There’s been a meme going around Twitter of listing your first seven jobs. It started with Marian Call, but of course spread across all sorts of folks, including academics. It’s been interesting—some folks have jobs that in retrospect lead exactly to the job they have now; others have a range of early jobs that I never would have guessed. But the academic ones often depress me. Many of the ones I saw seemed to quickly lead to being teachers, a few noted things like, “I haven’t even had seven jobs!” It wasn’t until smart woman and fellow scholar Kirsty Rolfe tweeted something about this that it occurred to me that maybe I was reacting to something more systemic than my individual annoyances. Thinking about #firstsevenjobs and what its use by academics says about academia and class (think it’s a bit more complex than it appears) — Kirsty Rolfe (@avoiding_bears) August…
Category: In other words
Everything else I write, including Shakespeare and performance, and personal stuff
new! digital facsimiles, Shakespeare apps & performance, close reading Othello & theater
Greetings! If you are, like me, waiting for the big blizzard to come and bury us all, might you like something else to read? Or if you are far away from the panic and are sick of everyone talking about it, might you like something else to read? I have you covered! Here are 3 relatively recent pieces I wrote—I hope you enjoy them and share them. “When Is A Source Not A Source?” (link) This past November, I gave a presentation at the Stanford Primary Source Symposium, the theme of which was “The Phenomenology of the Source.” My talk focused on a question that has been bothering me for a while now: how do we treat digital facsimiles of early print as source material? I’ll give you a preview of my rousing conclusion: So, when is a source not a source? If we go by what we see evidenced in…
books with friends
In the last few years I’ve started to keep track of what I’ve read. I don’t do anything fancy: I have a google doc and I write down the author and title of each book I’m reading and some quick notes on it, keeping track of the months as they go by. I do it partly because I was jealous of other friends’ lists and curious to know what I really read—not what I remembered reading, the low and high points, but what I’d really spent my time reading. I also do it so that when someone asks me for a recommendation, I have notes on what I liked and disliked and said meh to. (My 2015 book list is here, cryptic notes and all.) What I had not appreciated until recently, however, is that my list helps me remember my friends as well. When I look back at the…
starting a new chapter
Sometimes you look around at what you’re doing and you realize that it’s time to do something else. For me, that time is now: I’ve left my job at the Folger. For the immediate future, I’ll be concentrating on writing A Handbook for Studying Early Printed Books, 1450–1800, which is under contract with Wiley Blackwell. The book is intended to introduce undergraduate and early graduate students—and everyone else!—to how hand-press books were made and to working with them, whether in your hands or on screen. Those of you who have been relying on Philip Gaskell’s wonderful but dense A New Introduction to Bibliography will find A Handbook a more accessible introduction in the classroom. And those of you who know nothing about early modern bibliography and have no idea why you’d want to teach it will become converts to the joys of the subject. Along with writing A Handbook, I’ll be developing an open-access website with lots of images…
being a reader, again and still
There’s a story my parents used to tell of me as a child and how much I loved to read. Reading was what my family did in the evenings; we sat in the room we referred to as the study and read. One evening I was so deeply engrossed in my book that I had no idea they were talking to me; this was entertaining enough that they were both watching me to see how long it would be before I responded. It was long enough that it became a tale they told, part of how they understood who I was. I have always identified as a reader—a bookworm who understood the world by reading novels. It’s because I loved reading so much that I wanted to be an English professor (yes, if someone hadn’t intervened, I would’ve written one of those applications for grad school that gushed about how I…