Abstract

My two-year experience with post-doctoral limbo has been categorically thrilling and appalling, at once. Upon finishing a PhD at Deakin University, in Australia, in June 2014 (meaning submitting my dissertation “Visual Agency in Art and Architecture” for external review), and having barely subsisted for almost three years on a nonetheless generous Australian Government-sponsored International Postgraduate Research Scholarship, plus stipend and occasional paid teaching, I first escaped to Ljubljana, Slovenia, by way of Hong Kong and England, where I wrote my first postdoctoral fellowship applications: first for a US Fulbright Scholar Award (which failed); and then, one year later, for an EC Marie Skłodowska-Curie Independent Research Fellowship (which failed). The latter was monumentally bureaucratic, and I only tackled it after the Fulbright had failed. It came back scored like Olympic figure skating. Mostly I got “fives” (and there were no Russian judges involved) ...