Episode 134 - Timothy Harrison: "I had $287 in my bank account ."

Associate Professor Timothy Harrison finished high school and ventured off to build his career as a model until he decided to pivot to a scholarly pathway and fulfill his dream as a novelist. Now as an author and co-author of multiple books, Professor Harrison finds joy in teaching, reading, and thinking about various English literature in the 16th to 17th century. Tune in to listen to his view on why Humanities matter, and his unusual career journey to becoming a University of Chicago professor. 

Transcript

Stephen00:00
Hello and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Timothy Harrison of the Department of English. Professor Harrison is the author of Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England and the coauthor of John Dunn's Physics, which was recently published by the University of Chicago Press.

Here's a first for our show. Professor Harrison worked as a model after high school and wasn't even sure he'd ever go to college. We'll talk about his work on the concept of consciousness, the curious conjunctive anomaly he's exploring in some of his latest research, and his unique and roundabout route to becoming a University of Chicago professor. 

Professor Harrison, welcome to The Course. Thank you so much for joining me. How are you?

Timothy Harrison 00:40
 I'm really well. Thank you so much for having me here today. 

Stephen00:43
Yeah, absolutely. Could you please just let our listeners know what your position is at university and just a little bit in layman's terms of what it is that you really do.

Timothy Harrison 00:53
 Sure. I'm an associate professor in the Department of English in the Division of the humanities, and I'm also a member in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought in the Social Sciences, and I'm associated faculty in the Divinity School. And in my primary obligation to the English department, I teach early modern English literature, which is to say 16th and 17th century English literature.

So I teach classes on Shakespeare, Donne, Milton. I teach graduate classes on the intellectual culture of that period in its various complexities, and my writing also focuses on that period. And I write about poetry often in relation to various other contemporary discourses like philosophy, theology, rhetoric, and so on. 

Stephen01:44
Yeah, we were talking before we recorded, you have a or you took a fairly unconventional path, before actually you got your bachelor's degree. So, yeah, can you just set the scene for us and, and tell me a little bit about, you know, what you kind of felt your prospects were coming out of high school and what unfolded between that time and when you actually ended up going to college. 

Timothy Harrison 02:06
 Sure. So, just to back up even slightly earlier, when I was a kid, I really wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write science fiction or fantasy novels, and I read a lot, and therefore, because I had been quite sick as a kid, and so I was confined to various hospital rooms, and so all I had to do was read, and at a certain point in high school, I was no longer sickly and academics were no longer a priority for me for a variety of reasons and I ended up all but failing out.

So I graduated just by the skin of my teeth from high school. I almost failed my English class, in fact. And so there was no chance. Most of my friends went off to university, but there was no chance that I would have been able to do so. And through, I don't know, a variety of happenstance, circumstances, I found myself being a model, a male model at the end of high school.

That's also partly why I didn't do so well. I was kind of traveling back and forth between where I grew up and Toronto, which is the major Canadian city close to where I grew up. And so after high school, I went to do that and I did that for while working in restaurants and modeling for two or three years traveling to Milan. I worked in Athens. I worked in a variety other places. 

And yeah, in 2002, I ended up going to Cape Town, South Africa, where I worked as a, as a model. This was a new market, Miami had instituted tax laws that were disadvantageous for European clients. And so they wanted to shoot their beach stuff in Cape Town.

And so, while I was there, I ended up meeting the person who has, who became my wife a year later, a Dutch woman, and we were kind of living in the same building, and we fell immediately in head over heels in love. And then I moved back with her to Amsterdam, tried to immigrate to the Netherlands that didn't work. And then she successfully a year later immigrated to Canada. 

And when we first got together, she had also not gone to university. And we said to each other, if we stay together, we'll go back to school together, to pursue an undergraduate degree, just to enhance, I don't know, our, what we know and our chances in the world or whatever. 

So we were in the middle of saving money to go to school, and in Canada this was 5,000 Canadian dollars a year. So we needed to save 10,000. which for us was a lot because I was just working in restaurants and she was immigrating and so couldn't work. And we said that when we had $10,000 in our bank account, we would apply to school. 

And I remember very clearly I had $287 in my bank account and I went to deposit my check. And there were instead of $287, there was $10,287 in my bank account. So there was the magic number $10,000, there it was. And I went to the bank manager and I asked him where this $10,000 had come from. And he had no idea. Eventually we learned it was the government had mistakenly put someone's tax return in our bank account.

And so we didn't spend the money. But we took it as a sort of sign or whatever and said, okay, we don't have to wait to have the money saved. We'll just apply for school. So this was a freak accident, I suppose that, you know, went on to define much of my life, and so I applied to the University of Toronto. Christina applied to Ryerson University. And I didn't have the grades to get into university, so I went through a program called the Millie Rotman Shime Academic Bridging Program, which is run through Woodsworth College at the University of Toronto, and that's basically for people who don't have the grades to get in.

And the deal was, if you did a full, if you did a yearlong class and you got above, I think it was a B+ then you could get into the university full time. And if you got above a C+ or something, you could get into the university part time. And I did well in that course and really enjoyed it, and then entered the university, in that way, not knowing what I wanted to study, and not really knowing anything about universities other than that, you know, they taught you stuff.

Stephen06:22
Yeah. So I was going to ask if you knew what you wanted to study. It sounds like no, I mean, what were your goals and how was that? Was it a difficult adjustment after spending a lot of time pursuing other things?

Timothy Harrison 06:35
 Oh, it was a very difficult adjustment because I couldn't work full time anymore, but we couldn't afford for me not to work, same for Christina. And so I believe in my first year, I worked 40 hours a week as a waiter, while taking a full course load. And I had heard that if you got grades above, you know, an A or A plus kind of average that the university would offer scholarships to you.

And so I worked really hard for that to happen. And in my second year it almost happened but didn't and so I worked 20 hours a week and then in my third and fourth year, that's when things really changed and I was able to focus completely on my studies. But I went into the university thinking that I wanted to be a novelist, and have, and you know, even while I was modeling, I was trying to write novels badly.

And at a certain point I just realized that I didn't know anything. I needed to know something if I wanted to write. And so I went in thinking I would study English literature or philosophy or maybe religion or a variety of other subjects and just kind of explored. And gradually, I think over the course of my first year, I realized how exciting it could be to write about the work of other people.

This was not something I had really done since, you know, the really terrible hamburger essays that you're made to write in high school. And I found out that I was really quite good at that, at writing about poets had said or what novelists had written. And that I really enjoyed it, and that I was probably better at that than I was at writing my own fiction.

And so I decided I would try to become a professor. Rather perversely, I had the thought that this would be the ticket to economic security, you know? That’s how, wildly naive I was, you know, somehow it all worked out rather magically. But, yeah, obviously, given the current state of austerity and shrinking in various academic markets, particularly, the humanities, a ticket to prosperity the PhD is not…

Stephen08:40
I have not heard it referred to as such any, anytime recently. Yeah. was, there a specific point at which you thought, okay, I need to go for the PhD. Like, I'm gonna pursue this at a higher level, or did that kind of just dawn on you gradually? Like, how did you end up committing to that? 

Timothy Harrison 09:01
 It happened in my first year as an undergraduate. I remember I was in an English class, a philosophy class, a religion class, and a history class. And each of the professors said, oh, you should really do a PhD. You know, that's something you should, you should think about and I really didn't know what a PhD was.

I didn't know. I mean, to be honest, I didn't really know what a professor was until I went to university. So, yeah, it just seemed like this kind of, I don't know, magical faraway thing that one could aspire, you know, to be so. Gradually I believe it was clarified for me as I talked to various mentors, and, you know, faculty members and PhD students and so on, who were serving as my teaching instructors or teaching assistants. And so I think maybe by my fourth year, I kind of had a sense of what it was about, but as a sort of horizon of possibility or something it first came onto my radar in the first year of my undergraduate degree. Yeah.

Stephen10:00
Who are a few people who you would say were essential or, you know, like really important support to you at various points in your journey, not necessarily just to what we've just discussed, but yeah. I mean, you mentioned mentors, like who are some of the big people who stand out in your mind? 

Timothy Harrison 10:16
 Sure. Well, I mean the first person would be my wife, Christina. You know, with whom I've gone, I went through this whole kind of giant metamorphosis, you know, with. And she was there and supportive, you know, every step of the way, and knew me before I had an intellectual thought in my head, and now also knows me as a professor, and so that's a journey we've gone through together.

In terms of professional mentors, there was a couple. The first main one was a person who worked in the writing center at the University of Toronto named J. Barbara Rose. And she taught me how to write. I kind of very dedicatedly and doggedly brought a draft of every single paper I ever wrote all through undergrad to her, and she, one step at a time, you know, not so many dashes, let's focus on this, let's do that. Help me whittle away all of my bad habits and help me really learn how to say what I meant, and that took years. And she was just an amazing and indefatigable mentor, and I'm extremely grateful to her.

And the second major mentor that I had is my, the person who became my PhD supervisor. At the end of my undergraduate degree, I had funding available to me to serve as a research assistant. And Elizabeth Harvey, the person who became my PhD supervisor seemed like a very smart person who I'd never met. And so I made an appointment with her, came to her office and said, hey, I'd really like to be your research assistant, here's a bunch of money. What do you think? And she said, I don't, you know, I don't know you. I don't know if that's a good idea and I think if I recall, I was just  persistent enough that eventually she said yes. And then I served as her research assistant, and that was the beginning of a, I think, really beautiful relationship, which culminated, only this past year when we published a book together that we've been writing for the last 15 years, called John Dunn's Physics. And that started as a conversation that we had in a year long reading course that we did in the second year of my, PhD. 

And so I was in the rather unusual position of writing a dissertation while at the same time working on a book with the chair of my dissertation. So I was kind of learning, I think I learned how to co write before I learned how to write, in an advanced academic way. And so I had this rather amazing experience of being mentored from the inside, as it were, by someone with whom I was, you know, working on arguments and prose, and then I could take those lessons over into, you know, my own work. I believe it's been rewarding for Elizabeth as well, but it's much, it's been much more rewarding for me, I think over the years.

And then also I've had many fantastic mentors at the University of Chicago in the English department and across the university, as well, particularly Richard Strier and Joshua Scodel, who were extraordinarily helpful to me in figuring out what I was about.

Stephen13:15
You talked about writing and co-writing, as you know, kind of different things, can you tease out the difference there and I guess also just sort of define, for our listeners, what it is that you're talking about? But I assume that some skills, are necessary for both, but like how, what's kind of the difference in approach? 

Timothy Harrison 13:33
 Co-writing is much, much harder, you need to be sure you're on the same page and you need to be committed to every word, but you didn't write every word. And so, I edit my work a lot. I edit compulsively. But when I'm, when I write an article or a chapter or a book on my own, I will rewrite it many times.

But when I, co-write, then it's edit rewritten many times, you know, just to make sure that you're on, you know, on the same page and it's also, I think a really fascinating practice, to practice I've grown to really love, of being radically open to the voice of another, to the point where the voice of the other becomes your voice, and vice versa.

And so, you find your, as you work on a project, I've now, I've been involved in several, co-writing projects, and it's not like, I'm providing the data and someone else is writing the analysis as it might go in the sciences. It's like, you know, every sentence is sculpted by both of us.

And yeah, it's this practice of becoming attuned to the style of another, becoming attuned to the patterns of thinking of another, and thereby broadening your own kind of capacities of articulation and analysis and insight. And it takes a lot, it took us 15 years to write that book, you know, so it takes a long time but I'm proud of the result. 

Stephen14:50
I do want to get into what your current research is about. So what either in your own work or in your department or in your field is really exciting and interesting to you at the moment?

Timothy Harrison 15:05
 I'm really interested and have been, I think, for my whole career in something like the historical preconditions for the articulation of the first person perspective, which is to say, I express myself here and now, as a first person speaker, and I do so using concepts and words and syntax and frames of reference that are historically and culturally contingent.

And so the way in which someone from 17th century England say is able to express themselves, or articulate what it is to be a self is going to be very different from how I'm able to do that. And so I'm interested in kind of excavating the conditions for and the meaning of something like the history of experience.

And so my first book was about the emergence of the concept of consciousness in the 17th century as a new concept. For articulating what it is to be human and minded, and how that process of conceptual emergence was influenced by poets just as much as philosophers. And so that's about coming into being. 

The book with Elizabeth that I just wrote, John Dunn's Physics, that's about kind of the end of human life and the experience of dying, focused on John Dunn, who in 1623 almost died. And then in 1624, only a month later wrote a book about what it was like to almost die.

And so, you know, kind of and what I'm working on now, the thing I'm most excited about is, I'm, it's another coauthored book that I'm writing with a student whose dissertation I actually was involved with named Jane Mikkelson. And she currently teaches at Yale, but she took her PhD here at Chicago and she's an Indo-Persianist and we are writing a book which is tentatively titled Horizons of the Mind, which is a comparative account of an English poet and theologian Thomas Traherne, who wrote in the 1660s and 16, early 1670s, and a Mughal Persian poet writing in northern India named Bidel of Delhi, who wrote at exactly the same time historically speaking, and both of these people are doing extraordinarily similar and strangely, uncannily similar things.

Both of them, for example, and this is how we started working on this project, both of them believe that they can remember what it was like to be in the womb, what it was like to be born, what it was like to be a baby, and that these memories, and these imaginings are very important to what it is to live a full human life. And so, and they're having this idea in the same decade and so Jane and I were really interested in, you know, what Carlo Ginsberg would call this a conjunctive anomaly, which is to say two things which are highly anomalous in their own historical circumstances, but that nevertheless kind of chime exactly.

And so, we're interested in kind of working our way through the writings of these poets into the kind of Afro Eurasian intellectual life that enabled them to write such similar things. 

Stephen18:22
Yeah, quite an anomaly. That's fascinating. I know this might kind of sound like a basic question, but what is the process when you're actually like studying a question like that, and then, you know, researching and writing about it, and I'm really just sort of asking basically like, you know how much time do you spend reading? Are you unearthing new things that you're reading? Are you pouring over the same thing, poring over a lot of like analysis? Like what is the work of that kind of research? 

Timothy Harrison 18:50
 I would say that just like in writing and reading, there are multiple scales so there are some things that I'm reading very intensively, for years, so for example, the passage in Paradise Lost where Adam, describes what it's like to wake up for the first time as a human being and to remember waking up for the first time as a human being, I've spent I don't know, years, you know, going through every single word and still when I return to it, there's new things. So that's like the very intensive kind of scale of reading that I do to certain things that speak to me in very important ways. 

I spent 15 years reading Gunn's devotions. For example, over and over and over and over but then there's also the reading of, you know, various historical contexts, you know other contemporary poets, uh, what philosophers are saying at the time, etc., and so I like to think of it as kind of like a receding horizon. 

I have a thing I want to explain or a thing, a puzzle I'm interested in, a textual puzzle. And in order to explain it, in order to even begin to ask smart questions about it, I need to situate it in a world and that world extends back temporarily back through, I don't know, the histories of humanism into the middle ages, back to antiquity, but also out spatially, you know, from England to continental Europe.

And now in this case, in the case of the book I'm writing with Jane, you know, out to India, and, you know, trying to just give a sense for the thickness of the world, in which  people were writing. And now I realize I veered here into abstraction, perhaps, and you were asking a very concrete question.

But the concrete answer is you have a puzzle and you do whatever you can to try to solve it, so there is no, you know, preordained answer. It's kind of like what works.

Stephen20:41
Yeah, okay. I know I'll allow that. I think that's a concrete enough answer. I wanted to make sure that we talked a little bit about the Committee on Social Thoughts, just curious if you could, in your own words, explain, you know, what that is, and kind of what the point is and what your role on it is. 

Timothy Harrison 20:58
 So my role is to be a member of the committee, which is to say that I, like all the other members of the committee, I read the exams of the PhD students. I read their dissertation proposals and engage in discussion with them. And with my colleagues, the committee, as you may know, was founded in the mid 20th century and is by design a place for radical interdisciplinarity.

So one way of thinking about it is that the Committee is  engaged in an ongoing conversation within and across disciplines that involves putting conceptual analysis, aesthetic analysis, historical analysis, and other, you know, kinds of ways of thinking in the interpretive social sciences and in the humanities together, in conversation about texts that we collectively think are meaningful and the boundaries of what counts as meaningful, that are obviously, you know, changing all the time.

But it's a group of people who are interested in thinking about the way that meaning happens, I think is one way, one way of putting it. 

Stephen22:19
Are there any areas that stand out to you or questions that stand out to you as things that you hope to get into like future projects that might just be kind of still forming in your mind or avenues that you're hoping to go down when you have the time? 

Timothy Harrison 22:32
 Yeah, a couple. So one is a book I'm currently writing another book, a book that I'm writing by myself on John Milton, the great English poet who wrote Paradise Lost in the year 1674, who is fantastically interesting on the topic of human freedom. And I'm very interested in Milton's understanding of the human being which I think is something he thinks can only be adequately expressed in poetry.

As opposed to in history or philosophy or theology. I'm interested in excavating what we might call Milton's poetic anthropology. The way in which he seems to think that to understand, the best way to understand what it is to be human is through poetry. And so I'm interested in thinking more about that and writing about that.

And another thing is I taught this great class with or I thought it was great with a colleague of mine Edgar Garcia, who teaches in the English department as well, and that was a class which was on the topic of creations and we were looking at two almost contemporaneous texts, at least contemporaneous in their being put to writing, Paradise Lost in England, an epic about creation, and the K'iche Mayan epic of creation, the Popol Vuh, the cop, soul surviving copy of which is actually stored here in Chicago at the Newberry Library.

And so Edgar and I were putting these texts together and in conversation, you know, one written on the European side of the Atlantic, one written in the Americas in relation to Spanish rule and in resistance to Spanish rule, and we had a great time comparing what might seem to be apples and oranges, but in fact were two texts that spoke to each other and what we found to be really profound ways. And we're going to be writing an article, about it. And that's something I'd like to think more about kind of the role of creation in literary texts and how we can collaboratively put texts from different traditions, you know, in dialogue with each other, in ways that aren't reductive, but also aren't banal. 

Stephen25:01
That's fascinating. And I hate to ask what might be a kind of reductive and final question to wrap up, but, if you had to pick, because we're making you pick here what would you say you find the most fulfilling about your current role?

Timothy Harrison 25:15
 That's so hard because I really love writing, and love thinking, and love being in dialogue, but I really love teaching. I think I find teaching incredibly fulfilling and I find teaching the humanities to be incredibly fulfilling. I want students to leave my classrooms with an understanding of why the humanities matter.

And, why I think they matter is that the humanities teach you how to do the thing you're already doing every day, unknowingly, in a knowing way, in a reflexive way. That is to say, they teach you how to speak with the dead, how to live with the dead, in a way that is reflexive and self aware as opposed to just inherited and unknowing and unthinking. Because of course, all of our lives are completely, and I'm taking this thought from a wonderful scholar who just retired from Stanford, named Robert Harrison, who has a great book about this called The Dominion of the Dead, but all of our lives are fully conditioned by the dead, from the laws we obey, the words we speak that, you know, you do nothing that is not in some way mediated by the dead. And therefore it really, really matters, you know, how you go about doing that. 

Do you inherit ideals or prejudices unthinkingly or thinkingly? And I like to, I don't know, work with my students to really try to animate the spirit and ideals and idea of the author or authors that were that we're working on, and to see that as a kind of practice that one that matters, not just for appreciating great art or poetry or philosophy, but a practice that matters for, you know, how you ought to live your life. 

Stephen27:07
Thank you, Professor Harrison, for your time today. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu, or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening.