First, everything is on fire; as bad as things have been looking, and continue to look, for English-language universities in Quebec (a long story I won't bother with at the moment), the Trump administration's war on academia has ramped up so dramatically in the US, and on so many fronts -- from arresting and deporting … Continue reading A quick, mid-apocalyptic update
history
The Illusion of a Future
Say the line! "Faculty need to tell the truth about the academic job market." Unobjectionable in itself, this is a constant refrain in online and print performances of academic self-criticism. Why? One implication is that faculty members have been cornering unwary bystanders to share the Good News about tenure-track jobs. Another implication is that the … Continue reading The Illusion of a Future
The Sorcerer’s Amanuensis
So there I was, reading Silvia Federici's bestseller, Caliban and the Witch.1 It argues -- to be brief and I hope not unjust -- that the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should be ranked alongside the enclosure of land, the elimination of the commons, the conquest of the New World, and the … Continue reading The Sorcerer’s Amanuensis
Better CVs will not save us
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
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
And now for something completely different
Now that the second book is safely out of my hands, I've been working for the last little while on some new things: perpetual motion machines (see this earlier post for a very preliminary version), Spanish ghosts in English-conquered Jamaica, scientific projectors in Restoration England, and so on. One of these, as previous posts might … Continue reading And now for something completely different
The Best Compliment I’ve Received on My Teaching
It was not the evaluation that said I was a snappy dresser. It was the time fifteen years ago when a student in an introduction to modern history who had identified himself as conservative said that, thanks to our class's discussions of The Communist Manifesto, he wanted to read more Marx. Today, when the notion … Continue reading The Best Compliment I’ve Received on My Teaching
memorious 