KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – On Tuesday, the new list of MacArthur “genius award” winners will be announced. If you’re on it, here’s what to expect:

Most likely, you didn’t know you were being considered. Winners are often plucked from obscurity, and nominations are secret.

You’ve been told to wait for a phone call from an acquaintance, but it’s a set-up. When you answer, a serious-sounding stranger will ask if you’re alone, and if you’ve heard of the MacArthur Foundation and its famous fellowship.

You have, of course.

The foundation disavows the term, but everyone else knows the MacArthur as the “genius award.” Winning it means never having to prove yourself again – plus $500,000, no strings attached.

Once a year for five years, $100,000 will be deposited in your bank account. Nobody will check up on you. The idea is to give very smart people five years to focus on their work, without having to worry about money. Spend it as you think best. If buying a Porsche helps you focus, go for it.

Later comes the public announcement, and the flood of congratulatory e-mails, the full-page newspaper ads from your employer, the phone calls from reporters.

Inevitably, from your snarky friends, there will be a string of genius jokes every time you trip or can’t work the DVD player.

If you’re fortunate, some things – the right things – will change in your life.

And if you’re really, really lucky, like Jay Rubenstein, perhaps one year after you win your MacArthur genius award you will be able to look back and say this: It wasn’t even the best thing that happened that week.

Rubenstein – medieval historian, sardonic wit, amateur country-western musician, aficionado of science fiction and barbecue – sits in a Knoxville pub and recounts how he first got excited about the monks who made him a genius.

The story starts in the 11th-century France. A Benedictine named Guibert of Nogent was struggling to make his way in the world and build a career in the church. In his own time, he never hit it big. But he was a deep thinker, a prickly observer and, courtesy of his mother, possessor of a ferocious Oedipus complex.

All of this made for a fantastic autobiography. Or so it seemed to Rubenstein, 900 years later, reading it as an undergraduate at Carleton College in Minnesota.

Monks were not a predictable intellectual passion. They hadn’t gotten much attention at school in Cushing, Okla., where his father, now retired, ran a scrapyard and his mother is still the resident firebrand liberal.

But there was something surprisingly human about monks. They were not nearly as pious and deferential as their caricature would suggest.

Jay’s studies took him to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and then to the University of California-Berkeley for a Ph.D. With monklike discipline, he finished his degree in six years.

But the road got rougher. He shuffled around in one-year teaching appointments – the fast-food jobs of academia.

“He was discouraged but determined,” said Gary Barth, a close friend. “It was frustrating for all of us to watch from the sidelines. Here is this clearly exceptional person, intellectually and in the classroom, going through this awful meat-grinder.”

As a penny-pinching graduate student, he was living in San Francisco during the dot-com boom. Everybody around him seemed wildly successful. People his age were retiring.

He had been 22 when he won the Rhodes, and they’d named a street for him in Cushing. He was embarrassed: “There was a point when I was 30 when I thought, ‘I bet they wish they could take THAT back.”‘

At one point, he went to a career-placement testing company and filled out pages and pages of questions, hoping the computer would suggest a rewarding but attainable career.

It spat out the career he was best-suited for: historian.

After his years in the academic wilderness, Jay finally got a tenure-track job – at the University of New Mexico.

If not the most prestigious history department, it was a chance to settle down and enjoy his beloved Southwestern cuisine and a decent music scene. Every week, he took his graduate students out dancing to the tunes of Vanilla Pop, a cover band.

He expanded his dissertation into a 2002 book, “Guibert of Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind.” It was no best-seller but boosted his profile. Gradually, papers and fellowships accumulated, and his star rose.

In 2006, the University of Tennessee recruited him with a generous offer: It would pay him to go to Europe for two years, to research the Crusades, before returning to Knoxville.

The MacArthur award came when he was 40 and finally settled as a professional historian and living in Paris. He had never married.

“When we were first going out he was like, ‘I’ve been living alone for 15 years, I don’t know if I can have a girlfriend,”‘ Meredith McGroarty says now.

She e-mailed him two days after the MacArthur announcement, but she didn’t know about it.

“Hi Professor Rubenstein – you probably don’t remember me, but I was in one of your medieval history classes at Dickinson about 10 years ago,” she wrote. She told him she still read medieval history during her subway commute, and had noticed his book when it popped up as a suggestion on her Amazon.com account.

“I can’t tell you my intentions were entirely platonic,” she said. “I had a crush on him.”

In his response, he made no mention of the genius award.

Months later, when he came to New York for a conference, they met up for pizza and stayed out talking until 1 a.m. Later, she visited him in Paris.

Nowadays, he talks about buying a Fender Stratocaster guitar, but really, he plans to use the money to write more books. His next one is on the Crusades.

Jay could land work at some of the most prestigious institutions in the country. These days, top private universities are raiding faculty from public ones, which can’t compete financially.

But he’s happy here. Meredith likes Knoxville. She visited for a couple weeks in August and hopes to return soon. Tennessee has a good library, and showed faith in him before he was a certified genius. He sees no reason to leave.

“I have good colleagues, barbecue, country music, and a babe to boot,” he says.

“What else does a guy need?”

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On the Net:

Jay Rubenstein’s faculty page: http://web.utk.edu/ 7/8history/faculty/f-rubenstein.htm

Jay Rubenstein’s blog: http://www.euromad.net

The MacArthur Fellowships: http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.959463/

AP-ES-09-20-08 1550EDT