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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Blogging and the Triumph of Consumer Capitalism

Just about once a week, I have the same reoccurring epiphany: the Internet exists solely to make money. The event that led me to that realization today, my stumbling across Thisisby.us, has effectively split my online writing persona. But better yet, it’s encouraged me to create a distinction between things I want to write because [...]

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Why Can’t the Lexington Media Leave UK English Alone

I hope everyone interested gets a chance to check out Randall Roorda’s editorial in today’s Lexington Herald-Leader.  Randall, my dissertation adviser, condemns the journalistic irresponsibility of local Lexington television news reporter Heather MacWilliams of Channel 36 news, and he also refutes the near-sighted argument of an earlier Herald-Leader editorial.
For those unfamiliar, there’s a backstory here.  [...]

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Review: The Tempest at the Guignol

The venerable literary critic Harold Bloom writes of The Tempest that no other play in the Shakespeare canon has been misperformed more frequently or drastically. Bloom loathes interpretations of The Tempest that over-politicize the play, turning it into an allegory of the post-colonial quandary, and he sees such interpretative agendas to be the bane of [...]

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The Secret to Graduate School

Tonight I discovered a guide to studying for my qualifying exams.  It’s a book called How to Talk About Books You’ve Never Read.  In fact, this book may well be a guide to graduate school, or what this reviewer refers to as “a boot camp for strategic fakery.”  Is anyone else laden with the burden [...]

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