I always forget how hectic the start of the semester is. This semester, I feel particularly caught out. I have a book that I’m publishing to appear this week (!!), another book – that I’m co-authoring – staggering out of the bleak winter writing season, a teaching overload, and the usual onslaught of early-semester meetings. … Read More →
I know that New Year’s resolutions are a bit silly and all, and most involve middle aged men and women trudging off to the gym at 6 am for a couple of weeks in January, but I’m not the only academic to indulge in this annual opportunity for personal and professional introspection. Over the last… Read More →
On the recommendation of a commenter on this post, I read Michael Serres’s Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials. (2014). As readers of this blog realize, I’ve been struggling with the growing gap between my expectations as a teacher and the expectations of my students. In particular, I have come to recognize more and more… Read More →
This weekend, I finished Gordon Hunter’s and Feisal G. Mohamed’s edited volume A New Deal for the Humanities: Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Education. (Rutgers 2016). The book is positioned as a response to The Heart of the Matter a report commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and published in… Read More →
Every now and then I get an idea that percolates through my head on a run or a walk on a sunny fall afternoon. Usually these ideas dissipate with my growing exhaustion or once I return to the distraction of daily work. Mostly they’re just bad ideas. Anyway, I’ve been turning over in my head… Read More →
Last year I became the director of graduate studies for the history department at the University of North Dakota. This was not a natural fit as I have had relatively few graduate students during my 10+ years at UND and few of them earned their M.A. without some kind of drama. That being said, we’re… Read More →
I’ve been thinking a good bit about reading lately. Some of it comes from a stalled summer reading list. Some of it comes from the growing awareness that I don’t really read enough. I’ve been shamed lately when I hear about the prodigious amounts of reading my colleagues do and recognize more and more that… Read More →
If you’re an academic and on social media, now is the time of year where we’re expected to commiserate with our colleagues across the country as they sit down to grade final papers, exams, and projects. Universally, there are cries of disappointment, hilarity, and unhappiness directed toward the grading project. I understand, of course, that… Read More →
The academic year is wrapping up this week at the lovely University of North Dakota. I try to take a little bit of time before the onslaught of grading commences to think about my classes and take some notes on what worked and what didn’t. I also tend to think of new, overwhelming, and complicated… Read More →
In a productive coincidence, there was a provocative published in the Los Angeles Review of Books that subjected the Digital Humanities to rather pointed criticism aligning the darling of tech-savvy humanists, granting agencies, and university administrators everywhere with the dreaded neoliberal bugbear of our age. In short, the authors associated the rise of the Digital… Read More →
The problem of making a post with a “part 1” is that I feel obligated to publish a “part 2.” Go read Part 1, which is basically a review of Maggie Berg’s and Barbara Seeber’s The Slow Professor (Toronto 2016). In it, I suggest that the problem with their lovely little book is that many (if not all)… Read More →
I keep thinking about a post that I wrote a couple of weeks ago on branding in the humanities. Go read it here if you wonder what I’m talking about. Since then I’ve given it a bit more thought and had a few interesting and productive (and, frankly, depressing) conversations. 1. Open Ended Branding. We… Read More →
This is an exciting week on the lovely UND campus. The annual UND Writers Conference will attract national voices to UND’s campus and create a daily forum for the earnest discussion of literature and culture. This year, the theme is the “Art of Science,” and because of complex legal issues, I can’t really talk about… Read More →
On Thursday, I heard an inspiring talk by David Ernst of the University of Minnesota. He’s the CIO of their College of Education and Human Development and an open educational resource activist. His talk to at UND focused on the importance of open textbooks and was part of a larger “open educational resources seminar” put… Read More →
I’m frantically assembling the paperwork for my first, post-tenure, triennial review which is both a year and about a week or so late. In do so, rather hastily, I’ve learned three things: 1. I can still list all the significant things that I’ve done in less than 3 full pages of my CV. 2. My… Read More →
As the year draws to a close, I’ve started to fret about the trajectory of my research. Right now, I am working on three significant projects (and a few minor ones) that don’t really feel like they’re converging around a single set of methods, ideas, or arguments. This year, I’m going to work on figuring… Read More →
It’s the end of the year and I suppose it’s also a time for traditional reflection on all the things that we learned over the previous 12 months. I obviously learned academic stuff and archaeological stuff and even some historical stuff, but I also think that I have a better grasp on practical stuff. Here… Read More →
I was really pleased to see the thoughtful responses to my post yesterday, but there are a few things that I feel like I probably need to clarify. It seems like the prevailing attitude is that academics are obligated – either ethically or contractually – to write in a way for the general public. It… Read More →
It seems like every year someone pipes up with the suggestion that academic writers – particularly in the humanities – should write in a more accessible style and try to engage non-academic readers. Often the suggestion comes from frustrated graduate students in my graduate historiography class who have just had to endure some or another… Read More →
I spent Saturday morning reading the first part of the George Kuh et al. edited Using Evidence of Student Learning to Improve Higher Education for a faculty reading seminar on assessment. As readers of this blog know, I have some pretty strong opinions about assessment and the rise of the campus assessocracy. At the same… Read More →