The theme for this year’s International Open Access Week is “Who Owns Our Knowledge?”, a question that ought to be nonsensical, but which is becoming ever more urgent. I cannot help but think about Open Access (OA) within the current context both of our world generally and also my own world […]
I delivered the following essay as a paper at the 2025 Modernist Studies Association conference in Boston. (There are actually a couple more paragraphs here than in the paper as delivered, since I cut it for the sake of time.) A paragraph or so is repeated from a chapter I […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The coronavirus pandemic has revealed many fissures and failures in U.S. society, some of which have long been obvious, but were more easily ignored in better times. For instance, the pandemic has revealed just how much the U.S. power structure stands opposed to the concept of the public good. There […]
I’m participating in Plymouth State University’s Cluster Pedagogy Learning Community (CPLC), and this post is a reflection on one of the first activities of the year’s CPLC. For the activity “A Community of Values”, we brainstormed a list of values for our work at a university, how we see ourselves […]