A little over a year ago I wrote a post titled “If I go there’s just no telling how far I’ll go.”

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Direction? Decided. 

The answer to that is, apparently, approximately fifty-five miles: to the University of Northampton, where from Friday 1 November my fixed term contract transforms overnight from pumpkin to gilded coach. Yes, the much sought-after permanent post.

I’ve been working at Northampton for seven months now, and while I was hired under the expectation that we could probably make my post permanent, it wasn’t by any means a done deal. So I owe a great deal to the people who went to bat for me, in a time when it’s increasingly hard to convince university bureaucracies that what they need is more staff – in the humanities, no less – and I’m very glad that my institution has decided that yes, what it needs is a history curriculum that begins in 1200 instead of post-1500, and that the other qualities I bring to the table are worth investing in.

I have a lot of thoughts about (im)permanence and precarity that I’ll write about some time, but I have a bunch of teaching prep and admin to do and no time to let them take shape. And for now, I just want to enjoy this: not the end of the journey, but a new phase of it. Here’s to the next part of the road.