Commander Steele has requested that I start contributing to the political pirates blog. I have found this quite difficult in general, as I am not currently in the field, but rather am currently quite occupied with the process of applyiing for grants to return to the field. However, it seems like this is as good of a source of material as any.
So, the fulbright grant (not the Hays, but the plain old vanilla Fulbright) requires that you submit a curriculum vitae in addition to a project proposal. By this, they don't mean a standard academic resume, but rather "a narrative that describes your intellectual development as an individual" blah blah blah. Here is my "intellectual biography" as it stands. I would happily accept comments and suggestions.
The central characteristics of my intellectual development as a pirate have been a deeply ingrained desire to know more about the world around me and a commitment to looting and burning that world. While I was growing up, my parents were more than happy to foster and support this desire to explore and rapaciously exploit the world, in a large part because both of them had been unable to become pirates themselves. Much as men who have failed at an aspiration to become professional athletes are determined to have their sons fulfill that dream, my parents were deeply committed to having me live a life of adventure on the high seas. At all points, my parents were always willing to support my piratical activities even in spite of my family’s modest financial means. When I was just a wee lad, they saved a substantial amount of money to allow me to spend a month as a deck-boy on a galleon on the Spanish Main. This experience helped to instill in me a desire to voyage broadly in order to gain exposure to as many different cultures and societies as possible and steal their dubloons.
Another important step in my piratical development that occurred at that same time in my life was the birth of my interest in swordplay. When I was admitted to college, I was convinced that I was well on the way to realizing my dream of becoming a musketeer, stunt-man, or even an Olympic-class fencer. However, after only a short time at university, my strong desire to pillage began to get the best of me. In particular, I was captivated by my courses on comparative piracy and nautical theory. Over the course of my education, I came to believe that in order to pillage more effectively, we need a better understanding of the micromotives of both pirates and their victims. This led me to work as a first mate for numerous pirates, and made pursuing a PhD in piracy a natural choice upon graduation. However, throughout the past two years of my graduate training, I have become convinced that I don’t want to become the kind of pirate that sits in a ship every day, simply plundering boat after boat. Rather, I want to test my training in social and nautical analysis in the field, working to solve concrete problems faced by pirate crews.
Given my natural curiosity and my deep commitment to using that inquisitiveness to enrich myself and me mateys, I see the project that I am proposing here as central to my personal and career goals. By living and working as a pirate in the Spanish Main for a year, I will be able to take the next step in my lifelong quest to understand and ultimately conquer the world.
