July 27, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
In what appears to be a first for a traditional humanities journal, Shakespeare Quarterly let contributors to a special issue on Shakespeare and new media post drafts of their articles online and take public comments from...anybody.
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July 18, 2010, PageView (CHE)
Notes on a flap at the University of Southern Mississippi over the exit of Frederick Barthelme, the director of the Center for Writers, and what his exit might mean for the
Mississippi Review, which he edited.
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July 18, 2010, The Washington Post
Is the Internet making us stupid? Two new books consider the evidence. I consider the arguments.
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July 14, 2010, Wired Campus (CHE)
A librarian looks back at the technological shifts she has encountered in a half-century working as a cataloguer.
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July 11, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
R. Carter Hailey probably knows more about the physical aspects of early editions of Shakespeare than anybody else on the planet. So why can't he get a permanent academic job? Does academe not value bibliography any more?
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July 4, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
Famous for mussels, serenity, and as the setting for Anne of Green Gables, Prince Edward Island, the smallest of Canada's provinces, seems an unlikely hotbed of revolution. But at the University of Prince Edward Island, the province's only university, a bit of scholarly-communication revolt is stirring.
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June 29, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
At the annual meeting of the American Library Association, librarians heard the results of research into how students actually use the library and how to make that process a little easier.
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June 28, 2010, Wired Campus (CHE)
The commercial publisher expands its experiment in incorporating open access into its business model.
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June 21, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Hyperabundance and the future of the long-form argument, how and what libraries buy, and e-books, e-books, e-books: Those topics were front and center at the annual conference of the Association of American University Presses, held in Salt Lake City June 17-20, 2010.
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June 19, 2010, PageView (CHE)
Richard Brown, the director of Georgetown U. Press and the new president of the university-press association, says that scholarly publishing is not in a state of crisis but in a state of "perpetual transition."
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June 18, 2010, PageView (CHE)
JHU Press director Kathleen Keane, stepping down as the president of the Association of American University Presses, told the group's annual meeting that things were bad this year but could have been worse.
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June 9, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
The scientific publisher picks up the gauntlet thrown by the University of California over rising journal prices.
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June 8, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Faced with what it says is a 400-percent increase in site-license costs for the Nature group's journals, the University of California threatens to cancel its subscriptions and organize a faculty boycott.
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May 23, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
How can you expect the members of your tenure-and-promotion committee to take your dazzling visualization of Republican Rome seriously if it's not getting review attention from the journals they read?
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May 23, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
Tired of the 3-paper-panel format? Try this.
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May 20, 2010, PageView (CHE)
A classic novel endures, along with the university press that published it.
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May 19, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
It wasn't quite the news the press's supporters were hoping for, but a new statement from SMU's provost holds out some hope that SMU Press may have a second act.
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May 9, 2010, The Chronicle Review
Ralph Ellison is most famous for two things: writing the classic
Invisible Man and never publishing another novel in his lifetime. A scholar named Adam Bradley wants to rewrite what we think we know about Ellison as a blocked writer.
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May 10, 2010, PageView (CHE)
A conversation about when it pays to give books away.
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May 6, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
SMU moves to suspend its press as of June 1. The press and its advisory board say they had no warning, and supporters are mounting a grassroots campaign to convince the university to reverse its decision.
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May 4, 2010, PageView (CHE)
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April 25, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
Nobody sues a book-review editor over a negative review of a scholarly book. Except somebody now has.
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May 3, 2010, Wired Campus
A Victorianist and a team of spectral-imaging scientists try to uncover the writing in an 1871 diary kept by the explorer in the weeks leading up to his famous encounter with Stanley.
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April 18, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
A look at efforts in the U.K. to change libel laws there, and some questions about how much of a problem so-called libel tourism really is.
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April 14, 2010, Wired Campus
The Library of Congress announces that it will archive all public tweets posted since Twitter made its debut in March 2006. The historians of the future don't know what they're in for.
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April 13, 2010, Wired Campus
AOTUS--that's David S. Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, head of the National Archives and Records Administrations--now has a blog called "AOTUS: Collector in Chief." AOTUS wants you, citizen archivist!
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April 7, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
E-journals? Yes! E-books? Not yet. Libraries? Maybe or maybe not.
A new study of faculty members by the Ithaka group has the details on how scholars conduct and publish research in this ever-more-digital environment.
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April 4, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
I report on "Online Digital Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come," a conference held at UVa in late March. What was hot? "Social editions" and the idea that sometimes sustainability means knowing when to let a project die. Not so hot: traditional publishing.
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April 2, 2010, Wired Campus
A look at "The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GIs, and Germany," an online archive devoted to the experiences of black GIs in Germany after World War II:
The domestic history of the American civil-rights movement is well known to scholars. Less familiar is the movement's international side, especially as it played out in Germany, where African-American GI's stationed after World War II helped spread its ideas. The transatlantic influence worked in the other direction, too, as those soldiers brought their experience in fighting for democracy home to the United States.
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March 28, 2010, The Chronicle Review
In a new book,
Contested Will, Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro argues that Stratfordians and anti-Stratfordians have more in common than they admit or acknowledge. All sides want to find autobiography in the plays of William Shakespeare--a habit that Shapiro, a firm Stratfordian, says is the wrong approach.
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March 21, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Top literary scholars gathered at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C., to figure out how they can better explain what they do to administrators, students, and the general public. What was mostly missing from the conversation: the digital humanities and the lousy job market.
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March 14, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
The latest twists in the lawsuit brought by three big academic publishers against Georgia State University over the use of copyrighted material in e-reserves--potentially a very big deal for scholarly publishers, authors, and anyone who wants to use copyrighted material in class.
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March 1, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
The results of an important new cross-disciplinary survey of humanities departments make it clear that the humanities remain popular with students and central to the core mission of many institutions. They also confirm that the teaching of English, foreign languages, and other humanistic subjects has become more vulnerable at American colleges and universities.
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Feb. 21, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
A Hot Type column about the demise of Eastern Washington University Press and what it means for the press's authors and for regional and national literary life.
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Feb. 9, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
Recent acquisitions of Dead Sea Scrolls fragments by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Azusa Pacific University leave some scholars wondering whether the money is worth it.
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Feb. 4, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
An interview with Patrick Tardieu, the chief curator of Haiti's oldest library, about the situation that faces Haiti's libraries after the earthquake.
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Jan. 31, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Although more and more scholars are interested in trying out new technologies as a way to share or publish their research, the traditional cultures of their disciplines and the high regard accorded to peer review still tend to have the strongest influence on them, according to a substantial new report on scholarly communication from the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley.
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Jan. 26, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
The American Association of University Professors says this is the first journal to focus entirely on the subject.
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Jan. 24, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
I talked with philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein about her new book,
36 Arguments for the Existence of God, academic satire, and novels of ideas.
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Jan. 21, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (Wired Campus)
Cornell asks heavy institutional users to help defray the costs of maintaining the widely used online scientific repository. A sign of things to come?
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Jan. 17, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
There has been a lot of lip service paid to translation lately. The Modern Language Association made translation the official theme of its 2009 convention, and university-affiliated presses such as Dalkey Archive and Open Letter have made publishing literature in translation their guiding principle. What's life like for a translator who wants to have an academic career?
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Dec. 31, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
As digital humanists debated what kind of scholarly culture they have created, Twitter added a lively social overlay to the 2009 MLA proceedings in Philadelphia and, in some quarters at least, looked like the real story of the conference.
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Dec. 29, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Brian Croxall, a visiting professor of English at Clemson University, couldn't afford to travel to Philadelphia for the 2009 MLA. Delivered in absentia, his paper on the plight of contingent faculty members was a sleeper hit of the conference anyway.
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Dec. 28, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
A report from the 2009 Modern Language Association conference, where translation was the official theme.
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Dec. 13, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Having grown increasingly skeptical over the years about how those best-books-of-the-year lists are put together, I didn't expect to see many university-press titles in this year's roundups. I found ever fewer than I thought I would.
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Dec. 9, 2009, Wired Campus
Now that so many archives have gone digital, it can be easy to forget that many collections exist only partly online, if they have a digital component at all. An interesting case is the William Ransom Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz at Tulane University. I sat down with the archive's director, Bruce Boyd Raeburn, to talk about the collection, jazz scholarship, and how the brass-band tradition will not die.
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Nov. 29, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
A profile of Father Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk who directs the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John's University in Minnesota. Father Stewart and the HMML team seek out collections of rare manuscripts held by Christian monastic communities, many in the Middle East, and help the owners make digital copies of them.
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Nov. 25, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
S. Ann Dunham's dissertation is published almost 15 years after its author's death. I spoke with Maya Soetoro-Ng, Dunham's daughter and President Obama's half-sister, about their mother's life and work.
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Nov. 22, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
Lean budgets and ambitious collaborative dreams are on research libraries' agendas.
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Nov. 12, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
A library plan to send some humanities books to remote storage creates an uproar among faculty.
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Oct. 27, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
An outcry over mistakes and inconsistencies in the 6th edition of its widely used
Publication Manual leads the American Psychological Association to offer free replacements to purchasers who ask for them.
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Oct. 19, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
Hot topics at the Association of Research Libraries meeting included public access to research ("inevitable"), the Federal Depository Library Program (in urgent need of an overhaul), and how to help small journals survive (unclear).
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Oct. 16, 2009, Wired Campus, CHe
Don't lock your special collections away in neglected corners of the library, use them to get students involved in original research.
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Oct. 15., 2009, Wired Campus, CHE
A report from a panel at the Association of Research Libraries meeting.
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Sept. 25, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
When Northestern University announced that it was moving the venerable literary journal online and turning it over to student editors, many in the literary community were shocked, surprised, and saddened.
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Sept. 14, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
An obit of Barbara E. Johnson, a literary critic who earned great admiration and loyalty not just for her ideas but for her personality. Not many critics get to say that.
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Sept. 10, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
In my Hot Type column, I survey the troops lined up on either side of the Google Book Search settlement, and wonder just how far the judge in the case will decide he can go.
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Sept. 7, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
When supporters of the UCLA Arts Library heard that it might be closed or moved because of California's traumatic budget cuts, they began a campaign to save it. So far the campaign appears to be working. So far.
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Sept. 1, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
That National Humanties Alliance report on HSS journals published by scholarly associations--which I previewed in July--is finally out.
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Aug. 26, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
My Hot Type analysis of Yale U. Press's controversial decision to remove all the illustrations, including the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, from Jytte Klausen's
The Cartoons That Shook the World. Did the press's decision set a precedent that other scholars ought to worry about?
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Aug. 10, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
A Hot Type column in which I have some fun with the just-published 6th edition of the
UCLA Slang dictionary, compiled by UCLA undergrads.
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July 20, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
Many scholarly publishers want to make and sell digital books but are daunted by the cost and the technological hurdles. Four university presses--NYU, Penn, Rutgers, and Temple--have banded together to investigate the possibility of a collaborative e-book platform for such presses.
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July 20, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
A new study of 8 learned-society journals in the humanities and social sciences reaches some surprising conclusions. For instance, it costs almost four times as much to publish an article in such a journal than it does to publish one in a science, technical, or medical journal. (We're talking about journals run by scholarly societies, not the big commercial ventures or the heavyweights like Nature.) The report's not publicly available yet but should be soon, and I expect it will kick up a lot of dust in scholarly-publishing circles.
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July 10, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
How can we make sure that the record of what happened at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center is not lost to time, link rot, and historical rewriting? Create a Gitmo archive. Mark Denbeaux, a law professor at Seton Hall University, and Jonathan Hafetz, an ACLU lawyer, are doing just that, beginning with Gitmo defense attorneys' accounts and notes. (Both men represent detainees.) Michael Nash, head of the Tamiment Library at NYU, is helping them. I take a look at the early stages of the project.
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June 29, The Chronicle Review
In which I profile UCLA lit critic Mark McGurl 's idea, developed in his book
The Program Era, that "the rise of the creative-writing program stands as the most important development in postwar American literary history."
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June 24, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
What makes a lead book a lead book? For my Hot Type column, I asked a handful of presses how the casting process works.
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June 22, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
My report from this year's Association of American University Presses, held June 17-20 in Philadelphia. My assessment: Scholarly presses are "bloodied but still standing."
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June 12, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 2009
I sat down with Adam Smith, director of product management for Google, to talk about the Book Search project, the proposed settlement in the authors-and-publishers lawsuit against it, orphan works, and fears of a Google monopoly. Listen to the podcast. This is my podcast debut, FYI.
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June 1, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
My June 1 Hot Type column looks at why it's no longer enough for a university press to be considered a "valuable asset" to its parent institution.
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May 22, 2009, The Chronicle Review, journalism
In which I wander into the enchanted forest of fairy-tale scholarship and see what's lurking there. Lots, as it turns out.
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May 14, 2009, Wired Campus, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Protests at OSU over the culling of printed materials from the library's collections, as space and budgets get tighter and more researchers look online for information.
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May 11, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
A group of scholars, led by a Berkeley law prof, challenge academic authors to take a harder look at the proposed deal between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over Google's book-scanning program. I write about their warning in my latest Hot Type column.
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April 24, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
A UC-San Diego political scientist makes what he calls the find of a lifetime in the British Library.
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April 24, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
It might take two years (or more) to write a scholarly monograph, but it shouldn't take two years for it to get reviewed. One literary scholar has a plan to rev up the metabolism of academic reviewing.
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April 5, 2009, The Washington Post
My review of Jeffrey Moussaief Masson's
The Face on Your Plate and Mark Caro's
The Foie Gras Wars, both of which make a strong case, in very different ways, that we need to think harder about what (or who) we eat.
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March 27, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
What's a journal editor to do in the digital age?
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March 27, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
My debut Hot Type column, reported from the publishers' hall at the ACRL conference in Seattle.
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March 18, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Slimming down for the long haul, the director says.
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March 13, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
A report from the Association of College and Research Libraries conference in Seattle.
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March 2, 2009, Wired Campus (CHE)
Welcome to the most wired conference I've ever seen--which maybe isn't saying much, but this was a very plugged-in group.
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Feb. 18, 2009, Wired Campus (CHE)
UNESCO debuts the online version of its
Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.
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Feb. 12, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
A "call to action" issued by the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, the Coalition for Networked Information, and NASULGC.
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Feb. 10, 2009, Wired Campus (CHE)
Hundreds of medieval manuscripts are now at your fingertips, no matter where you are.
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Jan. 30, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Times are tough all over, but some university presses are having decent, even good years. It's hard to find a press director who isn't nervous, though.
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Jan. 22, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Worries about the economy--and the need to restructure the law, medicine, and reference divisions as they move increasingly online--prompt the largest university press to cut 60 out of 700 jobs.
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Jan. 20, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education
A Q&A with the editorial director of the Vault at Pfaff's, a online archive dedicated to recreating the lives and times of the literary bohemians who hung out at Pfaff's saloon in New York City in the 1850s and '60s.
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Jan. 21, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
A survey by the Association of American University Presses confirmed some of the gloomy talk heard in academic-publishing circles lately.
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Jan. 20, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
A small university press hears that it may not have a future.
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Jan. 7, 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
The Humanities Indicators make their official debut.
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Dec. 19, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
Wouldn't it be nice if you had someone to help you get that book into publishable form and out into the world? If you're an author affiliated with Georgetown University, you already do: Carole Fungaroli Sargent, director of the university's Office of Scholarly and Literary Publications, a k a Booklab.
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Dec. 19, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
Students in a history class at George Mason University created a fictional 19th-century pirate and unleashed him on the Internet. The catch? Their professor told them to do it.
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Nov. 21, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education
In honor of Milton's 400th birthday, a small college in Minnesota stages a marathon reading of Paradise Lost. It only took 12 hours. But was it heaven or hell for the particpants? I was there and brought back the story and even
some video.
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Nov. 21, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education
More and more research libraries are starting or beefing up programs in scholarly communication or hiring librarians with expertise in intellectual property and copyright issues and (in some cases) a law degree too. I talked to three people on the schol-comm front lines about the kinds of help and advice they have to offer scholars baffled by the ever-more-complex digital publishing world.
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Nov. 10, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
A
"field study" from the Association of Research Libraries looks at what it calls the "unexplored ecosystem" of digital publishing.
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Nov. 7, 2008, The Chronicle Review
A new edition of
Frankenstein strips out Percy Shelley's edits and restores Mary Shelley's original language.
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Oct. 10, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education"
A European push to rank humanities journals has many humanists worried--and it's not just a European phenomenon.
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Sept. 12, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
Should federally funded research be made freely accessible to the public after it's published? The House Subcommitte on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property heard testimony pro and con last week at a hearing on H.R. 6845, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, which would, among other things, threaten the NIH's current public-access policy.
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Sept./Oct.Nov. 2008, Bookforum
Tim Butcher, a journalist for the Telegraph, set out to retrace Stanley's 1874-1877 journey across the Congo. Was it a brave or stupid thing to do, and what did he find? How far have we come since the days of the "Scramble for Africa"? I reviewed Butcher's account of the trip,
Blood River, for the Sept./Oct./Nov. issue of Bookforum, which is now online.
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Sept. 4, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Aug. 26, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
A
report just released by the Ithaka group shows "a mismatch of perception" between librarians and faculty members when it comes tthe importance of libraries' traditional role as a gateway to scholarly information. Ithaka used data from surveys conducted in 2006, so this report is slightly out of date, but the trends it picked up on only appear to be accelerating.
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Aug. 15, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
The publisher of the Arden Shakespeare has cancelled the contract of a senior scholar charged with producing a new edition of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" for the well-regarded series. Patricia Parker, who has a high reputation among Shakespearians, had been working on her edition of MND for more than a decade. Did Arden's publisher, Cengage, terminate her because of missed deadlines? Or was something else--commercialism versus scholarship, or scholar versus scholar--behind the dismissal?
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Aug. 1, 2008, The Chronicle Review
A look at two nifty new digital-humanities projects: The Map of Early Modern London, created by Janelle Jenstad, an assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria, and a Google Earth visualization of the development of Irish-American literature. That one's the brainchild of Matthew Jockers, an academic technology specialist at Stanford University. Neat stuff.
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July 28, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
The 2007 annual report of the Andrew W. Mellon has some surprisingly intriguing things to say about the past, present, and future of scholarly communication.
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June 30, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
A report from the annual gathering of the Association of American University Presses, June 26-29, in Montreal.
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June 25, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Recent libel actions involving U.S. authors and the British legal system make it clear just how wide a gulf separates the United States from the rest of the world on the question of free speech.
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June 18, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
The College Art Association has decided not to fight a threatened libel action in British court. The case concerned a review in the Fall 2007 issue of its flagship publication, Art Journal, by Columbia University professor Joseph Massad. The association has asked its institutional subscribers to withdraw the offending portions of the review. Was it right to do so?
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June 18, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
The University of Michigan Press has decided to end relationship with Pluto Press, a small, London-based publisher with a self-described radical agenda. The relationship caused Michigan some grief last year when one of Pluto's books,
Overcoming Zionism by Joel Kovel, became the target of protests by pro-Israel groups.
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May 23, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education
A report on John Updike's Jefferson Lecture, delivered here in DC at the Warner Theatre on May 22. The Jefferson Lecture is sponsored by the NEH and is the federal government's highest honor for "distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities."
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May 16, 2008, The Chronicle Review
This month, Yale University Press published a new translation of Virgil's martial epic by the poet and classicist Sarah Ruden. Her edition appears to be the first by a woman. And she's not alone: There have been four new translations in the past three years, with at least two more in the works. Why the
Aeneid, and why now?
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May 7, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
The
Open Humanities Press has the backing of some heavy-hitting humanists, including Stephen Greenblatt and Alan Badiou.
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May 2, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education
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April 13, 2008, The Washington Post
My Washington Post review of
Why Women Should Rule the World by Dee Dee Myers, the first woman to hold the job of White House press secretary.
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April 4, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
While the Ithaka group was preparing its 2007 report on "University Publishing in a Digital Age," the University of California was taking matters into its own hands with a look at home-grown publishing activity on its 10 campuses. You can find the report
here.
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March 26, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
Goodby, research--hello, tourism! Or so scholars fear.
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March 28, 2008, The Chronicle Review
Romanticists debate whether Coleridge was the anonymous hand behind an 1821 translation of Goethe's
Faustus.
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Feb. 26, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Gutenberg-e, the high-profile digital history monograph series published by Columbia University Press in collaboration with the American Historical Association, has gone open access. The monographs are also available, with some enhancements (related historiography etc.), through the Humanities E-Book project run by the American Council of Learned Societies.
Read More »
Feb. 8, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
A special issue of the Journal of American History gives scholars a chance to think historically about a catastrophic recent event--the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. It's an interesting example of what some call "the search for a usable past." The journal's editors also
created a website that expands on the print edition as well as linking to lots of other Katrina-related material.
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Jan. 31, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
New guidelines for undergraduate creative-writing instruction promote the very sensible idea that to be an expert writer, you first have to learn to be an expert reader.
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Feb. 1, 2008, The Chronicle Review (subscription only)
The social psychologist Carol Gilligan made a splash 26 years ago with
In a Different Voice, which took developmental psychology to task for its insistence that male experience defined human experience. Now she's written a novel,
Kyra. Why?
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Jan. 21, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
The Library of Congress is the mother ship of U.S. libraries. Has it shouldered too much of the cataloguing burden? What's the best use of finite library resources? This report has some suggestions. I co-wrote this article with my Chronicle colleague Andrea Foster.
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Jan. 11, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Not a story for everybody, but if you follow academic literary fashions you might find it intriguing. Posthuman is all the rage--but SF folks have known that for a long time.
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Dec. 21, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Who gets to decide what goes in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and what other choices do Brit-lit-survey instructors have? Do we still need anthologies anyway--and do students even know how to use them? I talked to editors and classroom types to get some answers.
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Nov. 20, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
A schism of Biblical proportions.
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Nov. 19, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
The National Endowment for the Arts declares reading dead (again).
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Nov. 14, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
But the news is not all good, especially if you compare the new numbers to language-enrollment rates from 40 years ago.
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Nov. 8, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Some wonder if this means that the University of Texas no longer cares about its own state's history.
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Oct. 26, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare maven and founder of New Historicism, is teaching a nifty new course at Harvard that uses 21st-century technology to take students on a voyage through the world Shakespeare knew--although it doesn't stop there.
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Oct. 11, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
I especially love the story about a member of the Nobel Committee telling her why she'd never win.
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Sept. 27, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Scholarly society reverses trend, ditches commercial publisher for a university press.
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Sept. 11, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
PRISM, an anti-open-access lobbying effort backed by the Association of American Publishers, riles some of the APA's members as well as OA advocates. More
here and
here.
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Sept. 14, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Folklorists lend a helping hand via "Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston," a Texas-based project that trains hurricane survivors to collect the stories of fellow survivors.
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Aug. 30, 2007, Slate
Backpacks for junior scholars put to the test.
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Aug. 27, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Norman Finkelstein v. DePaul University, continued.
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Aug. 5, 2007, The Washington Post
In which I review Wendy Shalit's new book,
Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad To Be Good, and find it an exercise in alarmism and dubious sociology. Watch out, girls, for cheap sex, bought with cheap clothes and cheaper liquor, at the price of self-respect and the prospect of any serious romance.
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July 24, 2007, Slate
Kiddie pools your children will adore.
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Aug. 3, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
The just-issued Ithaka Report will transform scholarly publishing as we know it. Or it won't. Your call.
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July 20, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
The aftermath of that Mellon RFP mentioned in the previous entry.
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June 29, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Drama! Gossip! A request for proposals from the Mellon Foundation! Actually, this convention was a lot of fun.
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June 22, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
A new book by scholar Sharon Marcus maps out the surprisingly complex emotional landscape inhabited by Victorian women.
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May 25, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
There's been a spate of stories like this lately.
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May 4, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Digging up the truth about the first permanent English colony in America.
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April 5, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Alan Dershowitz doesn't want rival scholar Norman Finkelstein to get tenure at DePaul University, and he has a dossier to prove it. That makes some people, including many DePaul faculty, uncomfortable, to say the least.
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March 11, 2007, The Washington Post
A review of Nalo Hopkinson's
The New Moon's Arms, in which hot flashes really are power surges, Caribbean-style.
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March 9, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
Historian Timothy Naftali will lead the Nixon Library into the federal system of presidential librarians. But can he convince skeptical scholars that he'll be able to turn a private shrine into a genuinely public archive?
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March 2, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
President Bush, are you listening?
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Feb. 9, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education
The steel-drivin' man raced a steam drill and died with his hammer in his hand. So the ballads say. Did he really exist? A historian thinks he may have found the flesh-and-blood man behind the legend.
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Jan. 5, 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
University presses approve of the recently released report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. Death to the tyranny of the monograph!
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Nov. 10, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Should you really need permission to interview Grandma? At some universities, oral historians can't turn on a microphone without clearance from the local IRB (Institutional Review Board).
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November 2006, Parenting magazine
How to prevent meltdowns and help your child control his emotions. With advice from the experts (not me--are you kidding?). I took this assignment hoping I would learn something useful, and I did. Not that it shows.
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Oct. 12, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
For once, the favorite wins.
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Oct. 6, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Publishers discover that it's getting easier to be green--and high time, too. Go, Green Press Initiative!
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Oct. 5, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
In its fall 2006 issue, VQR published "War Thoughts From Home," a just-discovered poem by Robert Frost. VQR's editor described the find as "staggering." Was it? Maybe not so much.
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Sept. 29, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
In a new book,
By His Own Hand? The Mysterious Death of Meriwether Lewis, rival scholars dabate whether the explorer killed himself or fell victim to foul play. Here's a Q&A with a partisan of the murder-most-foul camp.
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Sept. 29, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education (temporary link)
The Chicago Manual of Style turns 100 this fall. To celebrate, it's going where the party is--online.
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Sept. 22, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
A Q&A with Walter Benn Michaels, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who's going public in a big way with his "heterodox views" on American identity and inequality in his new book,
The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality.
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Sept. 10, 2006, The Washington Post
A review of
Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child by Alissa Quart. How to ruin your child by trying too hard to develop his or her talents. As if parenting wasn't already hard enough. What I don't say in the review, and what Quart fails to address in her book, is that there are plenty of parents out there who can't even be bothered to read to their offspring, much less encourage them to be concert pianists or math whizzes. Still, you might want to think twice before you park the tot in front of a so-called developmental video.
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Aug. 4, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Art-history scholars face narrowing publishing venues and rising permissions costs. But a report signals that help is on the way. Check out, for instance, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's proposed scholars' license program.
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July 14, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
James Miller, the editor of
Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, learned abruptly that he will lose that job as of August 2008. What does it all mean?
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July 7, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
The Gutenberg-e project at Columbia University set out to bring historical monographs into the brave new digital world. Six years in, how's it doing?
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June 19, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Tech talk, copyright jitters, and anti-FEMA tee-shirts at this year's Association of American University Press conference in New Orleans.
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May 28, 2006, The Washington Post
The author of
Like Water for Chocolate returns with a novel about the woman who translated for Cortes during his conquistadorial rampage through Mexico. Great subject, right? You'd think.
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May 12, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
If you didn't get to Dublin to raise a celebratory pint in honor of Samuel Beckett's centennial in April, you can visit an online exhibition of his work--or just read about it here, along with a description of the fantabulous doodles he liked to do. My new motto, courtesy of SB: "Nothing left. All used up. What's your deadline?"
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April 28, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
10 years ago, a young female scholar had trouble being taken seriously when she wanted to study Hemingway. Now Papa's hot again.
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April 14, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Is this what the future of scholarly publishing looks like? Perfect for cash-strapped librarians and scholars overwhelmed by material, Oxford Scholarship Online offers subscribers access to a browsable database of more than 1,000 OUP titles in philosophy, religion, economics, and finance.
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March 24, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
No more Leave It to Beaverland: A new wave of scholars challenges common assumptions about sprawl and urban growth.
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March 10, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Theodor Adorno said it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. In a Michigan Quarterly Review symposium, several writers and critics--including Jay Ladin, Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Marjorie Perloff--take up Adorno's challenge. Not a topic for the faint of heart.
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Feb. 17, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
How new technology, paired with good old-fashioned textual scholarship, is reshaping what we know about Herman Melville. Among other discoveries: He entertained the idea of having Capt. Ahab kill off Moby-Dick at the end of the book.
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Feb. 17, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education
What Herman Melville has in common with James Frey: His first, best-selling book might not be quite the "unvarnished truth" he claimed it was. New archaeological and ethnographic evidence takes issue with some facts in Melville's 1846 debut,
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life.
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Feb. 3, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
University presses discover the civic and monetary rewards of keeping it local, in print and online.
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Jan. 2006, AARP Magazine online
Lighter fare, in every sense.
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Jan. 6, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only)
The game's afoot (again). Thanks to Stanford's "Discovering Sherlock Holmes" project, readers can sign up to receive several Sherlock Holmes stories in weekly installments that are facsimilies of the original Strand magazine versions.
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Dec. 25, 2005, The Washington Post
In Ana Castillo's novel
Watercolor Women/Opaque Men, the life of a Chicana single mom could be verse. It could also be better.
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Dec. 16, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
Is Theory with a capital T dead or more alive than ever? I asked some literature professors. Here's what they said.
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Nov. 11, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
Alabama writer Brad Vice "borrowed" chunks of Carl Carmer's 1934 book
Stars Fell on Alabama for his story collection,
The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, only he failed to cite his (copyrighted) source. Was it naivete, literary homage or plagiarism?
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Nov. 4, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
If aliens aren't really abducting earthlings, why do so many people have such vivid memories of close encounters? A psychiatric researcher investigates.
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Oct. 28, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
Why are there so darn many, anyway, and what good are they? A Q&A with the author of
The Economy of Prestige.
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Oct. 21, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
It's not always bad to write in your books. Hey, it worked for Coleridge, Keats and Blake. What marginalia can tell us about "the reading mind."
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Oct. 13, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
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Sept. 19, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
A Q&A with Lee Clarke, author of
Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination, who explains why playing the odds isn't a good bet when it comes to disasters.
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Sept. 9, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
Did the author of "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano...," one of the 18th century's seminal slave narratives, fabricate his experience of life in Africa and the Middle Passage? U-MD English professor Vincent Carretta thinks maybe so, and others aren't so happy about it.
Read a transcript of an online chat with Carretta.
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Aug. 5, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
When a writer goes silent, is he or she still producing a readable text? (Subscription required).
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July 19, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education, reprinted in Znet.com
A new book that attacks Alan Dershowitz will see print despite the threat of legal action from the Harvard prof.
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July 8, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
How to say rude things about politicians and get away with it--in 17th-century England, anyway. (Subscription required; I'll post a copy of the article soon, but in the meantime you can read a longish excerpt
here at the History News Network.)
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July 1, 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education
At this year's confab of university presses, the Google Library project was hotly debated and the environmental and social costs of printing in China were not. (Subscription required).
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March 16, 2005, The Washington Post
In which I revisit my old grad-school stomping grounds and its second-hand literary attractions.
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Feb. 11, 2005, The Washington Post
Former Del Fuegos lead singer turns Pete Seeger for the new millennium--and still rocks.
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Dec./Jan. 2004-'05, The Boston Review
It's academic: Susanna Clarke's
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel l turns epic fantasy into literary history. J.R.R., where are you when we need you?
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Nov. 8, 2004, New York magazine
A review of
Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem and
The Final Solution by Michael Chabon. A study in annoyingly extended adolescent angst, and a Sherlock Holmes-inspired meditation on mortal losses.
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Oct. 3, 2004, The Washington Post Book Club
Daemons, Dust and a brave-hearted heroine named Lyra with a world-shattering destiny. Read a transcript of my Post Book Club online discussion
here.
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Sept. 1, 2004, The Washington Post
A review of
Sammy's Hill by Kristin Gore. Idealistic young Senate staffer discovers love, meaningful policy change and some really bad writing on Capitol Hill in this debut novel by Al Gore's daughter. Soon to be a movie! Another reason Harvey Weinstein should never tell anyone to write a novel.
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Aug. 8, 2004, The Washington Post
A review of
Checkpoint. The author of
Vox gets his war on in this anti-Dubya polemic masquerading as a novel about a guy who wants to off the prez.
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July 25, 2004, The Washington Post
A review of
Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives by Anna Fels. Turns out you
can keep a good woman down.
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May 30, 2004, The Washington Post
A review of
After by Claire Tristram. This post-9/11 novel imagines a one-night stand between an Iranian exile and the American widow of a man killed by Muslim extremists. Just because something's topical doesn't mean it's good.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6460-2004Mar18.html
An experimental novel that also satisfies an old-fashioned narrative itch. A review of
Vanishing Point by David Markson.
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January 2004, The Washington Post Book Club
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel inspired by Virginia Woolf's
Mrs. Dalloway. Read the transcript of my Post Book Club online discussion
here.
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Jan. 11, 2004, The Washington Post
Talk-show shrink shares the secrets (?) of a happy (??) marriage. A brief review of Dr. Laura's
The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands.
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Nov. 16, 2003, The Washington Post
How not to make friends and influence people in cyberspace. Read an online discussion of the article
here.
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Oct. 22, 2003, The Washington Post
A review of
Lucky Girls by Nell Freudenberger. Twentysomething writer makes splashy New Yorker debut, publishes much-anticipated story collection. Is there talent behind the buzz?
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Sept. 28, 2003, The Washington Post
A review of
Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett. Girls in uniform! The 29th Discworld novel tackles gender politics and life during wartime.
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July 31, 2003, The Washington Post Book Club
Marlowe, blondes and the dirty mean streets of L.A. Read a transcript of the online discussion
here.
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April/May 2003, Boston Review
Two French "neo-polars" by Jean-Patrick Manchette take the thriller genre apart, with the help of Guy Debord and West Coast jazz.
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Sept. 1, 2002, The Washington Post
A review of
Blood of Victory by Alan Furst. This book just plain made me mad. Why is this guy so popular, anyway?
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Aug. 18, 2002, The Washington Post
A review of Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke. Yeah,
that Ethan Hawke. Not as lousy a novelist as you think he is.
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May 10, 2002, Slate
Our feet are getting bigger. Here's why.
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Feb/March 2002, Boston Review
The political thrillers of Eric Ambler. What you should be reading instead of Alan Furst.
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May 11, 2001, Slate
Rick Moody and the Magnetic Fields? Not your usual boring bookstore reading.
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Feb. 26, 1998, review, Salon
What happens when bad people sell good art.
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