Welcome to te penultimate day of this week-long excursion into the summer work schedule of academics – or, really, one academic. Â Me. Â If you’ve come this far, I’ll presume you’ve read the earlier entries (links at end of this piece). Â If you haven’t, the whole thing starts back on Saturday. Â You might begin there. Â Or…
Starting on Saturday, I began blogging a summer-work-week in the life of an academic – specifically, me.  We are now up to day 5.  The goal is simply to show – in as much detail as I can – precisely what I do in the summer. Indeed, if all academics who have a blogs did this,…
It’s hard to imagine that this is even slightly interesting to read, but it does (at least) make visible the work that academics do in the summer. Â Or this academic, at least. Â If you’re just tuning in today, I should say that this week — and this week only — I’m keeping track of what…
The week’s ongoing experiment in trying my readers’ (or “reader’s,” singular?) patience continues. Â In a (possibly misguided) attempt to make academic labor visible, I’m documenting how I spend my days during this first week of summer, when academics are allegedly “on vacation.” Â Here is day 3. Monday, 14 May 2012. 12:00 – 1:55 am. Â Caught…
Continuing what I started yesterday, I’m continuing this week’s chronicle of what a professor does in the summer. As noted, it’s an attempt to make visible the work that academics do when most people think we’re on holiday. So. If you found yesterday’s post dull and yet slogged through it anyway, then you’re in luck:…
For a week in February of 2011, I blogged exactly what I did each day – the goal being to show precisely how academics spend their time. Starting today, I’m beginning the summer edition of the same experiment. From today through Friday the 18th, I will publicly keep track of how I use my time…
One of the many pleasures of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010) is its evocation of the thrill of research. As he traces the history of his family’s netsuke (small Japanese ivory and wood carvings), de Waal describes great-great-great grandfather Charles Ephrussi’s art-collecting in nineteenth-century Paris as “‘vagabonding’ … done with…
I don’t enjoy flying, but I do like traveling. There is pleasure in being somewhere else, in experiencing a different city or country. All that is taken for granted in daily life cannot be taken for granted – and this is especially true when in another country, when the food, language, and culture differs in…
Gene Marks’ instantly infamous “If I Were a Poor Black Kid” column (Forbes, 12 Dec. 2011) is a classic example of how privilege remains invisible to the privileged. Though he acknowledges that he is “a middle aged white guy who comes from a middle class white background” and so “life was easier for” him, the…
When I was a graduate student, I would have voted myself Least Likely to Succeed in Academe. I published nothing while in graduate school. I worked hard on my seminar papers, but none would work as an article – so, I didn’t send them out. I didn’t figure out how to write publishable literary criticism…
