Author Archives: Timothy Burke

State of the Union

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Timothy Burke

One of the commitments I carried into blogging from the outset was to try and build bridges to conservatives. First, because they were a significant presence in the early blogosphere and the wider public sphere. Online, I’ve always sought inputs … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics | 11 Comments

Learning the Rules

Posted on September 22, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I got into a conversation earlier this week about the cultural capital of graduating students at elite universities. What students learn in their coursework and from being in a college community builds some of the cultural capital that they will … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia | 8 Comments

A Lord Byron in Every Cyberpot

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I’m interested in seeing the film Catfish after reading A.O. Scott’s review. Still, Scott’s references to familiar examples of online deception coupled with his welcome awareness that literary and cultural fraud is an old and established part of American life … Continue reading →

Posted in Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Popular Culture | 2 Comments

Island at the Top of King Solomon’s Mines

Posted on September 16, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Re-reading King Solomon’s Mines for today’s class, I was suddenly struck powerfully by a sort of deja vu. Not about the novel itself, since I’ve read it quite a few times, both for courses and otherwise. Nor even about the … Continue reading →

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Popular Culture | Comments Off on Island at the Top of King Solomon’s Mines

How to Succeed as a Court Jester

Posted on September 15, 2010 by Timothy Burke

If you want to be the kind of professorial public intellectual who gets quoted a lot or profiled in mainstream media, some advice (keeping in mind that I’ve done a few laps around that racecourse) about what to write and … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Politics | 2 Comments

Toilers in the Trope Workshop

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Timothy Burke

One of my hopes for cultural history & media studies courses that I teach is that students will learn not just how to read, analyze and critique expressive culture but also get some sense of how to produce it, use … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, Digital Humanities, Popular Culture, Production of History | 1 Comment

How Natives Think: About Presidents, For Example

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Timothy Burke

One of the stories that American conservatives used to tell about themselves in the 1960s and 1970s was that they were the ones with the ideas, the people who had a structured, rigorous philosophy, the people who had intellectual standards … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment

I’m Shocked, Shocked That There’s Hatred Going On Here

Posted on September 10, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Ta-Nehisi Coates picks up on an NPR piece about government hostility towards homosexuals in Uganda, and an interesting comments thread follows. This is an issue that I’ve thought about for a long while, partly due to the influence of my … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, Politics | 3 Comments

If All the Other Kids Jumped Off a Bridge…

Posted on September 10, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I have surrendered to Twitter.

Posted in Blogging, Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy | Comments Off on If All the Other Kids Jumped Off a Bridge…

Looking Backwards

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Timothy Burke

In a few weeks, I’m going to be talking about how searching as an act changes when the digitized texts you’re searching through are either highly specialized in their content or are from a distinctly different era of rhetoric and … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Popular Culture | 1 Comment