That’s what one of our extremely gracious hosts at the Instituto de Estudios Gallegos, kept repeating during the wining and dining that made up an important part of the IV International Colloquium Compostela. I can now attest that it’s absolutely true. The meals were extended food fests where serving after delicious serving, dish after delectable […]
Archive for the ‘Academe’ Category
“if you like to eat, go to Galicia…”
Posted in Academe on October 18, 2010 | 1 Comment »
where was Bart when I needed him?
Posted in Academe on October 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XViCOAu6UC0?fs=1&hl=en_US
NRC doctoral programs report
Posted in Academe, tagged graduate programs on September 30, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Inside Higher Ed has an interesting piece on the just-released National Research Council report ranking doctoral programs across the U.S. Among other things, the report is criticized for the 4-5 year time lag in producing it, its confusing methodologies, inaccuracies in data, and its disciplinary approach (which is ill-suited for evaluating interdisciplinary programs like the […]
claim your own ground (Indiana 60% off sale)
Posted in Academe on September 15, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
The entire regular-price catalog of Indiana University Press is on sale today for 60% off. (Don’t worry — they’ not going under, as far as I know. They do it every once in a while.) That includes my first book, Claiming Sacred Ground, which should be going for $10 today. Grab it while it lasts. […]
big ideas
Posted in Academe on September 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
I haven’t read any of these yet, but the Chronicle Review’s tenth-anniversary What’s the Big Idea? forum features a good cast of characters, including Peter Singer, Parker Palmer, James Elkins, and others (including Jaron Lanier, of all people, writing about “The End of Human Specialness”). Nice to see my colleague Saleem Ali up there, too. […]
persuasions of the historian’s (& ragpicker’s) craft
Posted in Academe on June 7, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
While I’m not a historian, I do a lot of textual research, and read far beyond what I can reasonably hope to make sense of, so I can relate to Keith Thomas’s ruminations on the micromechanics of the historian’s craft. It’s a great article, with witty insights on things like note-taking (and -making), tableting, scrapbooking, […]
AAAARG lies in state
Posted in Academe on May 28, 2010 | 3 Comments »
As of yesterday, academic file-sharing library AAAARG appears to be dead. (This time for real.) Digital death, however, is rarely total or eternal, and arg-ists at the Facebook group (find it yourself) appear to be awaiting instructions about the next incarnation. Red-robed monks are scouring the electronic Himalayas searching for the child manifesting the correct […]
digital agora
Posted in Academe, Media ecology, tagged Academe, blogosphere, philosophy on May 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Levi has an interesting post on how the internet is changing the way philosophy gets done. [. . . ]
Still, it’s nice to dream of a world in which philosophy and the liberal arts aren’t seen as unprofitable appendages left over from an era of bloated welfare states (a neoliberal narrative that is deeply problematic), but where they are vital nodes within a culture of social and ecological transformation — not because philosophy feeds social change in some direct, instrumental way, but because of a shared recognition between philosophers and activists of how and why it is that we have come to live in a world of oil spills and economic crises, and how and why it could be all different.
philosopher shoot-out at the Times Corral
Posted in Academe on May 16, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
The New York Times launches a philosophy blog and asks Simon Critchley to moderate it. Brian Leiter goes apoplectic. For some background on the Leiter-Critchley conflict, which turns out to be as much about the analytic-Continental divide as it is about Leiter and Critchley, see Leiter’s account of their brawl over Derrida’s legacy (which Leiter […]
rematch Sunday
Posted in Academe on May 7, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
I’m sorry to have to miss this weekend’s philosophers’ rematch. But if the Monty Python crew is the British answer to French existentialism, as Julian Baggini claims in The Guardian, how about having the Brits (Bentham, Russell, Hume, Adam Smith, et al) take on the French (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Deleuze, de Beauvoir – a female […]
theory videos
Posted in Academe, Media ecology, tagged Latour on April 15, 2010 | 2 Comments »
One can find an increasing number of videotaped lectures online by today’s better known cultural theorists. But lectures are lectures, and the best audio-visual teaching tools remain full-fledged documentaries like Manufacturing Consent, An Examined Life, or Slavoj Zizek’s Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, and these remain all too rare. Somewhere in between the two are small-budget, […]
advice
Posted in Academe on April 8, 2010 | 4 Comments »
Graham Harman has been posting some very useful advice for graduate students (and aspiring academic writers) here and here. The five “lessons” at the end of the first piece are especially useful. To the third – “Write for the specific occasions that called for the writing” – I would add: and create those occasions when […]