Well,
I'm 3 months into my PhD, and already I feel stressed and WAY behind the 8-ball, and yet I'm working very hard at it and getting through a ton of reading, so I don't why I feel so inadequate!
ARGH!
Anyway - mostly the stress has been created by logistic and administrative nightmares, and most of these have been caused by my need to spend a considerable amount of time in the UK for research.
My topic (at present - haha) is 'Operatic performance practices in colonial Victorian societies with particular reference to the social, economic and cultural context of opera in London, Calcutta and Melbourne'. Basically I'm looking at the way opera was performed in those 3 cities during the course of the Victorian era (1837-1901), comparing and contrasting both the musical (scoring, instrumentation, adaptation, repertoire choice) and extra-musical performance practices (staging, sets, costumes etc) of the centres and then relating them back to the socio-economic and cultural conditions of each society in order to find trends - i.e.: middle-class professionals preferred Mozart to Verdi, or the Anglo-Indians used opera as a colonisation tool, whereas the Melbournians used it a symbol of social status etc.
It is a fabulous topic, but being essentially a topic which is both sociological and historical, it is very dependednt upon primary source material, such as diaries, memoirs, journals, newspapers, letters and handbooks. and almost NONE of this material is available through UWA. Books and articles I can get on ILL, but all the others are generally held in British archive collections, with some in Melbourne.
Hence the need to go to England. Also the guru of all things Music in the British Empire is Professpr Stephen Banfield at the University of Bristol, who is also the director of CHOMBEC (Centre for the History Of Music in Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth). Stephen and I have been e-mailinf since November last year, trying to organise me coming over to be supervised by him for a couple of months, while I do this research over there.
As usual, teh academics are all for it, and the bureaucracy keeps putting up obstacles, and generally wasting everyone's time. I stress that it's the bureaucracy and not the bureaucrats, who are just doing their job. Sato Juniper is absolutely one of the most useful and helpful people on the planet...I'm officially a groupie of hers!
But finally after months of 'should we do it as a co-tutelle', or 'should we jsut send her over un-enrolled' 'or maybe she could go as a guest?' it was finally discovered that a simple student exchange was all i needed - with some jiggling at the edges, such as enrolling me at Bristol as a part time student in 2 non-coursework units, and I believe the lovely Carrie Haloun at Study Abraod did some special pleading as it was now July, and I needed to go in September.
But it's all done....so if you ever need to go away for an extended period of time, just talk to Sato at GRS. She'll work it out!
And of-course, that isn't the end of the paperwork, it's only the beginning...now the adventure is getting flights as cheap as possible, as close to the $1750 that GRS offers as possible! I've spent so long working on logistics, I'm forgetting what my actual PhD work feels like!
I'll keep you posted!