Next semester will be the first semester in some time when I haven’t taught at night. It’ll be weird not having that one day a week when I have to head back on campus — swimming a bit against the stream — and entering an oddly quiet and dark building to teach students. Walking across… Read More →
Over the weekend, my alma mater, the University of Richmond played the Lehigh University in the first round of the FCS playoffs. The Spiders of Richmond lost to the Mountain Hawks (?!) Lehigh to bring a disappointing end to a season where the Spiders outperformed expectations. Despite the disappointment of his game (and the other… Read More →
It’s been a hectic, but interesting week. This means that my mind is cluttered with half-baked thoughts and competing priorities. This seems like a good excuse for a three things Thursday. Thing the First I continue to be fascinated with Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel, Mumbo Jumbo. Not only is an entertaining book, but it also… Read More →
Last week, I had a series of engaging conversations about the nature of time. My relative new Garmin smartwatch prompted some of them. My watch records exercise minutes in two ways. It records the number of minutes that I exercise “moderately” (like walking the dog), but gives me double minutes for vigorous exercise (like going… Read More →
Today’s post is getting cross listed with the NDQ Blog, but it felt appropriate in either place. One thing that I consistently regret is that I don’t have enough time to get anything but professional reading done (and even then my pile of “things to read” far outpaces my pile of things read). Anyway, the… Read More →
I made a classic mistake this week: I decided to start a 300 page book. It was impossible that I would finish it before the semester started to gain momentum and the waning days of my summer research and writing time would brusquely push aside any time (or honestly motivation) to read a book. So,… Read More →
Last week, I had an interesting conversation on The Social Media about the news that Taylor and Francis would be selling academic works published under their various imprints to a group who wanted to use them to train their AI. This situation was “shocking” to several of the academic authors on the thread, and this… Read More →
Completing a short article on “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis” was at the top of my list of summer tasks. The paper will (hopefully) appear in a volume on campus crises. The paper is now officially done. Last spring, I wrote a quick draft of the paper thinking for some reason that I… Read More →
It’s been a pretty long summer and I’m already starting to look forward to the discipline and structure of the academic year. I’m hoping that the “frog days of summer” can serve as a springboard for the new academic year by motivating me to get my priorities set and develop some new (and hopefully good)… Read More →
Over the last couple of years, our department has seen an infusion of new faculty. This is very exciting for us on a number of grounds (not the least of which is that some of us feared that our department was in terminal decline). Of course, some of our new faculty have been teaching at… Read More →
As readers of this blog know, I’ve been writing a bit on a paper titled “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis” for an edited volume. This paper will focus on a class that I taught in 2018 at the height of UND’s budget crisis. You can read more about it here or here or… Read More →
For the past ten years, I take some time around now to think about my late friend Joel Jonientz. He pass away in 2014 and as we have for every year since then, I got together with a few friends from “back in those days” for a drink and some memories. As always, there are… Read More →
As readers of this blog almost certainly know, I’ve been working on a chapter for a volume on campus crises. My chapter is titled “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis,” and it is focusing on a class that I taught in 2018 at the height of UND’s budget crisis. Along side that class, I… Read More →
Over the last two weeks, I’ve been working on a paper titled “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis” for an edited collection of papers on contemporary responses to campus crises. You can read more about here (and then follow the links to earlier postings). Earlier this week, I worked on the section describing the… Read More →
As a bit of lark David Pettegrew and I submitted the following abstract to the Journal of Field Archaeology for their 50th anniversary volume. According to the call for proposals, they’re looking for papers that consider “what inspires researchers to do their best work?” The longer I spend in the field of archaeology, the less… Read More →
On Tuesday, I posted some text from my new project “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis.” I explained in my post then that this project has a sense of urgency fueled in no small part by an August 1 deadline! Wednesday was a chaotic day punctuated by the dogs annual visit to the vet,… Read More →
I was tied up in a meeting last night and was not able to attend the premier of some pieces that my buddy Mike Wittgraf prepared from recordings that we made in Merrifield Hall a few years ago before it underwent renovation. We did this as part of a larger project to commemorate Merrifield Hall… Read More →
