This morning I was grading work for a 2-credit, half-semester course I teach called Cluster Learning Springboard. While going from one assignment to the next, I suddenly realized I was having an emotion I don’t usually associate with grading: joy. It was legitimately fun to see what the students had […]
In The New Yorker, there is a long and depressing article titled “The End of the English Major” by Nathan Heller, an article that explores the fast decline in enrollment in English majors and classes at schools throughout the United States. It’s well researched, and doesn’t entirely fall into the […]
The ChatGPT handwringing of late has bothered me, not least because it is cloaked in a kind of shock, like the domain of higher education has suddenly been sullied by this profane technology. But babes, it was always already here. —Brenna Clarke Gray I tried to ask ChatGPT to write […]
“We’re in a bad time for everybody. There are very few models as to our way to be drawn upon in any community. There certainly are no states that one could look to and say, ‘A revolution has occurred here; they’re acting better toward people.’ And the religious are going […]
1. Take a moment, settle yourself, and note your immediate emotional response to these words: kindnessjoycontemplationgenerositylovepeace Now think about them in the context of your work. Would your work be better if there were more of these things? Do you feel that they are relevant to what you do every […]
At this year’s MLA Convention, I am honored to be on a panel devoted to “Woolf’s 21st Century Academia”, a panel sponsored by the International Virginia Woolf Society. My presentation, “Poor Queer Studies for a Society of Outsiders” positions Woolf’s Three Guineas alongside Matt Brim’s Poor Queer Studies. However, once […]
Interdisciplinarity is one of those words, like openness and diversity, that many people in academia like to affirm as a positive value, but when it comes to building the structures and supports necessary for it to be a meaningful practice, things get complicated, challenging, frustrating. The idea of interdisciplinarity is […]
This summer, I recommended to everyone I encountered that they take an hour and listen to this podcast conversation between Ezra Klein and Annie Murphy Paul about her new book The Extended Mind. The conversation has so much to say about how we shape our lives, workplaces, and schools that […]
He is the corporate Silence: dread him not! No power hath he of evil in himself… —Edgar Allan Poe Reading Sean Michael Morris’s blog post titled “On Silence: Humanising Digital Pedagogy”, I am struck by the anecdote he begins with, about returning to the dating scene for the first time […]
Hope Long ago, when the Earth was young, I enrolled in a poetry workshop led by Liz Ahl, and one of the assignments was to write a “how-to poem” — that is, a poem instructing readers on how to do something. I wrote a poem called “How to Have Qualms”, […]
1. The toll of the last year on my teaching, work, and life is evident in silence. I last wrote here in November, shortly before my school began an extended winter break. Though I had time to write here, and I had ideas about things to write, it was difficult […]
Matt Brim’s Poor Queer Studies is the most exciting book about academia that I have read since Cathy Davidson’s The New Education, and for me personally it is even more exciting than Davidson’s wonderful volume because Poor Queer Studies is about the world I have spent much of my life […]
Unless otherwise noted, all content of this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
