It’s time to update my CV to include recent conferences and courses I’ve taught. I also realized it’s been years since I last updated my résumé. My situation is a little unusual: I finished my PhD less than a year ago, so I need a CV, but I also work full-time as a staff member at the university where I teach part-time. The two documents serve different purposes, so I can’t simply copy and paste between them. As I compare them, I notice that some items appear in one but not the other, and that many accomplishments are missing from both. Where do I add the missing details? As an academic, I find it difficult to decide where everything belongs. I now understand the frustration my students feel when I tell them that, once they’re in college, their high school academics and accomplishments are no longer necessary. Work experience, yes, but the sport they played for six months can go.
Curriculum vitae is Latin for “the course of one’s life,” which sounds almost too much for such a specific document. A CV is a genre, and like any genre, it has conventions. It is chronological and cumulative, growing longer as a career develops. It has familiar categories: publications, presentations, grants, courses taught, and committees served on. This is one’s academic life, organized into a series of accomplishments. A CV leaves out what was attempted and abandoned, like the PhD I once wanted to pursue on board games. That’s where a CV differs from a résumé. A résumé is a short, tailored argument, usually a page or two, designed to persuade a particular reader that you’re right for a particular job. A CV presents itself as the full record. It asks to be read as complete, which makes it both persuasive and misleading. As a historian, I can’t help reading a CV the way I’d read an archive. No archive is the past itself. It contains what someone chose to keep and what survived that process. A CV is similar: a curated collection shaped by what its keeper believed was worth preserving and what the profession is willing to count. A CV tells you what happened. It rarely tells you what it took, and it often leaves out the small things that matter, like a note from a student thanking you for helping them reach their goals.
A CV hides some of an academic’s biggest struggles and time-consuming work, such as unlisted work. The reading that doesn’t look like anything. Before a project becomes visible, there is a long session/season/window when you can’t show anything about it. You read, take notes, and follow footnotes into other books. From the outside, and sometimes from the inside, it looks like standing still. Surrounded by colleagues whose lines keep accumulating, it can feel exactly like falling behind. It isn’t, but nothing on a CV will tell you so. And the book that isn’t a book yet. I’ll say the quiet part: since my PhD, I haven’t published anything. My dissertation sits there, full of work I’m proud of, and it would need real revision to become a book. It would also need quite a few more visits to various archives. That is a different task from writing a dissertation, with a different reader and a different shape, and it takes time that teaching and the rest of life don’t leave much of. A CV has a line for a finished book when it is under contract. But there’s not a line for “in progress.” A CV doesn’t, and probably shouldn’t, record imposter syndrome, the sense that you’re a step from being found out even with the credentials in hand. It doesn’t show up in a CV, but it shapes how many of us work and how we talk about our own work. I also wish I could find a way to explain my love for Travel Writing and the Intelligence World. Latin American travel writing was one of my dissertation fields, and the intelligence world fills the syllabi I teach. Neither fits neatly into a single narrative of expertise. But they’re why I read the way I do, with an eye for the person behind the document, the voice inside the report, and the story under the record. Something else missing is all the added labor. Advising conversations. Recommendation letters, each written individually and carefully. The student who needs an extension, a referral, or just someone to listen to at the worst possible moment. This work is real; it takes hours, and it’s often among the most meaningful things we do. It leaves almost no trace.
These academics’ struggles and laborious tasks are all part of a shadow CV. It’s a private list of the unlisted work, such as what you read, what you tried, what you carried for others, and what you kept going through. I could teach a series of lessons on the shadow CV! What would be on your shadow CV?
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