November 27, 2008 It's been a busy few weeks. Two Tuesdays ago I flew from Istanbul to Detroit, then spent a few days in Ann Arbor. From there I went out west for a campus visit, returning to Ann Arbor on Wednesday. Then, Thursday morning I flew out to the AAASS (American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies) conference in Philadelphia. On Saturday night I traveled to Washington, DC for the MESA (Middle East Studies Association) conference and four preliminary job interviews. Tuesday night I got back to Ann Arbor. The traveling has been a bit much, but it's been okay. The campus visit was fun, except for when I realized that just about all of the faculty members taking me out to dinner had told me they'd been on something like eight campus visits before finally landing a job. I was on my third campus visit, and it got me wondering if I would really have to go through at least five more of these before finally getting a job. Not that the visit went badly—I had a great time. But all the same, it's a draining experience, and always involves being asked questions that I don't necessarily feel prepared to answer. As was the case with other campus visits I've been involved in over the last two years, it was a marathon. Plenty of wining and dining, plenty of one-on-one discussions, millions of questions. After the visit I headed to Philly and the AAASS conference. I was the official organizer of the panel this year, but the idea for the panel was that of Norihiro Naganawa. Last year when I was attending a couple of conferences in Sapporo and Kyoto, Norihiro brought up the idea of putting together a panel on human mobility. So, Nori contacted Michael Khodarkovsky, who agreed to be our chair, while I contacted Adeeb Khalid (our discussant) and Lale Can (our third panelist). The panel was scheduled for the first session after lunch on Friday afternoon, the second day of the conference, which I think was a pretty convenient time. There weren't many other Russian empire panels occurring then, but the only other panel on human mobility was, unfortunately, held at the same time as ours. Anyway, I thought the panel was a really good one: all three of us talked about Muslim travelers between the two empires and how a focus on human mobility and transimperial connections can tell us things about the era which a focus on a single empire sometimes cannot do. After doing the panel in Philadelphia, Nori, Lale and I took our transimperial manifesto to Washington, where we all gave modified versions of our papers for an audience of Middle East specialists. At MESA, Virginia Aksan was our chair and discussant. The time of our session wasn't the greatest—I had requested doing the panel on Monday or Tuesday in order to avoid a conflict with AAASS, which I think pretty much gave the MESA organizers carte blanche to stick us in the last session (after all, I'd asked for it). Nevertheless, we had a pretty decent turnout—I think our high was 13 (we probably had a maximum of 25-30 at AAASS). At MESA, Marina Apaydin joined us to give a paper on Russian Orientalism. And the work doesn't cease. Ever since getting back to Ann Arbor from Washington I've been working on still more job applications and a couple of fellowship applications. That's what I've got to get back to now.