‘Tis the season, my friends. You get on a plane with your pile of papers to grade or that book you have to prep for class or that sheaf of printed primary docs you need to annotate. You fly to a mid-size city, take a cab to a conference hotel, dump your . . .
Read MoreHow long could #FollowWomenWednesday last? This was one of my questions in the first few weeks of this hashtag meme, which aimed to create more gender equality on Twitter. Initially I was not optimistic. Hashtags are usually flashes in the pan, and it was unclear how many Tweeps who participated in the . . .
Read MoreNow that you know why I left academia, let me tell you how I was able to do it. I was able to do it because I can afford to do it. Ah, money. The subject couples fight about most. And a topic about which academics are largely silent, even though historians, . . .
Read MoreA few weeks back, I wrote a Historista post about adjusting to a life untethered (or mostly untethered) from academia. In response to that post, readers wondered, Why did you leave academia in the first place? How are you able to support yourself? I’m going to answer question #2 in an upcoming . . .
Read MoreIf you were on Twitter yesterday and you follow or are followed by a lot of women in academia, you probably noticed that something was afoot. Around midday, posts began to proliferate using the hashtag meme “FollowWomenWednesday”; they listed the handles of women who tweet. As of 2:30 p.m. today, as Karen . . .
Read MoreYou have logged onto Facebook and Twitter and you are reading through your feed. People have linked to posts of all different kinds: breaking news, silly quizzes, articles they have written. Which of these posts do you like or share or retweet? Some? None? How do you decide? I started thinking about . . .
Read MoreIt 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 MoreLike 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 MoreIt 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 MoreTwo 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 . . .
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