Blog Archive
A Year Untethered: Notes from the Writing Life
It has been more than a year since I submitted the grades for my final class, cleaned up my home office, and turned to face the great wide-open expanse of the writing life. In that time, I’ve had a lot of adventures – most particularly a two-month-long research trip to the Southwest . . .
Read MoreFuriosa, Gazelle, and the Power of Prosthetics
Like millions of other people, I went to see Mad Max: Fury Road this weekend. I had seen some trailers but had not read any reviews so I entered the theater with almost no preconceptions whatsoever. I was predisposed to like it, however. I’m a fan of apocalyptic/dystopian movies, and I’m really . . .
Read MoreIntroducing: The Bancroft Prize Title Generator!
It is late May, a glorious time of year. The grades have been filed, the graduates ushered off to their futures. And like swallows to Capistrano, scholars return to their research: book projects, long-overdue book reviews, and articles they have been meaning to write but never have. And thus we also return . . .
Read MoreSkip Gates, Cornel West, and the Perils of Academic Celebrity
Two academic “scandals” dominated my news feeds a few weeks ago, before the upheavals in Baltimore and Nepal turned our attention to more pressing and important matters. The revelations that Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr.’s “erased” a slave owner (who, it turns out, may not have directly owned slaves after all but . . .
Read MoreNew Looks for your Academic Conference Badge
This week, more than a thousand academics will gather in St. Louis for the Organization of American Historians meeting. Sadly, I won’t be at the OAH (have fun, everyone!) but I will be attending several conferences in the summer and fall. I’ll go to panels (fewer than I should); I’ll go to . . .
Read MoreFinding Ruins in Tokyo
From the moment I started researching ruins, I began to see them everywhere. Sometimes I actively sought them out, especially during vacations: Tulum in Mexico, the Pont du Gard in France, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in West Berlin. Other times I would run across them by accident – tucked into some corner . . .
Read More5 Strange but Ingenious Ways to Hack your Writing
There are abundant essays and blog posts out there about how to boost your writing productivity (like this, this, and this). The advice contained therein can be helpful, depending on your professional situation and your personality: set specific times for writing; challenge yourself to produce a certain number of words per day; . . .
Read MoreWhat is “Southern Art,” Exactly?
As Dan and I entered the stark white exhibit space at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston this past weekend, we heard the sounds of spring. We ambled further into the exhibit and the birds chirped more loudly, the insects buzzed more insistently. It felt less like a hallucination then, and . . .
Read MoreFifty Shades of Pride and Prejudice
Last week, I went to see Fifty Shades of Grey. I’m going to let you take a moment to process that. Okay. So. There is certainly much to say about the sadomasochistic elements of the film. Jim Downs does a nice job situating these acts (particularly whipping) in entertainment culture and the . . .
Read MoreThe Rocking Horses of Lincoln
When you drive west on Old Sudbury Road toward Wayland, Mass., you turn a corner and suddenly the landscape opens up: cows lazily munch on grasses, sheep and llamas hang out under trees, organic vegetables grow in long rows in the distance. And in a wedge of overgrown field by a fence, . . .
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