Alizah Holstein writes about the complex echelons of academia in 'My Roman History'
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh.

I don't know if you've ever undertaken a big academic research project, but if you haven't, it can be an intense experience. I mean, best case scenario, it ends up consuming so much of your life that you can't stop thinking about it. And I say that's the best case scenario because that means you've fallen into some sort of love with your subject. That's the impression I got from today's interview. It's with Elisa Holstein, author of the book, My Roman History.

It's a memoir of her academic journey and how certain things worked out, but also how certain things didn't. And in this interview with Here Now's Robin Young, Holstein talks about how she ended up rejecting academia altogether and what that says about women's positions in the ivory tower.

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I met author Aliza Holstein on a panel at the Boston Book Festival about following your bliss. Most of the authors had done that beyond their wildest dreams. But at first glance, Aliza didn't seem to fit the bill. Oh, she seemed destined to be a scholar of ancient Roman history. As a teen, she fell in love with Rome through Dante's Divine Comedy, his tale written in the 1300s of traveling through the afterlife.

Aliza traveled to Rome, climbing over ancient ruins, scouring archives. And then, to everyone's shock, she didn't achieve what she thought was her bliss. And I wasn't sure how to ask her about it. Do you still have trouble with that, with talking about this, the fact that it didn't end the way you thought? Yes and no. I mean, I lost something. I lost a career that I thought I was going to have.

But I got the most beautiful outcome. I'm actually really lucky. So what happened? Well, for one thing, maybe gender bias in academia? Aliza Holstein's memoir is My Roman History. Aliza, nice to speak with you again. It's wonderful to speak with you. Thank you, Robin. So let's start at the beginning. The first line of your book is, the first place you ever wanted to go was Rome because of Dante and a high school English teacher who introduced you to him. What was that lightning bolt? There was something about that text.

full of symbols and clues. You had to know Italian to really read it, which I didn't, so I started to study Italian. I got excited every time I learned about a person that Dante was referring to from ancient or medieval history. I started to get to know that world of medieval Italy through him, and that is what drew me to Rome. Dante, of course, is not from Rome, but

The flights from Boston went to Rome. Well, but this is what you decided. You're 17. And one night, your whole family's asleep and you decide, I am going to Rome. You grab a knapsack. You are going to the airport in the middle of the night. You're going to go to Rome. And you're asking yourself, is this something that only happens in a movie? Gosh, can you really do this? The answer would be no. You realize, oh, wait, I don't have a passport.

And you go back home, the family's still asleep. But that right there says to me, well, of course this is all going to work for her. And you did go the next year with a friend. What was Rome saying to you? The first time I landed when I was 18, I had a very strong sensation of being in a place where I felt at home.

I don't know that I've gotten any closer to understanding it, but I do better understand my own history. My father and his parents lived in Italy directly following World War II. When he came home back to the United States at four years old, my father spoke Italian better than he spoke English. Mm-hmm.

But the other feeling that I have always experienced in Rome specifically is a sense of wonder. Even now, with my kids, with my husband, I don't think I'm alone in that because Rome is a city that inspires a sense of wonder. You have such a tangible sensation, visual, tactile of the human past.

Well, you also may not be alone in what happened. I'm going to really synopsize here because you go to Cornell in Ithaca, New York. You're researching medieval Roman history for a PhD. You go back and forth to Rome for different kinds of immersive studies. You learn Latin, which seemed easier than breaking into the mostly male world of academia. But it's so clear, you know, to me, the reader like, wow, you share all this scholarship with us.

And it just feels, wow, this is what this person was meant to do. And then, hmm, what's this? A brief relationship with an older professor at Cornell. Okay, let's file that for later. Again, you're back to Rome. You're now poring over ancient documents about ancient lives. You feel so isolated. You join a rock climbing group. Hmm.

metaphor alert, you know, pulling yourself up like Dante through these circles of purgatory as you are trying to make your way into this circle of scholars. Did it still feel like, this is what I'm going to be. I'm going to be a scholar of medieval Roman history. It certainly did. And I realized too late I had become an orphan. I didn't have anyone who was really looking out for me.

I had always assumed when I was in graduate school that the quality of my work would be what made the difference. As it turns out, mentorship is hugely important, and it was something that I underestimated. I'm not sure those mentors would have been available in the way that was appropriate. I mean, you meet with a prominent Roman historian. You go to his home. He sits way too close to you. Your knees touch.

You'd come back to the U.S., there was teaching, but contracts aren't renewed.

Suddenly, you're a mom with kids and the founder of a lovely children's clothing company. Well, that was my rejection of academia in a nutshell. Yeah, yeah. But I do think I was very naive about gender relations. In college, I essentially thought that the gender war was over, that women had achieved parity. It was my work that counted the most. One of the things that has come out of writing this book, which has been a real gift, has been the...

the feedback of so many women in academia who have reached out to me to tell me, and some men too, but mostly women who have reached out to tell me how deeply the story struck for them in the kind of structural obstacles that are against women in academia. And one of those was my college professor, Caroline Bynum, the first woman appointed university professor at Columbia and

She said,

about mentorship of women in academia, which has been a real gift for me. Well, do you wonder if some of the way you were treated had to do with the fact that you did have a relationship with a professor at Cornell? I'll never know. I have always worried that that was the case. I was 26 years old. I was pretty naive.

Interestingly, after we broke up, he said that he was the real victim. He was a tenured professor. In retrospect, I can see the power dynamic there that I could not perceive at the time. I know that my opportunities were limited by that relationship because I was becoming an Italian historian and he was an Italian historian.

But because of that very brief relationship, he felt he could not be my advisor. So yes, it distinctly did limit my possibilities. I guess you got your PhD, but not a tenured position. When I asked you at the Boston Book Festival, is this tough for you to talk about?

I had this discomfort because I felt like, wait, this is a panel on following your bliss. And in your case, it seems so clear to me. You almost got on a plane when you were 17 with your family asleep. It seemed...

You were so meant to do this and then boom. But you said, actually, maybe you got redirected to your bliss. So that's the funny thing. If you had asked me when I was nine years old what I was going to do with my life, I would not have said I was going to be a historian. I would have told you that I was going to be a writer. So in a way, my failure at becoming a historian has enabled me to become what I actually always wanted to be, which is a writer. Yeah.

Yeah, you do belong. You did belong on that panel. I didn't know until I looked it up to research this book that the early 2000s, there were more jobs than there were PhD candidates.

We had heard about this big job crisis in the 1970s where historians had not been able to get jobs and we sort of felt sorry for our professors and their cohorts because it had been so hard for them to find their positions, whereas for us it was going to be easier. We didn't know, of course, that the financial crisis of 2008 was looming and the bottom fell out of history in general, but out of

pre-modern history like you wouldn't believe. There were 450 people applying for every single position. That has only worsened over the past 15 years. I am not alone. It may or may not have been that my personal choices were the only determining cause for what happened to me.

Only 25% of history PhDs now end up with tenure-track jobs. Yeah. What would you say to someone who desperately thinks that something is their destiny and maybe it's not? I think you can only put one foot in front of the other. I went and I started a baby gear company. It was as far from academia as I could get. It felt exciting and it felt different.

When I went to a trade show, I knew I was not among my people. That was a very lonely experience. At the same time, I don't think it was a mistake to have done that because it led me to where I needed to go. One of the things that happened is when I turned 40, I went back to Rome for a wedding.

And spent five days in tears. I walked around the city crying. The doorman at the hotel I was staying at offered me a card and offered to give me his professional consolation. You know, he was like...

He said, please call me. My scarf was wet with tears because I felt I had lost this place that I had always thought was going to be part of my life. Well, not only that, you're at a wedding. Someone else, everyone who's loving Rome in that moment is wedding your old love. Yes, right, right. At the same time, that moment was such a gift. It was the most painful moment ever.

of my life even, perhaps. And yet it was such a gift because it brought me back to what really mattered. It's just a great story, if not the one I thought it was going to be, just like your life. Elisa Holstein, the book is My Roman History, a Memoir.

Are you working on another one? I'm excited about an idea. I'm just starting working on something related to Machiavelli that has got me both excited and scared, which makes me think it's a good project. Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you, Robin. Thank you.

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