It’s a funky mid-April Tuesday where I’m starting to feel both excited about my summer research time and harried by the end of a hectic semester. These two, sometimes contradictory emotions, create quite a tumult in my rather simple world. I’m both eager to get on with the program and hoping to have more time… Read More →
I interrupt the regularly schedule blogging to advertise a job in my department for a “Teaching Assistant Professor History.” I won’t add much commentary to this other than to say that our institution and department is in full recovery after some lean and tumultuous years. Our department, college, and university currently enjoy good leadership and… Read More →
It’s the Thursday of Holy Week and for archaic (and not entirely acceptable) reasons we have a long weekend at Easter. If it weren’t such a welcome break from what can be a long winter-to-spring semester, I’d be filled with the kind of luke-warm outrage that comes from a slight (and deliberate) misunderstanding of the… Read More →
At first, I was all aboard on the panic about large language models (LLM) and “artificial intelligence” in the academy. In fact, I participated in an on-campus conversation a few months ago that centered on the impact of ChatGPT in the classroom. Since then, I’ve largely grown bored of the hype and the endlessly repeated… Read More →
I’m posting late today because I took some time this morning to prepare an article proposal to accompany a rather rambling abstract that I wrote last week. It is for a proposed volume on “the campus crisis toolkit” and edited by Lisa Di Bartolomeo and Kevin Gannon. Today’s post will make more sense if you… Read More →
A colleague sent along a call for papers for a volume on “the campus crisis toolkit” and edited by Lisa Di Bartolomeo and Kevin Gannon. I tried to ignore it, but after a bit of treadmill time (metaphorically and literally), I started to think about maybe submitting an abstract to the book that deals with… Read More →
I’ve started playing chess again. It’s not really that I ever played chess regularly, but I used to play in a consistently occasional way. Then I stopped, mostly because I didn’t have the time, no longer had chess playing friends (at least that I knew of!), and once one falls out of practice, it’s not… Read More →
Years ago, I wrote a bit exploring the idea of “slow archaeology” (you can get a sense of my ideas here). The idea, from what I recall, was to propose an alternative to what I felt to be the accelerating rate of field work and academic publishing as well as the pressures of contract and… Read More →
This week, I plan to attend the second breakfast meeting to listen to a team of faculty who are working to secure (or maybe they have secured) a Cornerstone grant from the Teagle Foundation. In short, the Cornerstone program is a 15-credit certificate or minor in the liberal arts designed for students in STEM program.… Read More →
My buddy Dimitri Nakassis sent along a link to an article by James Odenkirk in the 2007Journal of Sports History about Ohio State’s decision to decline an invitation to the 1961 Rose Bowl. The 1961 Buckeyes were 8-0-1, coached by the legendary Woody Hayes, and ranked #2 in the AP poll, but a faculty… Read More →
Last Friday, I learned that Al Berger had passed. He was a long time colleague in the history department at the University of North Dakota where he taught and researched 20th century US history and modern military history. He retired a few years ago and the department is only now working to fill the gap… Read More →
A number of colleagues (h/t to Grace Erny) have pointed me in the direction of a recent article by Artur Ribeiro and Christos Giamakis titled “On Class and Elitism in Archaeology” in Open Archaeology 9 (2023). The article is painful to read for many reasons. On the one hand, some of the appeals to the… Read More →
One of my biggest struggles as a professional is setting priorities and sticking to them. The only time when I have real clarity of purpose is when I have deadlines. Recently, a colleague suggested that I try to categorize the work that I do other than teaching and service at the university. The goal of… Read More →
This week is turning out to be a busy one, but I continue to work away at several projects for The Digital Press and this weekend is poised by a great flurry of publishing activity. The good news is that I have some momentum toward finishing up some of these projects. For example, here’s the… Read More →
This week, on one of my first leisurely walks on the Grand Forks Greenway, I started to ponder the question: what is a book series. I have the good fortune of editing three book series right now and each of them have rather loosely defined characters. The Annual of ASOR features the publication of legacy… Read More →
One of the most interesting phenomena at my institution over the last decade is the shift of research from a vital component of our academic life to a casual complement to our work as teachers. On the one hand, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Teaching should be a priority for most university faculty and… Read More →
