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…
The main problem with Chronicle of Higher Education blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley is not racism.  The main problem is her intellectually lazy, sloppy “journalism” that cherry-picks examples in order to “support” uninformed opinions.  In her recent piece, “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations,” she reads the descriptions of dissertations by five recent…
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…
One wonders if David C. Levy came by his ignorance naturally, or whether it’s a state of mind that he has cultivated carefully over the years. Â His piece in the Washington Post is so poorly informed that I suspect ignorance may simply be something with which nature has endowed him. Â He claims that “Happily, senior…
      “It has been a long trip,” said Milo, climbing onto the couch where the princesses sat; “but we would have been here much sooner if I hadn’t made so many mistakes. I’m afraid it’s all my fault.”       “You must never feel badly about…
In the Chronicle of Higher Education this past Tuesday, Professor Kathryn D. Blanchard reports “wallowing in ‘post-tenure depression,’” a phenomenon she discovers is more common than one might think. What, she asks, “can account for the feelings of despair and apathy that follow this milestone, the pursuit of which causes us to invest not merely…
For those who may be heading to the MLA in Seattle (5-8 Jan. 2012), here’s a list of all the panels on either children’s literature or comics/graphic novels. I count sixteen panels exclusively devoted to one or more of these subjects, and an additional nine panels in which one ore more paper addresses either children’s…
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…
