Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

The annual Academic Job Conference of Doom fast approaches (this is my second year preparing for it), and yesterday I had a dress-rehearsal practice interview with my advisor and another professor. This gave me an opportunity to test my interview makeup as well as my answers to questions like "But Machiavelli and Polydore Vergil are very different historians; why did you mention them in the same sentence?" I've written before about makeup in academia, and I still think there's a widespread prejudice against women who put obvious effort into their appearance. I know about the studies showing that women who wear neutral makeup come off as more competent in the workplace than women who wear no makeup at all, but I'm not sure that rule applies in academia, where both men and women often assume a negative correlation between femininity and intellectual seriousness. But I also don't see the point in angsting over this until I get a job, you know? This isn't exac...

Now that a new semester is in full swing, I thought it would be fun to do a roundup of my favorite lipsticks to wear while teaching. Here are the basic criteria I have for a Teaching Lipstick: not too bright — no fuchsias , flaming reds , or white-based candy pinks not too dark — no blackened browns or gothtastic purples , though I'm the TA for a science fiction course this semester, so a vampy or otherwise uncanny lip might be appropriate... either sheer or on the satin/matte side of opaque able to withstand a 50-minute discussion during which I can't be trusted not to go on a tangent about the Kantian sublime, sorry not sorry Like many aspects of grad school, the makeup I wear in the classroom is a low-stakes affair. Believe me, I wish the stakes were higher! It would make me feel more important! But they're really not. I'm not forbidden to wear certain colors or finishes of makeup in the classroom, and if I rolled in one morning with sparkly teal eyeshadow and vib...

It's fair to say that shit just got real. In the last few days, I've been coming to terms with everything I need to do this semester (primarily applying for academic jobs, but also teaching and dissertating), and I'm not sure how much time I'll be able to spend on this blog in the near future .  I don't want to declare myself on hiatus, but I also know that I have a lot of hard work ahead of me, and I'd like to have as few distractions as possible. I'm writing this in a post not because I think you'll die of worry if I don't blog every few days, but because I want to blog every few days and I can't afford to do so right now, and putting that fact in writing will hold me accountable to it. At least, I hope so. Anyway, this is just to say that I'll be posting less frequently, and at less self-indulgent length, for the next few months. Wish me luck on the job market! I've been working toward this since I graduated college in 2009, and now it...

As you know , I'm going on the academic job market this fall. Accordingly, I'm now interviewing lipsticks for the position of Interview Lipstick. Am I doing this to put off compiling my job materials? Maybe, but there's no denying that first impressions are important. Academia has no set dress code. In fact, most rules in academia are unwritten. You're expected to just know, through intuition or social osmosis, how to structure an article, where to sit during a seminar presentation, and what to wear to an interview. I've encountered competing philosophies re: attire (and re: everything else, for that matter). Some people seem to think that a job candidate should skip makeup and wear an understated outfit in order to let her words do the talking. Others think it's an advantage to wear something that leaves an impression. Personally, I lean toward the second theory. My boyfriend tells me that when one of his advisers interviewed for her current job, she wore a te...

In the last month or so, I've been pondering the future of this blog. I started Auxiliary Beauty halfway through my fourth year of my PhD program, at a moment when I felt like I might actually be in graduate school forever. I had written one chapter of my dissertation, but the end was nowhere in sight, and nothing seemed more appealing than escaping my academic concerns through beauty writing. It's almost impossible to describe the bizarre state of being a doctoral student in the humanities. It's like having a job, in that you receive money in exchange for work, but neither the salary nor the work seems quite real. Your life settles into a stasis that feels interminable. You have coffee with a friend you see only once or twice a year, someone who decided not to pursue academia, and she tells you about all the dramatic changes that have taken place in her life since you last spoke. In return, the most you can say about yourself is that you finished your Hobbes chapter and s...

Early this month, just after returning from England, I started my summer job in the university archives. These archives house documents related to the history of the university, over a century's worth of senior theses, and the lifelong correspondence of some prominent alumni. My job for the summer is to reprocess the papers of one such alum, a New York-based lawyer who was involved in the founding of the League of Nations, though he later resigned in disgust at the American government's reluctance to get involved in anything resembling international cooperation. My task is to sit in the basement and reorganize a huge collection of letters written and received between 1917 and 1951. I've spent 15 hours with this collection and am up to the summer of 1922, and I've been working pretty efficiently, so you can imagine how many papers are involved. This might sound like a tedious job, but I've been enjoying it immensely. As most of you know, I specialize in Renaissance l...

Apologies for both my Beirut allusion and my ten-day absence from this blog. I was writing my second conference paper of the month, and then I was in Venice, drinking Campari and soda. I'll probably never like Campari, even if I drink it while sitting in a Venetian campo watching little Italian boys kick a football against a centuries-old wall. But I liked the Campari-soaked olive that came in the glass, and I liked everything else about Venice, too. Except the fake-designer-purse vendor who shoved me aside while fleeing the police. This was my second time in Venice; my first was the better part of a decade ago, in March 2008. During our spring break from Oxford, my friend Maud and I spent ten days touring Venice, Rome, and Florence, living on smoked mozzarella and hazelnut wafers from the grocery store. In the subsequent six years, I'd often describe our stay in Venice as two of the best days of my life. But after I arrived this time, I realized that I couldn't remembe...