the reason all of us like the menswear guy is because he’s like an old school literary critic. he makes value judgements based on a historical knowledge of an aesthetic tradition
my most boomer opinion is that academics should be writing their own citations by hand. it's so incredibly easy. and all the citation manager programs are sloppy as hell
i’m super excited to share that as of next academic year, i’ll be an assistant professor of early U.S. literature at mount holyoke college. i’ve been in this department—a department that i absolutely love—for two years as a visitor, and i am so happy that i get to stay!!
emerson is around 70% adjunct labor. sickening for them to punish precarious academics for the college's own violent response to their students' demands
the US is anti-kid not because of espresso martinis. the US is anti-kid because of the incredible price of child care. because of the lack of abortion rights for women. because of fetish of the suburban nuclear family, because of car culture. because there is no gun control. beca
Deputy Commissioner Tarik Sheppard shows the chains used to secure Hamilton Hall at Columbia University.
"This is not what students bring to school. This is what professionals bring to campuses and universities."
from now on nobody with a TT job may initiate a jobs discourse. i am calling for a complete and total shutdown on all jobs discourse by TT people until we can figure out what is going on
what are posts that aren’t load-bearing anywhere but your personal lexicon. like the ones that weren’t really popular but are so enshrined in your mind that you just assume they got hundreds of thousands of likes
So you're telling me you don't wanna get married, have 6 kids, move to the country, buy a homestead, get baby cows, grow our own food, drink raw milk all day and live happily ever after?
i write for specialists in my field. i don't expect the "general public" to understand, or even care. the point of scholarship is to advance a specific field of knowledge.
my teaching is public facing. if college were free and universal, there wouldn't be a problem w/ this
Academic writing is far too concerned with impressing the inner circle and not concerned enough with making their findings accessible and easy to digest for the general public. You're leaving that job to journalists, who barely understand you either and often spin your work.
twitter (or X 😅😅😂😂) hivemind! i’m really excited about a course i’m teaching next semester called “topics in literature”!!!! does anybody have any recommendations for interesting topics!?? 🙏🙏🙏
as advising week looms i thought i would share why i became an english major. at the age of 19, i thought it was the absolute coolest thing i could do. i was right.
Today, with the guidance of faculty allies I delivered a letter signed by every doctoral student in the English department at Boston College to our department leadership. We are asking the faculty to petition the administration on our behalf for a few basic material protections/1
they should put menstrual products in men's bathrooms for those who need them. and while we're at it, can they also put changing tables for babies in men's bathrooms as well? i cannot believe in 2024 this isn't standard
The National Guard searching bags at the entrance to the Grand Central subway station. Earlier today Kathy Hochul announced she would send 750 National Guard members to subway stations throughout NYC.
UNC is going fully remote a week after bringing students back to campus. How many will have fallen ill for the sake of this sick experiment? How many other colleges and universities will put their endowments before the lives of their students, workers, communities?
sorry to contribute to the discourse but TT faculty need to be advocating for structural change instead of pretending to be amazed that people are still interested in their discipline.
this feels a lot like punching down to me
Honest question: if grad students in history KNOW (really know) the state of the job market, why are they still pursuing a Ph.D.? Apart from loving history, which is a given, but not sufficient explanation. There has to be more to this. Answers very much welcome.
i am both shocked and honored that my essay on Martin Delany's BLAKE won the 1921 Prize in American Literature this year. you can go read it for free here!
it's my birthday today! i'm reminded of this Emerson quote from his journal: "After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death." LOL
Reasonable people may differ with me, but I'd argue the greatest writers of fiction & poetry have been apolitical--provided we define "political" as meaning "partisan." I don't think Joyce, Beckett, Faulkner, O'Connor, McCarthy, Stevens, Melville, et al had any use for politics.
the advantage of being non-TT is that it gives you another year of salary and healthcare before you can no longer find full-time employment in academia
@DrJuanDelToro
Or even a non-TT position! There are definitely some advantages to being non-TT when you’re early in your career. You can work on getting funding, doing pilot research, and starting a lab with less pressure. You can apply for tenure (if allowed) once you have a strong foundation
i served as an editor for an academic journal for 4+ years. i am currently editing a collected volume. it is obvious when someone uses a citation manager, because everything is done incorrectly and the formatting is always whack
i have applied to nearly every job in my field (broadly defined) regardless of location--both national and international--since 2019. i missed one deadline once. i don't know what the hell everyone is talking about
the biggest farce of the whole public humanities debate is that if college were a free public good everything we do would de facto be public humanities
the language of academia being a “calling”—where we must be ready and willing to move anywhere and do anything—obfuscates the exploitative labor relations that are causing it to crumble in the first place
i defended my dissertation 3 years ago today. i was graduating into a pandemic with only an adjucting gig lined up for the fall. it didn’t include healthcare. we still had a wild night
i end up having to spend hours fixing their sloppy work. because when you ask someone who used a citation manager to fix their citations, turns out they don't know how to do it!!
Last year I got tenure, this year I'll be a visiting scholar at Harvard, and I got a 6-figure advance to publish a book next year. In honor of these accomplishments, here's a list of embarrassing confessions revealing how dumb my brain is in many ways:
i was at a punk show until midnight last night and still managed to write 500 words for a chapter, meet with a student, and give another student feedback on a draft today. someone please clap for this geriatric millennial
does one ever reach a point in this profession where you don't feel like you're fighting to keep your head just above water? anywho, apologies for for not responding to your email/grading your essay yet/submitting that reader's report
the list goes on. if there is anti-kid sentiment it is the ideological result of a country that materially makes it nearly impossible for people to have children because of the fundamental lack of institutional support for children and parents
@MElmaazi
Literally my bookshelf lmfaooo
The difference? I learn the material and understand how bad it is rather than attempt to get people on board with it.
i love the summer because it's always a nice surprise to see how the supreme court is going to make life significantly worse for the majority of people living in this country