Academia is, make no mistake about it, currently shooting itself in the foot.  It is signing its own death warrant, digging its own grave, doing all that is humanly possible to make sure that humanities education becomes completely irrelevant in the 21st century.

The mechanism by which it… Read full post »

Well, I did it.  After weeks of avoiding the Widowmaker Wiki, I finally sucked it up and looked at it.  Why?  Because of the two interviews I had, I haven't yet heard from either of them and it's fully nearly two months post-MLA. 

One of the schools had said they… Read full post »

I saw my Yahoo! News today, and apparently jobless claims are up again.  This does not bode well, in any way, for the 2010 elections.  Nor does it bode well for my current job search.  It seems like I've been awash in bad news and silence lately, and I don't know… Read full post »

At the last minute-- almost the very last minute --I got two interviews.  Just two, not that I'm complaining, but last year I had nine.  I got the calls back to back on the last day of fall semester, after I had just walked out of the final exam I was… Read full post »

It's mid-December, and I am flabbergasted:  I have NO interviews yet for the MLA.  I have submitted more than two dozen applications to schools all over the country.  I have fine-tuned my cover letters and have updated my CV, which is much-improved over last year.  And yet... ....… Read full post »

There's a "helpful" thing to know about if you're hunting for an academic job this year: there's a wiki with precious information about who's heard from whom, who's already arranging interviews, who's bypassing the MLA and already arranging for flybacks.  Chances are, if you're on the market, yo… Read full post »

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 »