I had the very good fortune of seeing historian Darrin McMahon (Florida State University), author of the recently published Divine Fury: A History of Genius, deliver a lecture last week as part of Rhodes College’s year-long Communities in Conversation lecture series. I want to write a bit here about some of the questions his book…
Read MoreRebecca Tuhus-Dubrow published a piece a few days ago in the NYT entitled “The Repurposed Ph.D.,” which served as my first introduction to the neologism “post-academic.” The abbreviated (and eminently hashtaggable) version of that term– “PostAc”– is something like the poorer, sadder and less pretty twin of “AltAc” (“alternative academic”), which has for the last…
Read MoreI’ve never been in a fist-fight in my entire life but, yesterday, I received my first black eye. I got my black eye roughly 48 hours ago now, on what just so happened to be the last day of my College’s Fall break, which ended Tuesday evening. I spent the entire evening on Tuesday with…
Read MoreAs just-another college professor, it’s hard not to feel like the war against MOOCs is more than a little bit like the War on Drugs, or the War or Terror, or the War on Poverty. The “enemy” is largely nonspecific, nonlocatable, plural, mutable, incredibly powerful and often invisible. It’s hard to tell on which front…
Read MoreI’m going to assume that today’s prompt means for me to pick among living artists/bands, partly because it would be really creepy to have dinner with a dead person, but more so because the idea of choosing a dinner guest from all the living and dead artists ever is far too daunting a project for…
Read MoreI’ve never been to Africa, which is particularly embarrassing in my case since I have a Doctoral Minor in African Studies and a large part of my dissertation involved the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Not having been to Africa is far and away the greatest regret I have in my life, one that…
Read MoreThis week, I’ve begun my third stint in the Rhodes Institute for Regional Studies. RIRS is an innovative summer program in which Rhodes’ best and brightest students get to create their own independent research projects (each of which has some relation to the region) and work with one faculty member for eight weeks to complete…
Read MoreApologies in advance to my close friends and family, but the truth is that there is quite literally nothing in the world that I love more than Memphis. Thanks in part to the Grizzlies’ inspiring display of our city’s three most valuable homegrown resources– heart, grit, and grind– and in larger part thanks to the…
Read MoreLast week, my Philosophy and Film class took up the theme of “documentary truth.” In preparation for our Tuesday night seminar, students were required to choose one film from a list of documentaries (Grizzly Man, The Thin Blue Line, Night and Fog, Bowling for Columbine, Capturing the Friedmans, Man on Wire, Super Size Me, Ghosts…
Read MoreI’m not sure exactly where to place the blame for the total disappointment that is the (Academy Award-nominated) film Zero Dark Thirty, which tells a based-on-real-events story of “the greatest manhunt in history.” The hunted is, of course, al-Qaeda founder and mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks Osama bin Laden. Zero Dark Thirty is organized as…
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