As the academic year is winding down, we’re seeking bloggers for the summer months: June through August.
This blog is a space for graduate scholars of Romanticism to share their work, their ideas, and their inklings in an interactive forum. Posts should be relatively casual in tone and aimed at a broad readership, including our scholarly community and anyone interested in Romanticism studies.
Posts don’t have to be text-based. In fact, we encourage multimedia and creative contributions.
If you’re interested in contributing and can commit to writing at least one post per month over the summer, please send a brief introduction to yourself and your research interests to me (Caroline Winter) at winterc[at]uvic[dot]ca by Monday, May 17 (was 8th).
Caroline
Why We Blog
By Caroline Winter
The debate about the role of social media in academia that took over my Twitter feed a few weeks ago (read about it in The Guardian and in Forbes) has prompted me to think about the role of blogging as well, particularly for graduate students, who are perhaps especially concerned about being seen as “serious academics.”
Continue reading “Why We Blog”
Call for Bloggers, 2016–2017
Hello, Romanticists
As is traditional at this time of year, we are looking for bloggers to write for the NASSR Graduate Caucus blog!
Bloggers are asked to commit to contributing one post per month on a topic of their choice for the duration of the academic year, September to April.
If you’re interested in blogging, please email Caroline Winter, the Managing Editor, at winterc@uvic.ca, with a short statement of interest by Tuesday, September 27.
Paper Consciousness: Professor Deidre Lynch Performs a “Bookish Ontology” on the Nineteenth-Century Album
By Amy Gaeta
Recently the English department at UW-Madison hosted Professor Deidre Lynch of Harvard to present new work that appears to evolve from her last publication Loving Literature: A Cultural History (2015, Chicago UP). You should recognize the guest lecturer as one of the most influence contributors to 19th c. and Romantic studies. Earlier works remain frequently cited in contemporary scholarship, most notably her work on Austen and The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Cultural and the Business of Inner Meaning (1998). In consideration of blog readers interests in book history, archival methods, material culture, and all things 19th c. I’ve provide a brief summary of the talk title “Paper Slips: The Nineteenth-Century Album and Other Misadventures in Book-keeping” and offer comments on how the work Prof. Lynch presented could inspire scholarship to come, or at least re-think what we write in our diaries.
Continue reading “Paper Consciousness: Professor Deidre Lynch Performs a “Bookish Ontology” on the Nineteenth-Century Album”
Avoiding Winter Break Burn-Out: R&R for the Holidays
Recently, I’ve started trying to keep tabs on other academic blogs. After fumbling around with my partner to figure out how to get all (okay, most) of the posts in one reader, we finally got it to work, and I can now browse through them on my phone. In particular in the last month, I’ve seen a spike in posts dedicated to self-care. Apparently, it’s particularly difficult for academics to practice it in late November/early December—something to do with papers, grading, grant deadlines, and—oh yeah—making sure to have quality time with your family and friends on Thanksgiving if you celebrate it. To name a few posts I’ve seen: Raul Pacheco-Vega redefines academic success (in both small and large scopes); Meghan Duffy reminds us that while we are busy, we don’t actually work 80 hours a week and should stop feeling guilty if we aren’t; Steven Shaw discusses realistic expectations and developing a healthy perspective (as opposed to a “tough skin”); and our own Amy Gaeta highlights self-care as part of surviving the first semester of grad school.
All of these writers give great advice, and if you find yourself in a rut, they’re worth a read. Still, as helpful as their posts are, sometimes all we can manage during the end of a semester is to go, “Right. Green tea. I should drink that instead of coffee this afternoon,” and then table the rest for when our workloads die down. But when winter break starts (or summer, or spring if you’re on a quarter system), sometimes we want to collapse or throw all caution to the wind and celebrate that we’re finally done (for the time being, anyway).
Continue reading “Avoiding Winter Break Burn-Out: R&R for the Holidays”
Romantic Web Communities
One of the great advantages we have as scholars is the opportunity to form communities beyond our institutions — not just at annual conferences in remote locales, but also in ongoing conversations on the web. These online communities are fora for scholarly dialogue and informal queries, requests for crowdfunding special projects and historical sites, and repositories of archival material. Here’s a brief roundup of selected sites, listservs, and communities available to Romanticists (and if you know of more, please get in touch!).
Academic listservs:
(1) NASSR List — the list of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (subscription required). The list is frequented by many major scholars in the field, but also graduate students and junior faculty; this is a particularly excellent resource for answers to obscure and arcane historical questions, and for links to major awards and opportunities in the field. Continue reading “Romantic Web Communities”
Graphic Learning: Examples of Well-Researched Comics
It seems pointless to argue that graphic novels have an important place in literature at this point. Personally, I took two classes during my undergraduate career that incorporated such texts (including Satrapi’s Persepolis and Bechdel’s Fun Home), but more often than not this is a rare occurrence and something I did not encounter in my graduate coursework. Graphic novels often do not get the attention they deserve, in part because many deem them déclassé due to their graphic nature and/or subject material, but also because they are hard to teach. While graphic novels can be analyzed through literary theory (and should be), the format itself, and most notably, the visual element of such narratives, are in a scholarly discipline all their own. One cannot teach, or even fully enjoy a graphic novel, without at least a bare minimum knowledge of art theory and visual composition. (Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art and Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods are good places to start.) But then again, neither of these things occupies some alien universe detached from what we as literary scholars already tackle. Continue reading “Graphic Learning: Examples of Well-Researched Comics”
Sharing Process, Sources, Product: Around My Talk on Grad Student Group Blogging
Just a couple weeks ago, I gave a talk at MLA13 on graduate student blogging in which I call for graduate students, like us and in our example, to blog more about what we do over the course of the years we spend training for our jobs and for publishing. Rather than just reblogging my talk, this post is an effort to share my process of writing this talk, since it was highly dialogic and a new process for me. Feedback from other bloggers was critical to my learning how different users read, write, and connect through communities of graduate students studying Romanticism and other topics in the Humanities and to thinking through two very different kinds of group blogging forums: our nassrgrads blog and HASTAC.
Here’s a link to the talk: “‘A Large Amount of Good Second-Class Work’: The Value of Graduate Students’ Contributions to Scholarly Group Blogs”
Twitter and Storify: While writing my talk, and especially during MLA, I Tweeted a bunch and was on the lookout for Tweets on topic that pointed to relevant scholarly discussions. I made a Storify of these tweets, which you can find here.
To get to the final version of this talk I needed a lot of feedback from nassrgrads.com bloggers — thank you very much for your email replies! I also sought feedback from HASTAC (another group blog forum I wrote about and that I participate in). To think things through, I blogged on HASTAC and through those blogs generated two sets of very useful conversations.
Blog 1: “Graduate Student Research Blogging” and its conversation (on HASTAC) led me to …
Blog 2: “How Do You Use HASTAC” and its conversation (again, on HASTAC’s platform). All I can say is: wow! It is incredibly satisfying and exciting to have real-time discussions with scholars, like Cathy Davidson, and to have those conversations inflect my work so directly and meaningfully. More, please!
Here is a loose compendium of the sources I consulted while writing this talk, pub’d in Google Docs. One source I just thought of that is not on the list, and that includes blogs as scholarship, is Debates in the Digital Humanities (ed. Matthew K. Gold, U of Minnesota P, 2012).
On the “shoulder” of the MLA talk project, I was simultaneously thinking a lot about how we can make our nassrgrads.com blog a better, more fruitful, rewarding, rich, fun, and useful collection of posts and conversations. I’m looking forward to working on these improvements as a group!
All of this is to share a process that was extremely nontraditional for me in terms of scholarship production. It was true for this paper that thinking editorially about our blog and group on nassrgrads, blogging questions and comments in multiple fora, Tweeting and making a Storify, researching in The Chronicle and other pubs that focus on the relationship between scholars, modes of scholarship, and the profession helped me recognized the lack of serial scholarship produced by graduate students (on the whole) and ways in which we can increase our value as working Humanists who produce great quantities of useful work over the course of our training. It was a highly dialogic writing process in which comments from people I only know through HASTAC or nassrgrads — by professional connection in an online research community — contributed to critically thinking through the issues and identifying what I wanted most to say. After all, Mark Sample was adamant that each speaker only had 6 minutes and 40 seconds at the podium. I sweated this one and a lot of discussing and reading went into those few minutes.
Now that most of it is collected here, in this blog post, I am turning to my first spring semester projects: dissertation fellowship applications, revisions for my entries in the Johns Hopkins Guide to New Media and Textuality, and revising a diss chapter into an essay-length piece.
What are you working on right now? Looking forward to hearing from you — tally-ho, Spring semester projects!
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Image of raw cookie dough: By Nick Ares (originally posted to Flickr as Cookie Dough) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Call for new bloggers extended to Wed., Feb 9
If the NASSR abstract deadline got extended, we thought the call for new bloggers should, too!
We’re looking for graduate students in Romanticism *at any stage* in their studies, and from different kinds of universities both in the U.S. and Canada, to help us create online conversation about our field and our unique place in it as students, teachers, and new professionals. It’s also a great way for you to demonstrate who you are as a scholar and have your creative, energetic, intellectual voice heard echoing throughout the blogosphere. (Okay, perhaps a modest quadrant of the blogosphere–but it’s OUR quadrant.)
We ask that bloggers post 1-2 times per month on any aspect of your life as a graduate student Romanticist. We hope you’ll join us and continue the conversation. To apply, send a short letter of interest and your CV to nassgrads@colorado.edu. [You do not need to be a NASSR member to apply.]
Call for New Bloggers!
We are looking for new regular contributors for the NGSC WordPress blog on www.nassrgrads.com. If you are interested, please send your CV and a brief letter of interest (no longer than 1 page) to nassgrad@colorado.edu by January 22.
Bloggers are responsible for publishing at least 1-2 posts per month. New bloggers will start February 1, 2011.
We hope writers will address the issues that affect, inspire, and rile them as novice professionals learning to navigate the field and establish how they will contribute to it. There are no preset categories or topics on which to write, so we encourage interested bloggers to let your interests drive your content. Topics might include questions, challenges, and solutions to pedagogical issues as well as research, reading, and writing methodologies. You might also blog about what you’re teaching and how you’re teaching it, what you’re reading or re-reading in the field that you find useful and exciting, as well as what professional activities you participate in (reading groups, planning conferences, attending conferences, trying to get published, etc.). The posts already published on the blog serve only as a guide and we hope new voices and interests will expand the array of topics and content. Most of all, we hope contributing to and reading our blog will be fun and rewarding! We hope you will apply to blog for us!
Note: You do not need to be a NASSR member to apply.