As the academic year has come to a close, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this has been a particularly odd and most challenging twelve months. The COVID pandemic has thrown my well-worn routines into chaos, forced me to redesign classes on the fly, made it impossible to continue my field work in Greece and Cyprus,… Read More →
Every year about this time, I pause for a bit to remember my late friend Joel Jonientz who died in 2014. Invariably, this leads to my thinking back to the salad days of the decade from 2004-2014 which felt not only more productive but also more collegial than the years since then. You can read… Read More →
This week has been hectic, but I managed to find some time the read James Flexner’s recent article in Archaeological Dialogues 27 (2020) titled “Degrowth and a sustainable future for archaeology.” I have to admit when I first skimmed it, I was pretty skeptical that the degrowth movement had much to offer archaeology as a discipline.… Read More →
As another hectic week staggers toward its inevitable close, I’m lucky enough to have so much on my plate that I can’t decide where to start. As a result, we’re going to once again take the buffet approach and offer a little three things Thursday sampler. As always, I hope to turn one of these… Read More →
It’s the last Thursday of the semester and I feel like I’m at the point where I’m almost done, but there’s also so much left to do! This is exhausting and exhilarating in turn and also vaguely distracting as I try to balance between starting something new and wrapping up the odds and ends from… Read More →
Over the last few months, I’ve been asked to read and review more manuscripts than ever before in my career. I expect that this is because the COVID situation has upset the traditional reviewing ecosystem and pushed editors to dig a bit deeper into their Rolodex of reviewers. In an effort to do my part doing… Read More →
I’m really enjoying recent conversations about the role of citations in our scholarly lives. If you haven’t read it already check out Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Maximus Planudes’s thoughtful piece over at Rebecca’s Classics at the Intersection blog. I can also recommend “The Politics of Citation” over at the Digital Feminist Collective’s blog, Shawn Graham’s… Read More →
It’s the last Thursday before the last weekend before the start of classes. It feels rather momentous as we brace ourselves for the COVID-inflected start to the 2020-2021 academic year. In an effort to preserve a sense of normalcy, I though it appropriate to drop a Three Things Thursday. A little alliteration never goes astray when… Read More →
I really like Mary Leighton’s work and have found myself citing her work and referring to it regularly on my blog (e.g. here and here). Last week, I read her most recent piece in American Anthropologist on “performative informality” in academic archaeology and found it particularly compelling. She argues that the performance of informality marks many of the ways in… Read More →
My colleague Catherine Frieman broke her Twitter sabbatical to recommend a recent article by Yves Rees & Ben Huf called “Training historians in urgent times” in History Australia (2020). The article is really good and if you only have time for so much reading today, do go and read the article rather than my blog post!… Read More →
This weekend, I thought a good bit about my buddy Dimitri Nakassis’s post on how to be a better senior scholar. If you haven’t read it, you probably should. I also read Felix Ringel’s Back to the Postindustrial Future: An Ethnography of Germany’s Fastest-Shrinking City (2018). Ringel’s studies the city of Hoyerswerda which was a… Read More →
This time of year my thoughts always turn to my late friend Joel Jonientz and his family. He passed away 6 years ago this week. This is the fifth installment (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, I seem to have missed 2019). On a long walk with the dogs, I thought back to our time together at UND and… Read More →
I did some traveling this month and that always gives me time to sit still and read without being distracted by a million other things. On my last flight, I read David Staley’s Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Higher Education (2019). It was a pretty fun read and despite the book’s ostensible audience of higher ed… Read More →
Yesterday, the state board of higher education announced a new president for the University of North Dakota. After a session of deliberation, a few white puffs of smoke ascended from the Chancellor’s inner chamber and a herald of the board solemnly announced “Habemus Presidentum.” Andrew Armacost will become UND’s 13th president and the chant of “Armacost virumque cano” was heard… Read More →
Next week, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is really excited to publish Shawn Graham’s Failing Gloriously and Other Essays. As a bit of an appetizer, we’re making the introduction to the book available this morning as a download. Failing Gloriously and Other Essays documents Shawn Graham’s odyssey through the digital humanities and… Read More →
This weekend, I read Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s new book, Generous Thinking: The University and the Public Good (Johns Hopkins 2019). The book calls for scholars to think more generously as individuals, as a community, with the public, and through our institutions. The first pages of the book spoke immediately to me (and some of my growing concerns about how… Read More →
Over the last few months, I’ve been thinking a good bit about both academic labor and graduate education. Some of this has been prompted by our own efforts to revise our graduate program over the year or so and my role as our department’s director of graduate studies. Some of this has come from my… Read More →
