The Glowing Eyes Job Letter

Let’s get this out of the way: Vince McMahon is a terrible person. But, the Vince McMahon Glowing Eyes meme is really excellent. You probably know it and know that it builds from a modest claim to a more exciting one to even more exciting ones, leading to McMahon’s Glowing Eyes.

In 2022, I was on the job market and decided it was time to take a very different rhetorical approach to my job letters. What I had noticed over the years is that academic job letters often start with broad topic sentences and then follow them with ever-narrowing sentences that provide finer details to support the topic sentence. A broad sentence about a project that makes it really appealing is then followed by a series of sentences that provide detail that make the project seem increasingly less interesting (unless the reader is really familiar with relevant details). Here are two paragraphs, from successive iterations of a job letter, that cover the same ground:

My scholarship largely falls into two streams that intersect around questions of embodiment, temporality, and subjectivity. One stream draws on historiographic, media-based, and ethnographic approaches to analyze the contexts that make “neurological disorders” objects of concern for scientists, health care workers, patients, and their families. In The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life (2012) and Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age (2020), my research shows how neurological disorders become sites of profound social and personal transformations for individuals and families as they confront changes to beliefs about personhood, subjectivity, and everyday life in the U.S. In The Slumbering Masses, I show how the history of industrial capitalism shaped ideas about innate human nature—as expressed in sleep and wakefulness—and laid the foundation for contemporary American everyday life in ideas about whiteness and typically abled-bodies. In Unraveling, I demonstrate how attending to communication disorders—autism, aphasia, and deafness—troubles conceptions of subjectivity as principally being based in an individual’s capacity for speech. These assumptions have structured the practice of psychiatry and medicine in the U.S. and shaped social theory in and beyond the humanities and social sciences. Developing a metalanguage of care based on family experiences of caring for disabled family members, Unraveling forwards an anthropologically-informed theory of “affective bioethics” to reconceptualize how institutions can support families in their interdependent relationships. The other stream of my research focuses on speculative practices, particularly in cinematic and literary science fiction and within scientific and medical knowledge production. This work draws on popular and scientific media and focuses on ideas about the future in the context of the Anthropocene and changing dynamics around racism, environmentalism, and capitalism in relation to the articulation of more inclusive and sustainable futures—captured in Theory for the World to Come (2019) and now the basis for a new project on mental health and climate change, discussed below.

My scholarship is focused on histories of contemporary institutions as social technologies, which follows emergent problems through their trajectories as medical, scientific, governmental, and popular concerns. I have developed “the biology of everyday life” as a framework for conceptualizing how capitalism shapes human physiology, social norms, and cultural expectations. This framework helps show how ableism and racism shape scientific and medical understandings of basic processes, like sleep, digestion, and communication, and the technologies that are developed to address their disordered experience. As an analytic, the biology of everyday life provides novel ways to describe the relationships between individuals, institutions, technologies, and society, integrating social and environmental determinants of disease with theories of subjectivity and personhood. In all of my work, I employ interdisciplinary methodologies that are built on ethnographic, archival, and textual analysis. The Slumbering Masses, which won a first book award from the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2013, was the first book-length social scientific study of sleep in the U.S. and garnered widespread media attention, including in the New Yorker and academic journals across the social sciences, humanities, and medicine. My second book, Unraveling, recovers the history of the nervous system as a complex system that is physiological, environmental, and social, proposing a model of “affective bioethics” that moves beyond exclusionary forms of bioethics that marginalize disability perspectives. In both of these books, the environmental and social interdependencies of everyday life are brought into relief as determinants of health, disease, and disability, which technologies—from institutions to pharmaceuticals—are developed to remedy.

The first one is from 2021 and the second from 2022. There’s a lot going on in both of them, but the first one is so saturated with content that I have a hard time reading it (and reviewers probably did too). The second one is comparatively breezy, with much more concise and targeted sentences that cover a lot of ground without getting bogged down in details. Those details exist in other places–in my research statement, in this case–and the aim of the cover letter is to get people to want to read those documents. One of my dissertation committee members, Thomas Wolfe, once counseled me that “Job materials are like a Vegas show: Always leave the audience wanting more.” The Glowing Eyes Job Letter is my attempt to try and embrace that at the cover letter level.

I wrote these letters as an associate professor approaching promotion to full, so the letters have ~15 years of scholarship, teaching, and service to draw on and describe–which is all the more reason to try and keep it light in the job letter. I think the same lesson holds for early career letters: rather than start a paragraph with a broad description of a dissertation project and then get deeper and deeper into the details, move to discuss the implications of your research, the points of connection it makes possible, and its broader merits in the field. Save the details for other parts of the application and employ them sparingly, knowing that interested people will have a chance to ask you about them during interviews or campus visits.

Paragraphs about teaching tend to do the same kind of thing: they start with broad claims about pedagogy and end with lists of classes people are willing to teach. Putting that list at as the second sentence in the paragraph and then using it to build out to broader issues related to teaching stops that paragraph from deflating as it goes along.

Maybe it was a fluke that it worked for me! But it might be work experimenting with. Let me know how it goes.