Tag: academia
Begin (Again): The Art of Openings
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…
Reading Privilege and the Privilege of Reading
[7-10 minute read] As a child, I was a voracious reader. Scholastic Book Fairs were the best part of the elementary school fall season; no questions asked. J.K. Rowling was still publishing book after book in the Harry Potter series, The Reading Rainbow featured heavily as parent-approved public broadcast television, and I distinctly remember the pride
The Transformational Archive (And Some Thoughts About Bullet Journaling)
[7 minute read] As I’ve discussed in my last two posts, I recently visited the Rubenstein Library at Duke University to complete research on the Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers. Visiting the archive helped me reorient myself towards my subject matter – the life and work of Abraham Joshua Heschel – and gave a much-needed boost of
Time and Authenticity in Visions and Images of Abraham Joshua Heschel
[7 minute read] “Can we have snack right now? When we get back to the classroom?” “We usually have snack at 10:00 or 10:30am. It’s only 9:30am now. Don’t you think you’ll want it later?” I ask one of my students doubtfully, walking beside him as we head towards the seventh-grade classroom at Temple Concord. We
Scholarship and Affect: Merging Critical and Fan Identities
[7-10 minute read] Take an adventure with me through my affective and critical experiences with a few texts I encountered during my first year and a half of my Ph.D. program: ***** I am sitting in the theatre in the last showing of the night for Star Wars: Rogue One. I have just come from
Dear Diary…
Dear Diary, Today I find myself in graduate school, I look around and still wonder how it is that I came to be here. In the fourth grade I cried while reading The Lord of the Rings because I believed that one of my favorite characters died. I would sneak out of the lunchroom to
Empathy and the Danger(s) Disengagement
For the past couple of years, I’ve been keeping a list. Admittedly, it’s not an original concept, being a mental exercise adapted from one of many optimistic Pinterest boards encouraging meditative mindfulness and gratitude in the upcoming New Year. Instead of coming up with a soon-to-be neglected resolution, this effort at self-improvement
Empathy and Education: The Double Burden (Part II)
In the numerous fields comprising that artistic and cultural field we call “the humanities,” we who self-identify as scholars must constantly be on the defense regarding our own choice of profession. An increasingly corporatized world sees banks encouraging ballerinas and actors to become engineers and botanists instead, and federal agencies such as the CBO actively
Empathy and Education: The Double Burden (Part 1)
A couple of weeks ago, toward the end of our class’s unit on “Thrills, Sensations, and the Ethics of Nonfiction,” I assigned my students the University of Chicago’s Welcome Letter to the Class of 2020 alongside Sara Ahmed’s thought-provoking “Against Students” (June 2015). The former, a document separately decried or praised as patronizing and oppressive
“Of Course You Know…”: Deconstructing the Privilege of Knowledge
Some time ago, a colleague of mine was leading discussion in class, and he offhandedly remarked that, of course, we all knew that Aristotle had spoken of the same issue we were discussing in his Nichomachean Ethics. The way in which he made the utterance made it clear that, if we did not, in fact, know this reference, we