Dissertated

Congratulations are due to Rachel Swinkin, who has just finished an excellent dissertation called The Limits of Sympathy, on animals and poetics in the long eighteenth century. I'm her first reader. Finishing can be a weirdly anticlimactic or depressing affair—you get familiar with it if you go on to do other projects, but when you first experience it, you think there must be something wrong. There isn't.