Barely Managing

Charles-Marie Bouton (1781-1853), Person Reading in a Gothic Ruin, first half 19th-century, oil on canvas, Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts

Hello! Welcome to my little slice of the internet.

Allow me to introduce myself: my name is Mélina and I am a...

PhD student in my third and, come Hell or high water, final year

Lecturer at two different universities

Museum docent

Conference speaker

3-Minute Thesis competitor

Basically, I am doing too damn much.

So why start a blog on top of it all? Great question! I'm just as surprised as you are because at the start of the new year, I made the conscious decision to cut down completely on my social media use. It's been amazing (I cannot recommend it enough and I absolutely will be talking about it in a forthcoming post), but while I love having broken free from doom-scrolling, I miss the option to share with others.

Because, you see, all of these things that I'm juggling at the same time? I'm doing them as an art historian, which means I am seeing a ton of incredible art and monuments and spaces, and I think it's a bit of a shame that everything is just sitting in my photo reel.

June 3, 2026

Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945), Mr. Alcott in the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, 1936, oil on board, Boston Athenaeum

May 25, 2026

This week, I need to prepare for my upcoming Annual Review. It recently occurred to me that I must have been profoundly marked by Debbie Jellinsky from Addams Family Values (1993) because I also like to use slides when making an argument. So today, even though I should be writing an article that is also due next week, I started putting together the Powerpoint that I will be using during my Review on Monday, and that includes going through my photo reel and my files to see all of the things that I did and saw in the past year of my PhD.

I went to the US for a five-week research trip in the Fall. Unfortunately for me, I had a lot going on during the Spring, thus, I have yet to go through and process everything that I saw, visited, consulted, etc., and it was a lot. That issue isn't going to be remedied for the time being, but for today, I wanted to share with you this painting by Newell Convers Wyeth, specifically for the information that was provided in its accompanying label:

N. C. Wyeth was a longtime admirer of Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and eagerly took on the assignment to illustrate a posthumous publication of the author's journals. Men of Concord (1936) includes thirty years of Thoreau's entries alongside 10 full-page Color illustrations by Wyeth as well as several uncredited black-and-white illustrations by his son Andrew Wyeth, who would later become a famous artist himself. This painting, reproduced in the book, imagines Thoreau's friend Bronson Alcott (1799-1888)—father of Little Women author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)—researching his family history in the Granary Burying Ground. In an 1852 journal entry, Thoreau comically described a visit from Alcott, who was eager to share his genealogical findings from local graveyards. Instead of depicting two friends in conversation in Concord, Wyeth opted to illustrate this imagined scene of Alcott's research in progress. Wyeth invented parts of the composition but also incorporated actual gravestones that can still be seen in the burial ground today. Thoreau and Alcott both frequented the Boston Athenaeum, which may have inspired Wyeth's widow Carolyn to offer the institution this painting after his death. Wyeth used Curious Old Gravestones in and About Boston (1924) as a source for his painting.

James Pradier (1790-1852), Fontaine Pradier, 1851, marble, Nîmes

March 26, 2026

On Thursdays, I lecture in Nîmes. I am fond of everything about the arrangement: commuting by train, what I'm lecturing, the students I'm lecturing to, being in the city of Nîmes itself...

My course is a reasonable mid-morning block, which then enables me to set up shop at my favourite café for lunch and to work for a couple hours before I take the train home.

Remedios Varo (1908-1963), La llamada (The Call), 1961, oil on masonite, Washington DC, National Museum of Women in the Arts

March 23, 2026

I feel very overwhelmed lately. I know I'm juggling a lot between teaching, and working at the museum, and the 3-Minute Thesis contest, and applications, and just trying to manage the day-to-day minutiae...

Not that I'm complaining! I wanted all of these things, I am happy with all of these things, but this week in particular, regardless of what I set out to work on, I feel paralysed and I end up doing (what feels like) very little. Add to that some of the progress I'm managing to do on my thesis and the frustration of having to interrupt myself when I'm finally really in the flow.

March 21, 2026

It's the first day of Spring, the perfect day to kick off the season of "leaving my computer at home and just taking a book and some paper to work in the sun". I started doing this the first year of my Master's and I'm pretty sure that's how I managed to churn out both of my dissertations in three months' time.

This time around, I'm working on my doctoral dissertation. I really want to defend my thesis by the end of this calendar year, but in order to do that, I have to get it all out into writing first.

March 20, 2026

It's a Friday and the weather is absolutely gorgeous. Cloudless blue sky, radiant sunshine, light breeze making the newly blossomed flowers dance a bit. Ideal conditions to not want to work basically.

Regrettably, I cannot give into the temptation of leaving all of my projects at home and finding a spot in a park with nothing but sunglasses, a (non-research-related) book to read, paper to write on, water to hydrate, and a snack for when I inevitably start feeling a little peckish.

Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), Portrait of Henri Cordier, 1883, oil on canvas, Paris, Musée d'Orsay

It's February 16, 2026. Today is New Notebook Day.

(It's worth noting that there are several of these throughout the year.)

As a child, I wanted so much to be a diarist, but wanting to be something isn't always enough to actually become that thing. The amount of notebooks and agendas I accumulated through the years, only only filled with a few pages before ultimately being left to the side, is proof of that.

In 2018, something changed. There was a shift of some sort and one day, after having spent a month carrying around a notebook and a pen in my bag, I started writing. I filled most of that notebook (I made the mistake of getting the next one too soon), I filled the following notebook from cover to cover, which felt like a great achievement, and then moved on to the next notebooks. In the Fall of that year, I started university and I felt a visceral need to somehow combine my journaling with ways to stay on top of my schedule and my course work, etc.

Cue the Bullet Journal Method, again. I had a brief stint with it in 2017 but it was very short-lived and remarkably underwhelming at the time. For some reason though, in that first semester of university, it felt like the perfect time to dive into that rabbit hole of "bujo" content on YouTube and Instagram all while trying to stay afloat between school and my personal life.

(If it's starting to sound like I've been barely managing for quite some time now, that's not wrong.)

It's been seven years now, and while I did take away some useful ideas from the Bullet Journal Method, I internally cringe when I think about the amount of time I wasted consuming content about it and all the ways I tried to experiment in my journals when all I really need to do was just write my day-to-day.

Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916), Moonlight, Strandgade 30, 1900-1906, oil on canvas, New York, Metropolitan Museum

February 8, 2026

Today, I put away the Christmas decorations.

No, not because I'm in so over my head that I've been putting it off for two months. It was always my intention to leave them up until the start of February because I live in France and on February 2, we observe what's called La Chandeleur (Candlemas). Its religious connotation aside, it marks the noticeable increase in daylight time and it's an excuse to eat crêpes (as if we ever need an excuse).

My plan was to put away the Christmas decorations after work on February 3rd, but then I learned about a seminar that was pertinent to the work I'm doing for the museum currently and I was busy the rest of the week so today was the day. Only five days late.