It was my first Convention of the Modern Language Association, held in Washington DC in late December of 2005.  I was not presenting, I was not interviewing, I was just there to get acclimated, thinking I would be on the job market the following year.

Setting aside how incredibly wrong I… Read full post »

This week about the same... about 15 new jobs.  Really wondering when the job market will pick up its pace.  Frankly very worried that it won't.  Also, it appears that it is not a particularly good year for my sub-specialty, and *really* not a good year for my sub-sub-specialty. … Read full post »

I think my cardinal sin, the one that has made me question the importance of originality in scholarship, is that my work is radically interdisciplinary, combining trends in history, literature, and science.  It's the Humanities - Hard Sciences interplay that seems to have most people (and by peo… Read full post »

This is what, as I enter my 8th year of graduate school (shame on me!), I wish I had heard (listened to?) when I started my climb up the Ivory Tower:

1. Publish.  No, really. Publish. Frequently.  (Read: Even if it won't count towards your future pursuit of tenure, and totally
… Read full post »

I'm starting a new series on OS called "Fizzle Fridays," Friday being the day that new job listings appear in the MLA's Job Information List (JIL).  Last week there were 11 new job listings added to the initial 76 in my field.  This week, 14.  Those numbers are, at the absolute… Read full post »

It's every researcher's nightmare.  S/he is putting the finishing touches on the much-belabored dissertation, does one last check of the MLA Bib to see if there's any important research s/he's missed, and voilà, there it is, the article that was written a few years ago that does close to… Read full post »

The online edition of the Chronicle of Higher Ed reports in a recent article (in their subsection "Facts & Figures") that 52% of colleges have not frozen hiring for new faculty positions.  Which means, friends, that a whopping 48% of colleges and universities have either partially or totall… Read full post »

It's a tough year for job seekers in academia.  So was 2008.  People said last year that the job market would improve by the time the Modern Language Association released its listings of open positions in English and Foreign Language departments worldwide, which happened to be this past Tue… Read full post »