Referencing his mother’s passing in 1992, Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “aim as an artist [was] to make a work that [was] so palpable and so dynamic and so incredibly felt that [his] Mom could literally walk off the surface of the canvas and back to life.”[1] The result was Untitled (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) from 2000, which was exhibited at his high school “Senior Art Exhibition.” Now...
Tracey Emin, Like A Cloud of Blood, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 59 7/8 x 71 5/8 in. (152 x 182cm) The difficulty in comprehending Tracey Emin’s Like A Cloud of Blood (2022) is the paradox of witnessing a disappearing figure coming into being. In Emin’s painting, an incomplete and empty body lies isolated in curled tension, presenting an image of discomfort, pain, and human frailty. Yet beauty is...
How do you feel about epigraphs? My partner once said she hated them, at least in the context of academic writing. Why not just get straight to what you want to say? Many readers find them pretty easy to skip over (as I’m sure at least a couple of you did when approaching this blog post) and if used incorrectly they can easily become unnecessary filler, pretentious excess, or both...
To conclude our series on humanities PhDs working full-time off the tenure track, we have Colleen Kennedy, who earned her English PhD from The Ohio State University in 2015. Her dissertation considered the role of odors, aromas, and other olfactory descriptors in early-modern literature. Today, she works in the publicity unit of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC. What is your job...
Welcome back to our series on humanities PhDs who are now working full-time off the tenure track! This week brings us Katherine Kidd, who earned her English PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2016. Her dissertation looked at depictions of queer and non-normative people in the working class and below the poverty line, and considered how to reintegrate class and queer politics in the...
This week, we continue our series on humanities PhDs who are now working full-time off the tenure track. We interviewed former Broadly Textual Pub contributor Melissa Welshans, an alumna of the English PhD program at Syracuse University, where in 2017 she defended her dissertation on gender and sexuality in the institution of marriage in early-modern England. Now, she holds the position of...
Picture this: You’re a PhD student. For whatever reason, you’ve decided to look for a career outside the academy, or at least off the tenure track. But while your PhD program gave you a lot of preparation for a tenure-track job, veering off this prepared path isn’t something you’ve been trained for. What do you do next? Which path will you choose? This month, we’re interviewing people with...
Write what you like. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. From Thomas Carlyle’s vision of the Victorian work ethic, otherwise known as the gospel of work, to the twenty-first century’s increasing focus on developing a comprehensive self away from time spent in productive labor, the concepts of labor for pay versus leisure...
![The "is this X?" meme. The male Asian anime character has a meteor superimposed over his face, and he gestures at an image of Earth. The meme is captioned "Is this [X]?" where [X] is an image of the eyes of the man from the commercial real estate meme.](https://i0.wp.com/broadlytextual.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/49265719_278284466202425_5489023532056707072_n.png?fit=720%2C707&ssl=1)
As a first-generation immigrant who first grew up speaking Mandarin Chinese, which then became superseded by English as my entire family struggled to learn the ins and outs of this truly ridiculous language, reading student papers submitted by those wrestling with the language will always provoke a bit of extra compassion from me. Working toward a doctorate’s degree in English may be no small...
Generally, there are few things that unite teachers more than a mutual aversion to grading. For some, the marking up of assignments and assigning of earned grades may be a mere annoyance; for others, the unavoidable nature of subjectivity inherent to that process, plus the amount of feedback necessary, multiplied by the time consumed makes for one distasteful equation. That being said, there are...