Jennifer Burns: recommendation

Transcript context

…You did incredible work there, going to the original sources… Can you maybe speak to that? What is required to persevere and to go for so many years, to go so deep to the sources? Yeah, I go to the archive. That’s where I feel like I’m communing with the dead in some ways. I’m seeing what they saw in some ways and reading what they felt. I tell my doctoral students, “It’s got to be something that gets you out of bed in the morning, because there comes a point in your doctoral career when there’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to be. You got to be getting up because you’re interested in what you want to study.” And so with Rand, it was this real sense of discovery. I am discovering. I want to know about this woman. I want to know where she fits. And the only way to find out is to do the research. Yeah, I like to go deep. It’s really interesting to me. And I should say in both of these cases, I’ve done it in an institutional structure. I don’t know that I would do it independently. The first was a graduate program in history, was at UC Berkeley. I had coursework. Then I had structures, and I did have people to check in with and read, but I had a great deal of latitude. I’m very grateful for… People are like, “You wrote a dissertation on Ayn Rand at Berkeley?” I’m like, “Yeah, hell, I did.” Berkeley’s like… It’s a great place. At the time I was there, there was absolute room for free inquiry. Oh, can you just linger on that? When you said that you’re doing that and doing a dissertation on Ayn Rand, was there… Did people get upset?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.