I’ve been thinking about the social ties that connect us to our scholarship. Last week I was at the annual Shakespeare Association of America meeting (or #shakeass13, as it was lovingly hashtagged), a conference that I’ve been going to every single year since (have mercy on me) 1994. ((Ok, I missed one year, in 1995, when it was held in Los Angeles and I was living in London, but I’ve been every other single year always.)) It’s a great conference, in part because it is organized around seminars: the bulk of the work of the meeting happens in seminars in which participants circulate papers in advance; there are also paper panels, with only two or three happening concurrently. The result is a conference with a lot of room for active participation and common conversations. It’s invigorating, and that’s one of the reasons I keep returning. Another reason is that I…
Category: In other words
Everything else I write, including Shakespeare and performance, and personal stuff
Make your own luck
What follows is a presentation I gave at the 2013 convention of the Modern Language Association (known fondly by many of us as #mla13) in the session “How Did I Get Here? Our ‘Altac’ Jobs.” The session was a roundtable discussion, with pecha kucha presentations, about “alternative academic” careers. You can watch the slides with my audio, or read the presentation and look at the slides on your own. My thanks to Brenda Bethman and Shaun Longstreet for organizing the panel and to my fellow panelists and to the audience for a great conversation. (Update: Slideshare no longer supports slides with audio, or at least, no longer supports what I had done, so if you want to hear me, you’ll have to listen to this audio and click through the slides yourself; it’s around 20 seconds a slide if you want to keep pace.) [slideshare id=15891152&doc=mla13altacslides-130107121927-phpapp02] “Make your own luck”…
pre-hurricane catch-up
As part of my pre-hurricane planning, I’m pushing out a few pages that I’d put together but not announced. So… In celebration of Open Access Week, here’s the fruit of my negotiated contributor’s contract: my book chapter on audiences for Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme’s collection, Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan 2012). The collection as a whole is geared towards exploring the practicalities of working with Shakespeare as a play texts intended for performance; my contribution explores how to think about the relationship between audiences and actors and what role each plays in shaping the other’s response. I talk about a couple of productions at Shakespeare’s Globe (a King Lear and an As You Like It), Toneelgroep’s amazing Roman Tragedies, and a Folger Theatre show of Measure for Measure. And in celebration of the upcoming Modern Languages Assocation conference (where I’ll be participating in two roundtable discussions,…
a new contributor’s contact!
In my last post, I discussed the contibutor’s contact I had been presented with for a chapter I have in a forthcoming collection. It was much more restrictive than I liked, including requiring that I ask them before I reuse my material in my own future publications and not allowing for any digital repository use at all. After emailing my editors and the publisher, and going through some back-and-forth, I’m happy to say that they presented an alternative contributor’s contract that I’m willing to sign! Here are the key details in how this happened for those of you who might be contemplating this sort of negotiation: I let my volume editors know that I intended to do this. I’m not sure they entirely understood my objections (one pointed out that he’d already put his contribution on his institutional repository; I didn’t counter that that didn’t seem permissible according to the terms we…
working with a contributor’s contract
6 July update below So, on top of everything else I’m dealing with at the moment, I just got an email requesting a super fast turn-around on a contributor’s agreement for a chapter I wrote. The book collection has already been accepted and is already in production—it’s really not clear to me how things got this far along without contributor’s agreements being worked out. But it has. So here’s my situation: this agreement sucks. It leaves the contributor with no rights. It doesn’t even let me republish my own work in, say, my own monograph without asking the publisher for permission. Here are the key details: “Author grants to the Publisher for the full term of copyright and any extensions thereto, the exclusive right and licence to edit, adapt, publish, reproduce, distribute, display and store the Contribution . . . in all forms, formats and media whether now known or…