For first-time authors: name your dissertation something plain and boring if you're planning to turn it into a book. A book and a dissertation should not share a title, so if you've got a good one, save it for later! Your "good" title, by the way, should contain information about the book's topic. That may… Continue reading A few notes on academic book titles
Category: Academia
How Not To Be: Peer Review
This post is modified from the original, which appeared in 2012 on Peachleaves. Back in my hoop-jumping early years of grad school, I sent an abstract of a seminar paper to three editors of a proposed volume. The road to revision never did run smooth, but the process for this volume was more painful than it… Continue reading How Not To Be: Peer Review
The Flight of the English Major
A recent NYT opinion piece gave some pretty surprising statistics on English majors: "In 1991, 165 students graduated from Yale with a B.A. in English literature. By 2012, that number was 62. In 1991, the top two majors at Yale were history and English. In 2013, they were economics and political science. At Pomona this… Continue reading The Flight of the English Major
Whoa whoa whoa!
This post was previously published at Peachleaves blog. Slow day at work, so I finished reading Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas. In the final chapter, my leisurely read-while-at-work pace was jarred when I reached this paragraph: What the surveys suggest is that if doctoral education in English were a cartoon character, then about thirty… Continue reading Whoa whoa whoa!
Maybe we teach it to them
This post was originally published at Peachleaves blog This article has been making the rounds of my Facebook peer group. It’s a thoughtful piece that puts a lot of effort into describing the conditions and causes of the current graduate school dilemma. I don’t think I agree with his conclusions (though I certainly haven’t any… Continue reading Maybe we teach it to them
Focus Pocus
This post was originally published on the blog Peachleaves You guys, my exams are in two weeks. I feel like a lunatic. I am driven to practice sanity insanely – cooking nightly; co-hosting multiple parties in a weekend; going out on the night that the Phillies won the World Series – because if I don’t,… Continue reading Focus Pocus
Sara Davis 