What was the Nobel Prize in Literature? Everyone seems to think it’s over. December 10 is the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death and the date on which the prizes in his name are traditionally ...
Tag: Academia
“Overpopulation” Is Not the Problem
I first encountered the biological concept of population in high school. We were introduced to the experiment of flour beetles in a jar of flour; each week, we ...
Saboteurs in the Modern Academy
What hope remains for the masses of disillusioned graduate students, unemployed PhDs, and embittered faculty who still, despite everything, believe in ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA and NWSA 2018
This year Americanists, feminists, feminist Americanists, and everyone between and beyond gathered in downtown Atlanta for the annual meetings of both the ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at AOIR
This October, scholars from 30 countries headed to Montreal for the 19th annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers. Experts discussed the state ...
The Great Global Grad School Novel
Was Sharmila Sen “happy” on the first morning she woke up in the United States to the strange smell of bacon frying? That’s what her young son wants to ...
Anthropologists and Novelists
Tim Watson’s Culture Writing surveys the border between anthropology and literature in the years following World War II. Watson provides illuminating ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at APSA 2018
Over a holiday weekend in early September, political scientists gathered in the heart of Boston in a mall (well, in a conference center and two hotels ...
Carolyn Heilbrun Told You So
Over the course of a few weeks in April, amid the usual tiny indignities that beset women in academe, I read through Carolyn Heilbrun’s entire oeuvre. April ...
What Can Millennials Teach Us about the University?
Perhaps more fragile and contested than ever before, the university today feels ...
Editor 2 Editor: Mary Francis and Gita Manaktala
How does a scholarly book differ from a dissertation, or a string of articles? What does and doesn’t change with a shift to digital publishing? Is industrial espionage ...
The Book Is a Time Machine
When we are not actually holding them, books are things over which we like to wring our hands. They stand, in their very solidity, for what might be precarious ...
The Future of the Global University
Great universities seek to erase the borders that confine intellectual exchange. The aspiration is at once scholarly and political: policies informed by research will topple ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at ICA
This May over three and a half thousand scholars descended on Prague for the International Communications Association Conference. In between the thousands ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at Kzoo 2018
Everich yeer, michel clerkes fare tu Michygan and eten, drynke, and telle tydinges. For you plebs who don’t speak Middle English, that means each year ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at C19
This year, members of the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists gathered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the organization’s fifth biennial ...
Editor 2 Editor: Priya Nelson and Joe Calamia
How important to an editor is the spark one feels (or doesn’t) about a potential project? How does one identify books that are surprising, new, and relevant? And ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at MLA 2018
Literary critics that managed the trek to this year’s Modern Language Association conference descended into a professional circle of hell: the convention was held in ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at AAA
The American Anthropological Association’s 116th Annual Meeting was brimming with how can we even? under the Trump administration. The theme ...
Editor 2 Editor: Lindsay Waters and Peter J. Dougherty
What does it take for a scholarly book to reach a broad audience? What should ...