning, I do not see that the generative AI stuff is yet very useful. I don’t see the application. I do, however, see the extraordinary utility as a tool that some humanities students and humanities scholars might be able to get, and I’ll give you an example. My Swahili really isn’t great, and oral history interviews, even if they’re in your native tongue, or like it’s a lot, like I mean, you know, imagine you were trying to type a transcript of every one of these podcasts, what a nightmare job that would be, right? So there’s a, there’s a site called notta.ai it will do quick transcriptions from an audio file or video in like 100 different languages, including Swahili. So it was the obstacle was that the internet, where I was, was pretty weak, so that that’s a limiter, but I was able to come home with one or two, or even three of these interviews from a day, let’s say each interview is an hour long, and if I could get them uploaded, you know, not a.ai would give, would spit out a, is it 100% accurate? No, I will still need to check them by listening, and I.

 

Jenny Davidson  39:59

Have yet to grasp whether my language skills are going to be good enough or whether I need to get someone else to help with that, but you know, you’ve got this 10,000 words transcribed in Swahili in two minutes, and then you can put that into Google Translate, and like 10 seconds later that same day, when you’re not a fluent Swahili speaker, you have a good enough English language transcript of that interview that you just did, so there are all sorts of uses like that that I think we’re only just beginning to get a handle on, and I’m absolutely keeping an open mind about what’s going to be useful for now, you know, even pre AI, I think it’s what I say, I read less, I read less fiction than I did 20 years ago, and that’s really because of the internet, because I all I read a lot of news sites, and I’m on social media, and you know, hours go by where once I would have been reading a book, and now I’m not reading a book, it’s a fair trade off, I read plenty of books, I’m not fretting over it, but I’m sure that you.. I don’t imagine it won’t resonate with you if I say read good deep reading happens in distraction-free environments where we can go in for many hours and then sort of emerge as if we’ve been swimming, you know, deep underwater, and then pop up, and with every passing year, I think it’s harder to create that environment, that distraction-free environment. So I prefer a screen-free classroom, insofar as that’s possible, and I strongly encourage students who want to be reading PDFs and digital stuff to get, I use a ReMarkable tablet that has it’s like a little bit more like a Kindle, right? It’s, you know, it’s paper-like, there’s a stylus, and you, you can’t be like, “Oh, I’ll just go and check the New York Times for whether they loved it, you know what I mean? You can’t, it’s completely separate from internet browsing. I had a midlife ADHD diagnosis, which makes a lot of sense, and which has let me understand certain things about how I work, but for me, you know, even if I’m trying to write a letter of recommendation, it’s much better for me to take it somewhere, maybe even write it by hand. Well, not letters of rock, I’d be typing them, but you know, if internet is available, I’m like down the rabbit hole, and an hour later I think, oh no, what just happened. So I’m really very focused on the things that humanities professors have always taught, which is how to create a quiet mind, so that you can immerse yourself in a reading, and how you can then really be present in a classroom and listen to what others have to say and work to think more clearly and to be able to formulate your thoughts in a way that another person will respond to. It’s one of the, it’s one of the vices of seminar teaching that you’ll often see a seminar where every student is just talking to the professor, like one student to the professor, next student professor. So, I’m very keen in my classes. On the first day, I give everyone like a little name tag that goes in front of them on the table, and I say it’s really very rude to just say he, she, or they if you want to refer back to someone’s comments. I want you to get in the habit of thinking about how your comment relates to what someone else said, and actually, you know, bringing them into the conversation, right? Like what Grayson said a few minutes ago made me think about a different aspect of the book that I hadn’t thought about before. So, those, those are the skills that I’m really prioritizing, and you can see that in that context it’s really not that I’m against AI, but that just isn’t going to be a priority in my, in my teaching, especially.

 

Will Bachman  43:51

Yeah. Okay. Tell us about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way.

 

Jenny Davidson  44:01

I mean, I had amazing professors. I felt I came in. I one thing I hated about Harvard was the core, because I knew what I wanted to do, and those terrible first year advisors would say, “Oh, take all the core, do that. I’m like, “Are you kidding me? Like, I don’t want to do this bland gen ed type stuff, it’s ridiculous. I already want to be taking graduate seminars in literature. Please just get out of my way and let me do what I know I should be doing. So I was pretty lucky, I think, in terms of being able to find faculty in English who were just spectacular. I took classes with Barbara Johnson, Elaine Scarry was a very important professor for me. Philip Fisher took an extraordinary class with Simon Schama that was on writing narrative history, where half of the class we read great narrative histories, and then the other half of the class we workshopped our own original projects in narrative history writing and. And as much as I, you know, I have the core classes I took. This is where the ADHD diagnosis makes sense. I’m like, I’m really like, I’m academics comes really easy to me. Why do I keep on getting like a B minus? Because I can’t stay awake in this incredibly boring lecture, you know? I took some classes, oh, they were, you know some of those big core lectures, it’s just a bad way of learning for me. I don’t want, I could read it so much more quickly. I don’t want someone to be imparting information to me. I literally would be asleep, like I would get in and I would just fall asleep, because it was, it was that boring, boring. So I would say I took about six core classes that were so unbelievably boring that they put me off the subject altogether, but were a few that were great, and in particular, I would then single out a class that the political philosopher Judith Shklar taught on political obligation, and a fantastic class that I’m so grateful that I took, especially now that I’m writing about Gibbon, that was called the development of the modern state. It was taught by Stanley Hoffman, Peter Hall, and Tom Ertman. You know, they covered different topics based on their different expertise, and it was an incredibly useful grounding in sort of the like that long scope of European history and the development of systems of taxation and something like the modern state system and so forth, which I wouldn’t have thought I was that interested in. I’m completely a literature and culture person, but I do love history, and that was the, that was the exception to the general rule. If you want to know what a boring class was, Charles Maier’s World War One class, it was partly because I knew so much about it already, and I had a terrible TA who knew nothing. She was an American history grad student, she knew nothing, so the section was a complete waste of time, but he would just drone on about battles, and I would fall asleep.

 

Will Bachman  47:01

Jenny, where can listeners find you online? Who, if they want to track more about your research and writing? The

 

Jenny Davidson  47:09

place where I’m very active online is on Facebook. If you search Jenny Davidson, there you should find me. I have some great photos up right now from my Gombe chimpanzee trekking, so be a good time to go and see if you can look, take a look at those. I also can be found very easily in the direct, in the email directory of the Columbia University website. Just look up Jenny Davidson in the directory, and you’ll be able to get my email that way.

 

Will Bachman  47:35

Fantastic, Jenny. Thank you so much for joining today.

 

Jenny Davidson  47:38

It was lovely speaking with you. Thank you for having me. Bye.