I’m super excited to be the first director of the new Penn State Center for Humanities and Information. There are visiting fellowships, graduate student fellowships, and faculty fellowships, as well as a bunch of other cool stuff. And a new … Continue reading
I actually spoke on this roundtable from a single page of notes, as is my preference; but then I typed up the notes for a friend and so here they are. I only spoke for 6 minutes so I’ve said … Continue reading
The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities, now out from Columbia; more or less a guide on how to write literary criticism for graduate students and faculty in literary and cultural studies. Comes free with two jokes about fascists … Continue reading
Remarks I read (much too quickly) at the MLA roundtable organized by Jim English. Feed of Twitter response to the panel here. Some of this drawn from the scale piece, some from remarks on close reading in On Literary Worlds, and … Continue reading
For all I know this has been said before, but: the anthropocene is a world-concept. The normal way to understand the Anthropocene is as a historical period, defined more or less as the era when human beings acquire the capacity … Continue reading
One of the things I want to do sometimes is to repost stuff from Printculture’s archives, because it tends to be hard to find. Here is a series of discussions on the topic of something I called “leverage,” by which … Continue reading
Nice article from NY Mag on the psychological and physiological adjustments that come with having lost large amounts of weight. Cultural fantasies of weight loss present a tidy, attractive proposition – lose weight, gain self-acceptance – without addressing the whole … Continue reading
So a few months ago I predicted that one day actors would be hired by firms like Coursera to teach MOOCs (because once you don’t have to respond to student questions live, who cares who reads from the script? Might … Continue reading
I’m in Seoul for the annual conference of the English Language and Literature Association of Korea, for which I’m one of many interesting keynote speakers (including Ira Nadel, who I started reading in graduate school but had never met, so … Continue reading
…with lots of ideas about the future of online education. I suppose by “strange” I mean that his politics (if you look at his blog) operate from a position that imagines itself as entirely apolitical but is nonetheless quite interested … Continue reading
At least according to this reading of a Chronicle story by Chris Newfield. Short version that both faculty and university presidents agree that MOOCs will have a negative impact on higher ed, and that this opinion is held by people … Continue reading
Talk coming up to students at Jacobs University, Bremen, “Modernity and the Ends of Europe.” Designed more or less to convince a group of smart undergraduates, many thinking of majoring in a program called “global humanities,” to get excited about … Continue reading
… or at least thinking about it. Those of you who know me and my family know that our son, Jules, was born with a very rare genetic disability (known as 9p deletion syndrome). He’s fine, at least medically, though … Continue reading
So a group of people at the University of Pittsburgh (including the excellent Gayle Rogers) is reading On Literary Worlds, and they sent a few questions. I’ve pasted my (slightly cleaned up) responses and their questions below. EH: Thanks to you … Continue reading
A discussion group at Douban is talking about the Chinese version of The Hypothetical Mandarin, and sent along a few questions for me to answer. Responses here. Review/discussion of the book here.
