Day Two: Chicago to La Crosse

We took a slow day traveling and started out by running a bit and then doing yoga.  Here’s a wrap-up of day two.
Legendary Dining Experience: We stopped at Madison, WI to find a good local place to eat, and we apparently hit the jackpot:  Mickey’s Dairy Bar.  This place still has menus, appliances, and staff [...]

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If Academia Operated Like the Professional Sports Universe

The recent Manny Ramirez saga, which culminated yesterday afternoon when the Red Sox traded him for fifty cents on the dollar to the Los Angeles Dodgers, has made me wonder: what would the world be like if academia operated like the professional sports universe? As Peter Gammons has explained, the Sox realized [...]

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Scientific Authority and Contemporary Culture

For a long time, I have been fascinated with Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment from the early 1960s on obedience and institutional authority. Milgram’s work is, one could argue, at once the most well-known and unethical experiments in the history of psychological research. Yet I am intrigued by this experiment, not because of what [...]

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Is the Academic Monograph an Endangered Species?

In the United States, a system of just 88 university presses support and maintain the entire process of tenure and promotion for scholars working in the arts and humanities disciplines. I learned this a couple weeks ago at a depressing talk by Stephen Wrinn, Director of the University Press of Kentucky. Wrinn’s discussion attempted [...]

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Can Blogging Derail an Academic Career?

When I started this blog several months ago, I cited my status as an unproven academic as the chief reason for my reticence to blog.  Ultimately I decided that “if I don’t blog, I may never be in position to accept an assistant professor position, a career goal that I once believed blogging would potentially [...]

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The Politics of Sex at Academic Conferences

It’s been a while since I last checked in to The Well Wrought Urn.  There’s much to talk about in the land of academia, but since I’ve been away at a conference, and I have conferences on my mind, I thought I’d share a Call for Papers from this year’s MLA Convention in San Francisco.
Conference [...]

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The Bleak State of a Career in an English Department

Every year around Christmas time there’s one thing I look forward to getting more than anything else:  my MLA Profession volume.  Each year, the Modern Language Association (MLA) publishes a volume that summarizes the state of scholarship in English Departments and attempts to assess the plight of humanities scholarship.
This year’s issue is especially compelling, and [...]

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