In lieu of a full-length post here, here is a link to a full-length post I wrote for the North American Conference on British Studies blog, Broadsides. It's one of a series looking at the state of British studies -- considered rather more as a profession than as a discipline, if you take my meaning. … Continue reading Better CVs will not save us
Reading advice for young historians
This is a sheet of reading tips I've developed over the past few years for my first-year students in history. I posted it on Twitter yesterday, as a png image and a tweet thread, and it got quite a few positive responses and several requests for copies. So I'm putting it here in what I … Continue reading Reading advice for young historians
Discipline and Profession
The introduction to one of the textbooks I'm assigning for next term's "Early Modern Europe" history survey contains an interesting sentence: Overall, at least in the editors' judgment, the academy has emerged bruised but resilient: more conscious of its limitations, more tolerant of alternative pathways, more cautious about general conclusions, but otherwise in remarkably rude … Continue reading Discipline and Profession
Why Was This Document Never Written? An Unsource Analysis Exercise
Who would the author have been? Where, when, and why did they not write the source? What conditions made not writing such a document possible, probable, desirable, necessary? Why was the source not written in this particular form? What stylistic or social conventions shaped its not being written in this way? What aspects of its … Continue reading Why Was This Document Never Written? An Unsource Analysis Exercise
History: What Everyone Needs to Know
A scientist I know, arguing for the importance of practitioners in her discipline learning fundamental theory as well as technical skills, asked me whether there are similar debates in history. That is: are there debates in the historical profession about what kinds of thing everyone learning to be a historian needs to know? I found … Continue reading History: What Everyone Needs to Know
Informal Historical Fallacies
This post is based on a Twitter thread I started back in 2021 and have expanded since. Its origins are in a sense platform-specific. Twitter discourse is awash in accusations and counteraccusations of informal logical fallacy; pretty much any criticism of anyone will meet with charges of ad hominem, any defence or elaboration of a … Continue reading Informal Historical Fallacies
Faculty[,] Don’t Run It Like a Business
The subtext of nearly every practical discussion about hiring, promotion, or retention in academia -- on the faculty side, that is -- is that everyone is replaceable. One might say this is the subtext of any discussion where there is a labour market to speak of, but in academia it is sharpened by the massive … Continue reading Faculty[,] Don’t Run It Like a Business
Don’t Think of an Elephant
I'm sticking with Twitter for as long as I can for the simple reason that I have a much larger and more varied following there than I can imagine building anywhere else. It's possible that the place will implode or vanish, but what feels more likely is that it will simply fade from significance as … Continue reading Don’t Think of an Elephant
That Noble Scream
James Sweet is worried about the state of historiography. Beginning in August with an ex cathedra editorial in American historians' trade magazine, Perspectives, and continuing now in an interview with David Frum in centrist pundits' trade magazine, The Atlantic, the president of the American Historical Association names "presentism" as a clear and, er, present danger … Continue reading That Noble Scream
Knowing when to quit
When I was still working on my dissertation, but near enough the end of it to begin looking for jobs, the question loomed: how long to keep at it? Asking this of some senior faculty members over a post-seminar dinner, I received the canonical answer: three years. "If you're on the market for three years … Continue reading Knowing when to quit
memorious 