Monthly Archives: September 2011

Missing Men

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, Andrew Wheeler’s smart take on DC Comics’ conceptual failures in its “New 52” relaunch of its intellectual property. (For another good analysis, see Laura Hudson’s essay at Comics Alliance.) For folks who don’t follow the comics, well, … Continue reading

Posted in Popular Culture | 7 Comments

Two Puzzle Pieces

Pieces of a big jigsaw puzzle. 1) The New York Times has a nice piece about how global publics in democracies of one sort or another have increasingly lost faith in political elites and in the process, lost faith in … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 10 Comments

Lead On

Princeton University restrains its faculty from giving away copyright on journal articles to academic publishers.

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 4 Comments

Working Through

Though I felt sympathy for Joyce Goldberg’s feelings that she could no longer teach military history to students whose primary interest in the material was therapeutic, I ultimately thought she was reproducing a binary opposition that will have increasingly dire … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 2 Comments

Digital Calluses and Tender Hands

J.J. Cohen’s reflection “The Darker Side of Blogging” is a very interesting read in many respects. I could certainly write an account of my experiences as an academic blogger that echo some of Cohen’s experiences, including the negative ones. What … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Blogging | 1 Comment

Imaginary Tales

I’m almost certain someone’s done this before, but I was looking in the long boxes and the impulse struck me.

Posted in Miscellany, Production of History | Comments Off on Imaginary Tales

Pictures From an Institution 8 (First Day)

We’re actually a whole week into the semester now, including Labor Day, which is not a holiday at Swarthmore. The first day of classes is always a bit of a puzzle for me as a teacher. There are obvious things … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Pictures from an Institution, Swarthmore | 2 Comments

What Meets in Vegas, Stays in Vegas

I wouldn’t quite say I was surprised at this report of unrest within the American Sociological Association over the choice of Las Vegas as the location for the 2011 meeting. And I’m fairly certain that some of the more extreme … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Consumerism, Advertising, Commodities, Good Quote, Bad Quote, Popular Culture | 6 Comments

On “Stop Doing Cultural Studies”

A quick follow-up to yesterday’s post. Reading Toni Bowers’ excellent post about a panel at the American Society for 18th-Century Studies in which Cliff Siskin and Bill Warner called for scholars of literary studies to “stop doing cultural studies”, I … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 1 Comment

Hunger Artists (TIAA-Cref Edition)

In the last few years, I’ve had a few conversations with colleagues here and elsewhere in which they insist that good humanistic inquiry is necessarily defined by its fundamental aversion to instrumental justifications of its own work and that teaching … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 1 Comment