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No More Little Match Girl Stories
In Hans Christian Andersen’s short story “The Little Match-Girl,” an unnamed girl struggles to sell matches on a snowy street. Having sold nothing at the end of the day, and desperate to avoid her father’s wrath at home, she lights each of her matches, one by one, to stay warm. As she slowly freezes to […]
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So You’re Leaving Academia
In the academic world, ’tis the season for announcements: new jobs, postdocs, fellowships, and promotions. This means it’s also the time of year when many scholars are beginning their departure from that same world. Some may have been planning that departure for months, or even years, while for others it’s more like Wile E. Coyote’s […]
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Contingent Magazine
Many of you have been wondering what I’m up to. Surely I couldn’t just be adjuncting one class and tweeting about my dissertation research! Well, in addition to that, and job-hunting, I’ve been working on something else for months, and now it is finally live. Contingent Magazine has three principles: History is for everyone. Every […]
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Should I stay or should I go? (and why I never have an answer)
This week, Slate’s advice columnist Prudie (Daniel Mallory Ortberg) got asked about leaving grad school. The advice-seeker noted that they’d been in grad school for five years, but had decided they didn’t want to be a career academic. What held them back from leaving was not only the personal, economic, and social upheaval such an […]
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Quit lit or Driven out lit?
I spent some time recently gathering up all of the responses I could find to the original piece of mine that caused such a fuss, so there’s a convenient list now. If I missed any, feel free to comment and let me know. But I wanted to highlight one response in particular that I think […]
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If I were baker, you could have a cruller
In the six weeks since I metaphorically climbed out the bathroom window at my wedding, and especially in the two weeks since I burst into Central Perk and told you all about it, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m going to do next. Since the future I imagined isn’t going to happen, I’ve […]
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Sublimated Grief responses and FAQs
So, how was your week? As you probably know, mine was completely surreal. My goodbye lament quickly overloaded the capacity of my website, and led to this, this, this, and this. My DMs and email inbox have been flooded with responses and inquiries in addition to all the comments on the pieces themselves and around […]
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The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind
It happened during AHA. I was sitting at home, revising my manuscript introduction and feeling jealous of all of my historian friends at the conference, when I got an email telling me my last (and best) hope for a tenure-track job this year had evaporated. I’d promised myself that this would be my last year […]
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Killing the Dad Book Table
On a recent trip to Barnes & Noble, I was not surprised to see the usual tables of “Father’s Day” suggestions piled high with books about famous white men, making war and doing politics, largely authored by people who look remarkably like their subjects. Around this time last year, I was thinking about related issues, most […]
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The Year of Writing Dangerously
Well, folks, it’s the one year anniversary of this website, so it seems like time for me to think about what I’ve done. I say that I’ve been “writing dangerously” not because anything I’ve written here has been particularly provocative, but rather because doing anything other than keeping your head down and publishing your ass […]
