Markmaking

Art of Two Germanys

Art of Two Germanys at the L.A. County Museum.

LACMA: exhibition catalog timeline

Previews and Reviews:

Christopher Knight, Culture Monster (LAT)

Eduard Beaucamp, Art Newspaper

Hanno Rauterberg, Die Zeit

Jordan Mejias, FAZ

Jori Finkel, N.Y. Times

Kate Bowen interviews Stephanie Barron, Deutsche Welle

Kerstin Zilm, Deutschlandradio

Marlis Schaum, Deutsche Welle

Suzanne Muchnic, L.A. Times

200 Years of Poe

This month, Edgar Allan Poe turns 200. What does academia have to say about that?

Algis Valiunas, "No to Poe"

The esteem in which Poe is commonly held these days has to do partly with his ruinous life, which epitomizes the misery of poetic genius in crass America—a theme beloved of the cognoscenti; partly with the fashionable elevation of popular literary forms like horror tales, detective stories, and science fiction to an equality with high art; and partly with the no less fashionable elevation of mental disturbance into a superior form of insight. 

Matthew Taylor, "Edgar Allan Poe’s (Meta)physics: A Pre-History of the Post-Human"

Rather than optimistically assuming, as Mayo and others did, that identifying a universal force is equivalent to mastering it for the betterment of humanity, Poe concluded that an allencompassing cosmic energy inevitably troubles human-being by suspending the autonomy and interiority of individual humans; the disorientation of normal, corporeal functioning and the literal loss of self-possession attending mesmeric practice illustrated for Poe the fact that people are little more than occasions for the demonstration of an impersonal power.

Peter Coviello, "Poe In Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery"

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.  —Henry James

That Poe had a powerful intellect is undeniable: but it seems to me the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty.  —T. S. Eliot

Above all else, though, the story of the dysfunctions of intimacy in Poe is important to tell because it allows us a way to find real rapport between the now divided critical tendencies around Poe, between those attending, with largely psychoanalytic tools, to the works' sexual suggestions, and those attending, with largely historicist tools, to the works' racial significances.

David Blake, "The Man That Was Used Up": Edgar Allan Poe and the Ends of Captivity

The General's status as a cyborg also makes him an important antecedent to the many robotic warriors that have surfaced in twentieth-century fiction and film. Poe's cyborg differs from these figures in that he is less the ideal combatant than the ideal captive, a figure endowed with charm, handsome features, and hegemonic significance. Poe's story leads us to question whether the ultimate mission of redeemed captives is not so much to defeat an alien society as it is to conquer their own.

Also Kevin J. Hayes, Poe and the Printed Word and The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe

AP: "Why 2009 Will Be Rich With Celebrations"

The Mark Moyar Case

NY Sun: Gary Shapiro on hiring standards in academia:

Mark Moyar doesn't exactly fit the stereotype of a disappointed job seeker. He is an Eagle Scout who earned a summa cum laude degree from Harvard, graduating first in the history department before earning a doctorate at the University of Cambridge in England. Before he had even begun graduate school, he had published his first book and landed a contract for his second book. Distinguished professors at Harvard and Cambridge wrote stellar letters of recommendation for him.

Yet over five years, this conservative military and diplomatic historian applied for more than 150 tenure-track academic jobs, and most declined him a preliminary interview. During a search at University of Texas at El Paso in 2005, Mr. Moyar did not receive an interview for a job in American diplomatic history, but one scholar who did wrote her dissertation on "The American Film Industry and the Spanish-Speaking Market During the Transition to Sound, 1929-1936." At Rochester Institute of Technology in 2004, Mr. Moyar lost out to a candidate who had given a presentation on "promiscuous bathing" and "attire, hygiene and discourses of civilization in Early American-Japanese Relations."

Farewell, Michael Winerip

In regards to Michael Winerip's farewell On Education column.

Dear Mr. Winerip,

As a young man, I somehow got the idea that the New York Times was the newspaper of record—the necessary source for understanding current events in society. I now know this was just a silly error of youth and that the Times is rather America’s left-wing newspaper. I still read it every day for this reason, and I think it fills a necessary and important role, like the Manchester Guardian, or Russia’s Pravda.

In the months and years to come, I will miss your indefatigable propaganda against No Child Left Behind, which has inevitably forced those of us on the other side to think clearly about our reasoning. I do wish you hadn’t taken the trouble to frame it as neutral reporting, but had simply issued it directly as position papers. I think it could play a constructive role in think-tank debates (actually, I’m sure it does already). It is not necessary to dress it up with the improbable pretense of informing the broad spectrum of readers about the complex reality at hand. For that, thank god, we have the internet.

It is with a pang of regret that I recognize that the On Education columns will no longer provoke spirited debate on this same internet. Since I will no longer benefit from that forum, I make the symbolic gesture of listing the questions which your columns have, in my view always raised but never precisely answered.

Do you think that every teacher in the country is doing a good job? If, hypothetically, a teacher could be found who was failing his students, would you give that teacher ultimate responsibility for making sure he improved? Do you think that a bad teacher should ever, in principle, be fired?

Do you think that the interests of teachers are identical with students? Do you think that these two can be assumed to be identical, or that, in case of conflict, those of the teachers should take priority? Do you think that friend vs. enemy of teachers should be the most important criterion for evaluating policy?

Could you ever accept the principle of external accountability, or do you think that schools are in the best position when each teacher and each principal gets to decide whether he or she is doing an acceptable job? And more generally, do you think that organizations in general function best when each member gets to have sovereignty over his or her own evaluations?

Personally, I had the benefit of affluent white suburban public schools growing up, in which, all the same, 10 percent of the teachers were great, 80 percent were mediocre, and 10 percent were obvious disgraces and yet, thanks to their redoubtable union, secure from suffering any discipline. Only on arriving at Harvard as an undergraduate did I learn what real learning was about. It took some catching up. In no way do I mean to play the victim here. I escaped with no ill effects beyond years of wasted time. Even within this school, of course, the poor and minority students disproportionally suffered from the bad teachers. Do you think that more money and lower student per teacher ratios are the best way to improve a school such as this?

If my extraction of argument from your anecdotes is correct, all teachers should be shielded from any punitive sanctions either indefinitely, or until the day, no doubt soon to come, when the voters of the United States enthusiastically endorse a massive wealth-redistribution scheme. In the meantime, I assume that the Times’s educational reporting will continue to win praise in uptown Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, where as we know, the public schools are so good that private school is scarcely ever heard of and hence the readership’s first-hand knowledge of public school can be taken for granted. I am also sure that this reporting will continue to play the role that all of its various readers have come to know and expect.

In the meantime, I congratulate you on your accomplishments and wish you success in the future.

Sincerely,

A reader

Taliban Welcome Here

John Fund takes the narrow-minded dead-white-guy cultural-imperialist position that diversity should mean educating the victims of the Taliban's crimes rather than their perpetrators. However, it's a good thing that the enlightened pluralists at Yale have the moral courage to welcome a man who defended the Bamiyan demolitions and yellow stars for Jews, rather than attempting to impose their oppressive Western values on such a victim.

I met one of those students at the reception. Makai Rohbar, an Afghan student whose family legally immigrated to New Haven in 2002, served as Ms. Joya's translator for the evening. After Ms. Joya's speech, I asked Ms. Rohbar what she was studying. She told me she was taking classes in chemistry and biophysics in the hope of someday becoming a physician. I then inquired how long she had been at Yale. She blushed. "I don't go here," she said. "I attend classes at Gateway Community College," also in New Haven. She had never imagined that she could be accepted into Yale or ever find a way to pay for it.

Intrigued, I later called her up to get her full story. She left a refugee camp in Pakistan with her mother, Maroofa, and her four younger siblings in 2002. Like Mr. Hashemi she has only a high school equivalency degree, because schooling in the refugee camp was limited. Her mother can't work and knows only basic English, so she and her sister Rona are the only means of support for the family beyond food stamps and $600 a month in housing assistance from the state.

I asked her what her life was like. "It's hard, but certainly better than Pakistan," she told me. "I am very grateful, but I must work 50 hours a week and also go to class. Sometimes, I am so tired I can't attend." She earns $8 an hour as a clerk in a local retail store.

I asked what she thought about Mr. Hashemi attending Yale with the help of a Wyoming foundation and a discount from Yale of 35% to 40% on tuition. "It's like a nightmare that you can't believe when you wake up," she told me. "This is a good country, but I think some people in New Haven are so complacent they don't know what officials like Hashemi did to my people."

Posner & Becker on Summers

Posner:

1. The members of the Harvard Corporation should resign; their successors should rescind Summers' resignation.

2. The reconstituted Corporation should redefine the lines of command of the university, making clear that faculty are not the owners or "citizens" of Harvard, but rather are honored employees.

3. A purely consultative University Senate should be created so that the university administration can obtain reliable, representative expressions of faculty opinion.

4. The president of the university should be authorized to appoint the department chairmen.

5. The anachronistic institution of tenure should be reexamined and perhaps jettisoned. The market for university professors is highly competitive; a good person whose contract is not renewed can get a comparable job elsewhere. (See my post on tenured employment of January 15 of this year.)

6. A generous buy-out program should be instituted in order to encourage early retirement and thus provide greater career opportunities for young academics.

Becker:

1. The Arts and Sciences faculty has too much power relative to professional schools at Harvard, as shown by what happened during the Summers controversy. An overall University Senate would have helped Harvard during this crisis, as it would have helped Columbia during the student disturbances of the late 1960's (where I taught at that time). It was crucial in the University of Chicago getting through those disturbances in much better shape than Columbia and many other universities.
2. Presidents should have more power and faculties less, for the reasons I gave. Universities will continue to be run mainly by faculties, but their power is excessive at Harvard and many other universities.
3. In light especially of the Federal law of the 1990's that prevents universities from forcing faculty members to retire, and because of the great competition among universities for faculty, a competition that in many fields is becoming worldwide (see my post on tenure of January 15th of this year), academic tenure is excessively strong. It should be greatly weakened, if not abolished.

Posner & Becker on Tenure

Posner:

The greater cost of tenure is simply in forcing retention of inferior employees. The 80-year-old mathematician may be working hard, but he may be incapable of achieving the output of the 25-year-old mathematician who would take his place were it not for tenure. Note how governmental prohibition of compulsory retirement at a fixed age aggravates the inefficiency of tenure--and is no doubt contributing to its eventual abandonment.

Perhaps the strongest argument for academic tenure is that without it academics would be reluctant to undertake promising projects with a high risk of failure. But the situation is no different in "knowledge" firms such as software and pharmaceutical-drug producers, which encourage their scientists to undertake high-risk projects--and do not think it necessary to offer tenure. If most good new ideas are produced by young academics, then an institution that raises the average age of faculty, namely tenure, seems likely to reduce academic productivity. An interesting empirical project, therefore, would be to study the effect of England's abolition of tenure on the average age and productivity of English university faculties.

Becker:

The traditional justification for academic tenure is that otherwise professors would be unwilling to express unpopular views for fear of being fired. This argument for academic tenure is extremely weak in the United States where several thousand colleges and universities compete for professors.

Posner:

I agree that tenure protects academics against being fired because of their unpopular ideas, but there are other forms of retaliation that are almost as effective. If there is a market for the unpopular idea, the fired professor can find another job. If there is no market, he's likely to be ostracized by his peers. I would like some examples of where tenure made the difference between production and suppression (presumablly temporary) of a genuinely important idea.

Becker:

Professors at the vast majority of colleges and universities do very little research, long-term or any other type. Serious research is concentrated at 50-100 universities. So it is hard to see the length of time it takes to complete major research as an argument for tenure at the remaining 3000 or so colleges and universities. Moreover, Bell Labs in its heyday, and other corporate research centers have encouraged long-term research without giving tenure. Good organizations, whether universities or corporations, will see the potential of original research, whereas bad ones will not, with or without tenure.

The Winerip Dossier

In today's New York Times, Michael Winerip files another sheaf of doctrinaire, conceptually incoherent but earnest anti-testing propaganda disguised as critical, objective journalism.

However, thanks to the internet, it is extremely easy for doubtful readers to learn from experts who cast doubt on the value of Winerip's reporting.

If I were to meet Winerip, I would want to ask whether he believed in principle that any individual in the educational system should ever be accountable for meeting any standard of any kind.

PARTIAL WINERIP DOSSIER

1. Joanne Jacobs May 22, 2003
2. Joanne Jacobs June 5, 2003
3. Kimberly Swygert July 22, 2003
4. Joanne Jacobs Oct. 30, 2003
5. Joe Williams, 2003
   
6. Eduwonk April 25, 2004
7. Eduwonk May 23, 2004
8. New York Sun July 15, 2004
9. Joanne Jacobs Nov. 22, 2004
10. National Review, Winter 2004
11. Andrew J. Rotherham, 2004
12. Joanne Jacobs July 19, 2005

Blogging Risky for Academics

[Now I'm pseudonymous! -ed.]

New York Sun: Blogging Prof Fails to Heed Own Advice

"I shouldn't be doing this. I'll be going up for tenure soon."

It was with those words of self admonishment that an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Daniel Drezner, inaugurated his Web log in September 2002.

...

On Friday, Mr. Drezner's first blog entry came back to haunt him: He was informed by his department that he was denied tenure and would have to look elsewhere for a job.

Under normal circumstances, a scholar who is denied tenure assumes that the decision was simply a reflection of a department's assessment of scholarship. In this case, Mr. Drezner and others are wondering whether the blog may have had an impact on his tenure status.

...

Academic bloggers interviewed say the most common problem they face is convincing their colleagues that their online activity does not come at the expense of scholarly research. While some of the nation's most prominent scholars have started their own blogs, most notably Chicago giants Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, and Richard Posner, a federal judge, blogging is still perceived by some academics as a slight activity lacking in intellectual value.

"I've heard plenty of comments that suggest someone's work could be better if they only didn't spend their time writing other things," said one untenured academic blogger who contributes to the widely read Volokh Conspiracy, founded by UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh...

Another blogger, Sean Carroll, a physicist at the University of Chicago who was denied tenure in May, said some of his colleagues have the opinion that blogging means "spending time as an educator or a public intellectual that you could be spending as a researcher."

...

Another risk for academic bloggers is that their content - particularly postings that are political in nature - will offend professors in their departments. There's a "fear that something they post will politically be alienating to some colleagues," Mr. Volokh, who gained tenure three years before joining the blogosphere in 2002, told the Sun.

...

In a more subtle way, bloggers also risk drawing negative attention to their work by joining academic debates in such a casual and shallow manner, without the benefit of an editor and frequently without backing up their ideas as thoroughly as they would in a scholarly journal. Online academic disagreements could very well "translate into an evaluation of a scholar's abilities or talents," Mr. Volokh said.

...

"The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why?" the scholar wrote. "What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses."

Upcoming Conferences

1. Contemporary Painting in Context (Denmark)
2. Räume der Zeichnung (Germany)
3. Verkehrte Symmetrien (Austria)
4. World Art | Art World (USA)

[Update 8 October: Image and Imagination, USA]

Universities: Berlin vs. Utah

Head in the clouds (Economist.com).

To grasp the full absurdity of this ambition, it is worth visiting the Humboldt University in Berlin. Walk into the main foyer, stroll up the steps to the first floor past a slogan by a former student engraved in gold on the wall (“Philosophers have simply interpreted the world; the point is to change it”) and study the portraits of the Nobel prize-winners that line the walls. There were eight in 1900-09, six in 1910-19, four in 1920-29, six in 1930-39, one in 1940-49 and four in 1950-56. The roll of honour includes luminaries such as Theodor Mommsen, Max Planck, Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. But after 1956 the Nobel prizes suddenly stop.

    The list of Nobel prize-winners actually understates the university's past glories. In the 19th century, it not only nurtured such world-class intellectuals as Hegel and Fichte, it also pioneered a new sort of educational institution—the research university. And the drying-up of Nobel prizes in 1956 is not the only indication of the university's current plight. It occupies 95th place on the Shanghai list, next to the University of Utah. The buildings are drab, lectures and classes are overcrowded, and some of the best professors have left.

    Apologists might retort that Humboldt is still recovering from its time on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. Yet Humboldt's problems are replicated across the whole of Germany, west as well as east. The highest-placed German university in the Shanghai rankings is the Technical University of Munich, at 45. The ratio of students to teachers at German universities is depressingly high. For some lectures, a thousand or more students pile into the hall. The only count on which German universities still lead the world is the age of its students at graduation, 26 on average.

    Their biggest problem is the dead hand of the state. The German government—both regional and central—tries to micro-manage every aspect of academic life, from whom universities employ to whom they can teach. The state has progressively starved universities of funds, not least because it has forbidden them from charging fees. It has also snuffed out academic competition. Universities have little power to pick their pupils and even less to attract star professors.

    Belatedly, the Germans are beginning to recognise that their system is dysfunctional, not least because some of the brightest German students are voting with their feet and going abroad to study. The government is trying hard to encourage foreign students to come to Germany, though its success may have more to do with the fact that higher education is free to both domestic and foreign students than with the quality of the education purveyed. The government is also trying to make its universities more competitive by creating a German Ivy League. Furthermore, Germany's Constitutional Court has ruled against the federal government's ban on tuition charges, opening the way for universities to increase their revenues (and prompting protests from tens of thousands of students). But these reforms are only a beginning. German states controlled by the left are likely to continue to resist fees, and even the more conservative ones will charge only a nominal amount.

    Universities are a mess across Europe. European countries spend only 1.1% of their GDP on higher education, compared with 2.7% in the United States. American universities have between two and five times as much to spend per student as European universities, which translates into smaller classes, better professors and higher-quality research. The European Commission estimates that 400,000 EU-born scientific researchers are now working in the United States. Most have no plans to return. Europe produces only a quarter of the American number of patents per million people. It needs to ask itself not whether it can overtake the United States as the world's top knowledge economy by 2010, but how it can avoid being overtaken by China and other Asian tigers.

Panofsky correspondence

Erwin Panofsky, a giant in the history of art, is said to have been the author or recipient of 27,000 letters during his lifetime. We don't have to read all of them, but a selected few thousand are said to be pretty good. Dieter Wuttke edited. Five volumes, covering 1910-1968, are planned. The first two, covering up to 1949, are available.

Panofsky Correspondence (from Harrassowitz Verlag; German/English link)

Volume 1 (of 5): 1910-1936. Reviewed in English by Gabriele Sprigath, Fast Reviews, 12.01. Reviews in German: Horst Bredekamp (Süddeutsche, 12.01), Wilfried Wiegand (FAZ, 12.01) Martin Warnke (Die Zeit, 11.01). Volume 2: 1937-1949. Reviewed in English by Gabriele Sprigath, Fast Reviews, 03.04. Reviews in German: Horst Bredekamp (Süddeutsche, 14.02.04), Willibald Sauerländer (FAZ, 05.07.04).

See also Thomas Y. Levin, "Iconology at the Movies: Panofsky's Film Theory," The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996) 27-55 (access restricted). Also Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann's review  in The Art Bulletin (09.98) of Wuttke, Morrison, Soussloff, and Holly. And finally: from the long-suffering Society of Indexers, "Indexers Praised October 2004."

A Jewish refugee from the Nazis who found sanctuary at the new Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and made prodigious efforts to help resettle fellow refugees, Panofsky still suffered from occasional xenophobia and anti-Semitism in America. (Bernard Berenson called him "Hitler of art history.") Apparently owing to his intellectual formation in the Joachimsthal gymnasium in Berlin, Panofsky held philology to be the foundation of humanistic inquiry, and he took the priority of word to image, and content to form, to be axiomatic (with mixed results).

On so-called commercial art:

If commercial art be defined as all art not primarily produced in order to gratify the creative urge of its maker but primarily intended to meet the requirements of a patron or a buying public, it must be said that noncommercial art is the exception rather than the rule, and a fairly recent and not always felicitous exception at that. While it is true that commercial art is always in danger of ending up as a prostitute, it is equally true that noncommercial art is always in danger of ending up as an old maid.

On art history, universities, and mass media:

The value of study of the arts in American colleges assumes today a special poignancy. Without the kind of experience which this study provides, the student is abandoned to the blind deforming influence of the mass arts — advertising, popular magazines, movies, and soon no doubt, television. Largely commercial in intent, cynical, blatant, they exert a pressure to which he would be unable to oppose a critical attitude or any sense of values. They would assume, unchallenged, the role of shaping personality which the colleges refused to accept.

On the US:

I have also discovered the keyword of American culture; that is: 'Why not?' beginning with the conventional invitation, 'Why don't you have dinner with me tomorrow?' and ending with the declaration of love, 'Why don't you sleep with me tonight?' The European does something when he has emotional or rational grounds for doing so - the American, when he has no grounds not to. That explains the admirable activity and hospitality, but also the aimlessness and tastelessness in this country; also the horrific cooking. Pineapple and mayonaisse: Why not?

On social anti-semitism in the US:

In the winter, you can be Norton Professor or honorary doctor everywhere, but in the summer it’s hard to find a hotel. Such is life.

On Robert Curtius:

He looks and behaves like an old sea lion; if he's not eating, he's barking, and if he's not barking, he's eating, but what he barks is first-rate.

Levin on Panofsky on film:

For Panofsky, cinema's elective affinity with the physical world is what assures its status as an iconographic "good object" and, as such, the legitimate heir to the traditional pictorial arts. Unlike Siegfried Kracauer, for whom film's photographic basis became an argument for its elective affinity with the quotidian and the marginal; unlike Louis Aragon for whom the same iconico- indexicality enabled film to capture and reveal the unseen, hidden meanings of everyday objects (a Surrealist aesthetic program rearticulated in Walter Benjamin's notion of the "optical unconscious"); unlike Béla Balázs's "physiognomic" theory which focused as early as 1924 on film's capacity to give a face to inanimate objects; unlike André Bazin, for whom film's grounding in the photographic served as an argument against montage and in favor of a long take that supposedly respects rather than violates the pro-filmic, ostensibly allow ing the viewer's gaze to roam freely through the deep-focus field; unlike Georg Lukács, who argued (as early as 1911) that it was precisely cinema's combination of a photographic realism with the anti- or super-naturalism of the cut that afforded it what he called a "fantastic realism," Panofsky's insistence on the importance of cinema's relation to "physical reality" is something else entirely. (35-36)

* * *

Taken as a whole, and despite its extended and sympathetic discussion of film's folk-art genealogy, despite its discussion of film spectator ship and exhibition practices, and despite its meditation on the relation of the actor to the apparatus, the film essay simply will not serve, as Breidecker claims it does, to overturn the critique that Panofsky's later work privileges the "content" of works over their formal or stylistic characteristics, the iconographic at the cost of the political, or that his approach was largely "geistesgeschichtlich," ignoring material and technical conditions and social effects of the works. The film essay's astonishing silence on questions of ideology, alienation, profit, monopoly structures, corporate capital, etc., its romanticiza tion of the spectatorship "community," its endorsement of viewer "identification" with the camera--almost point-for-point the exact antithesis to Adorno and Horkheimer's contemporaneous "culture industry critique"--would if anything actually buttress such objections.

Panofsky's bracketing of almost all questions dealing with film language, with cinema as symbolic form and thus with the issue of cinema's socio-political imbrications is, Prange argues, a symptomatic myopia of Stilgeschichte. (43)

 

Bloggers Need Not Apply

Yikes.

Chronicle of Higher Ed: Bloggers Need Not Apply

What is it with job seekers who also write blogs? Our recent faculty search at Quaint Old College resulted in a number of bloggers among our semifinalists. Those candidates looked good enough on paper to merit a phone interview, after which they were still being seriously considered for an on-campus interview.

That's when the committee took a look at their online activity.

In some cases, a Google search of the candidate's name turned up his or her blog. Other candidates told us about their Web site, even making sure we had the URL so we wouldn't fail to find it. In one case, a candidate had mentioned it in the cover letter. We felt compelled to follow up in each of those instances, and it turned out to be every bit as eye-opening as a train wreck.

How would you teach this class?

Chronicle of Higher Education: Many graduate students are poorly prepared to talk about teaching in job interviews

Say you are a historian. You may be asked, "How would you teach a survey course on the Civil War?" One way to answer that question is to list the texts you plan to teach or the topics you plan to cover. But it's also important to indicate how you conceptualize the course. What are the key themes or questions you would explore in class? How will your understanding of the objects and methods of study in the field inform the assignments you design and the grading criteria you use? How will your teaching respond to intellectual or pedagogical debates in the field?

Our colleague in literary studies observed that in her initial preparation for the job market, she focused too narrowly on the specific courses she might teach, without adequately considering the broader issues of teaching and learning in the discipline. Consult pedagogy journals in your field or talk with your colleagues about how to effectively teach your students to think -- and argue -- like biologists, sociologists, or art historians.

Art Archives

Art Archives

The C.V. doctors at work

The c.v. doctors at work:

• Anthropology PhD (1999, traditional medicine/Bali)
• English PhD (1999)
• Pharmacology PhD (1999)
• American Studies PhD (1999)
• Anthropology PhD (1999, environmentalism/Eastern Europe)
• History PhD (2001)
• Biology PhD (2002)
• English PhD (2004)

Guides

Book-enacting guides (books)
Getting It Published
An Author's Guide to Scholarly Publishing
Handbook for Academic Authors
The Thesis and the Book
Revising Your Dissertation

Manuscript submission guides (online)
How to prepare a publishing proposal (MIT Press)
Guidelines for authors (Oxford University Press)

Tenure-enacting guide (online)
Advancement and Promotion of Junior Faculty at U.C. Berkeley

brunette.n

Link: brunette.n

The only woman in Tim 's early life who anyone can remember is Gillian Malpass -- a tall , good-looking brunette who is now a senior editor at the London office of prestigious US publisher Yale University Press.

College of Humanities - Promotion and Tenure: Criteria

Link: College of Humanities - Promotion and Tenure: Criteria.

The achievement of such stature is manifested especially in the quality of the specific media of publication or presentation, the opinion of peers from prestigious institutions (who rank the candidate in reference to his or her cohort), the winning of grants, awards, and fellowships in support of the candidate’s work and the attraction of advanced students to the candidate’s tutelage...

Dictionary of Art Historians

The Dictionary of Art Historians at the Duke University library.

the Charles Homer Haskins Lectures

The Charles Homer Haskins Lectures of the American Council of Learned Societies: notable bookworms reflect on their book-oriented lives, including Judith Shklar and Geoffrey Hartman.

Shklar:

To this affected boorishness was added a slavish admiration for the least intelligent, but good-looking, rich, and well connected undergraduates. Their culture was in many respects one of protected juvenile delinquency. Harvard undergraduates were easily forgiven the misery they inflicted on the rest of Cambridge. High jinx included breaking street lights and unrailing trolley cars. Conspicuous drunkenness on the streets was normal on week-ends. One of the nastiest riots I ever saw, long before the radical sit-ins, was an undergraduate rampage set off by the decision to have English rather than Latin diplomas. Several tutors were physically assaulted and injured. All this was seen as high spirits, and secretly admired. Nor were these private school products particularly well prepared. Few could put a grammatical English sentence together, and if they knew a foreign language, they hid it well.

The real ideal of many teachers at Harvard in the 1950s was the gentleman C-er. He would, we were told, govern us and feed us, and we ought to cherish him, rather than the studious youth who would never amount to anything socially significant. There was, of course, a great deal of self-hatred in all this, which I was far too immature to understand at the time. For these demands for overt conformity were quite repressive. Harvard in the 1950s was full of people who were ashamed of their parents’ social standing, as well as of their own condition. The place had too many closet Jews and closet gays and provincials who were obsessed with their inferiority to the “real thing,” which was some mythical           Harvard aristocracy, invented to no good purpose whatever. What was so appalling was that all of this was so unnecessary, so out of keeping with America’s public philosophy. It was also a bizarre refusal to think through the real meaning of the Second World War.

Hartman:

There is some affinity between Eliot and Nietzsche on this one point. The latter's sharpest barbs are reserved for what he sarcastically names "Gelehrtenkultur," egg-head culture. It is marked by an abuse of "Historie," the kind of learning that dries up life, and to which Goethe's Faust gives such memorable expression in the drama's long opening kvetch. "The tree of knowledge is not that of life," as Byron's Manfred says more concisely.

Yet the learning to which Nietzsche objected was not a magical or virtuoso quest, it was distinctly modern: the pride of nineteenth-century German scholars whose research was destroying a Eurocentric universal history. Myths of emancipation, cultural progress and national destiny were challenged by historicism's resurrection of the dead, as Michelet described the new, secular science. Historians now revived victims together with victors, and produced a positivistic nightmare of endless, mostly anonymous suffering. For Nietzsche this B.C. information explosion had the potential of reinstating a sterile pity, or another slave revolt, that would result in the opposite of historical redemption. The outcome would surely be a relativism sapping conviction and playing into the hands of a reactionary nationalistic fervor.

Unwritten art history theses (I)960s

1Unwritten art history theses (yet)!

Mediterranean Visuality from Giotto to NJGuido

Rainer Ganahl: Seminars/Lectures

Rainer Ganahl: Seminars/Lectures, a set of photographs of artistic intellectuals communicating with their academic and public audiences. The uniformly grim and deadening environments of neutral-toned institutional walls, fluorescent lighting, and audience members sitting in more or less passive postures, leave it uncertain whether the content of the lectures is enlightening or mystifying. The opposite pole from the entertainment industry.