I ended 2011 on a not very happy note, feeling stuck in both my personal and my professional life, and fully expecting 2012 to bring more of the same. Well, 2012, you sure blew those expectations away, didn’t you? I’ve never in my whole life been happier to have been proved completely wrong. In January, […]
I’ve been sitting on this news until I had a formal offer letter in hand, but now I do, and now I can say it: I have a new job! In mid-September, I’m going to be the new Librarian for English and Comparative Literature at New York University‘s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. I’m in the […]
So I frogged a sweater last weekend. For those of you who aren't knitters, "frogging" means unraveling a knitting project. (It's a pun, because when you're unknitting something, you rip it, rip it, rip it…get it? Ribbit?) This was no partial unraveling to get to a mistake I'd discovered too late; this was a complete […]
Some days, it feels like my career trajectory from literature-scholar-in-training to academic librarian has taken me a long way from my old set of intellectual interests. The things that interest me now, that make me sit up and say "hmm!", aren't the kinds of things I even knew to look for when I started grad […]
Thomas Hart Benton (a.k.a. William Pannapacker) has a new column in the Chronicle of Higher Ed in his ongoing “why you shouldn’t go to graduate school” series: “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind’.” The key paragraphs, for me, are these: [T]he problem is that there is still almost no way—apart from the […]
This coming Monday will be my five-year blogging anniversary. (Five years?! Time flies, et cetera et cetera.) When I started my old blog, I intended it to be primarily about my transition out of academia. Around the time I started the blog, I had the “I don’t think I want to do this anymore” conversation […]
Those of you who've been following my posts about my job search have probably noticed that I haven't said anything about it in a while. I've been holding off making any kind of formal announcement until everything was settled, but now that I have an official offer letter in hand, I can share the big […]
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had two campus-visit job interviews and one phone interview in the space of eight or nine days. I don’t know exactly when the Great Job Search of ’08 will end, but I should know more next month. Most of it is unbloggable at this point, but I’ve been […]
Since several of you who read this have asked about it, I wanted to point out that the Questioning Authority conference proceedings are now online, and you can get to my conference talk from the page with the rest of the papers from my panel. The slides should go up too, at some point. If […]
(Title of this post stolen shamelessly from a Frank O’Hara poem, in case you’re wondering. He got an MFA here in between sojourns in New York.) So here I am in Ann Arbor for day 1 of the conference I’m attending; the papers are all being delivered tomorrow and Sunday morning, so today was mostly […]