What should an academic career in the humanities look like today – beyond “not like this”? The question is prompted in the short term by the fact that Mary Beard, to mark her retirement, has taken the opportunity to promote discussion of the academic precariat and the extent to which things have changed over the course of her own career; but if, like me, you use Twitter partly as a means of networking with younger colleagues and early career researchers, this is a topic which has long been pretty well impossible to avoid. One way of trying to think about it, from a not-as-old-as-Mary-but-still-moderately-decrepit-and-comfortably-established perspective, is to wonder about the ideal against which the present situation is being compared; what is it so much worse than, and when did it all change? (more…)
Archive for the ‘Musings’ Category
Dog Eat Dog
Posted in Musings, tagged higher education, jobs on July 27, 2022| 2 Comments »
Write Here, Write Now
Posted in Musings, tagged Long COVID, work, Writing on July 5, 2022| Leave a Comment »
The continuing joys of Long COVID… The main function of this blog post is just to give a link to a profound and thought-provoking piece by the ever-wonderful Maria Farrell over at Crooked Timber, talking about her experience of living with and adapting to ME/CFS, with an eye to this new epidemic of the after-effects of the plague. It’s full of striking and memorable phrases (“cosplaying normality”!), and you simply need to go and read it, and reflect.
I found it quite uncomfortable, to be honest. (more…)
Was It Worth It?
Posted in Musings, Podcasts, tagged engagement, Impact, research on June 28, 2022| 2 Comments »
And so farewell then, the Thucydiocy Podcast. In seven episodes, stretched out irregularly over several years, you established in mind-numbing detail the different ways in which people have misattributed things to Thucydides, to an audience of many tens of people, two of whom once posted positive feedback… Wait a minute! There is a faint pulse! It lives, to be largely ignored for another day! (more…)
Blank Space
Posted in Musings, Publications, Research in Progress, tagged indexing, technology on June 24, 2022| Leave a Comment »
I am not, I would like to think, an unreasonable Luddite. I suppose it could be said that what I am is at best inconsistent; sometimes not a Luddite at all, indeed sometimes the sort of middle-aged man who desperately strives to keep up with odd bits of the technological Zeitgeist, enjoying catch-up TV while wondering what happened to car CD players, and sometimes an entirely reasonable Luddite. I can see, for example, why my favoured approach to constructing an index – creating a simple Word table by working methodically through page proofs, and then doing an A-Z sort – is clearly unsuited to the world of eBooks and online publication. And so I didn’t whine too much when asked to provide a list of index terms when submitting the manuscript of a forthcoming edited volume. (more…)
Broken English
Posted in Musings, tagged grammar, higher education, learning, skills on June 23, 2022| Leave a Comment »
It’s always nice to learn that someone has found something you did a while ago useful – yes, I know there are giants in the field who get thoroughly sick of being told how they’ve transformed the understanding and indeed life philosophy of another dozen junior scholars this month, but us provincial types have more modest horizons. This month, I’ve actually had it twice. Someone liked an obscure thing I wrote on ‘historiography as trauma’ in Thucydides and has done the hard yards of a proper analysis of the theme in relation to the Sicilian Expedition rather than just tossing out a few random ideas on the topic – so, watch out for the new piece by Bernd Steinbock. And then I heard about what may prove to be my greatest, if rather unsung, contribution to the world of learning… (more…)
Everything’s Fine
Posted in Musings on May 31, 2022| 1 Comment »
There is a small, rather marginal community, struggling to survive in the face of the pressures of the modern world, heavily dependent on attracting tourists. There is a series of odd and sometimes alarming occurrences, which most people ignore – but a few argue that there is a pattern to them and actually they are signs that the community is faced with an existential threat. The music becomes ominous. (more…)
Public Image
Posted in Musings on May 26, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Ah, the brand. The backbone of all that we do, the foundation of international success, the very heart of the institution. It’s not enough to produce excellent teaching and research if your logo fails to communicate your core values in just the wrong shade of green.
But things could be worse. (more…)
Caught Out There
Posted in Musings, tagged Churchill, fake history, quotations, Thucydides on May 19, 2022| Leave a Comment »
This weekend, there’s a fabulous-looking conference at Cornell on Thucydides and Aristophanes in honour of the great and wonderful Jeff Rusten. The advertising on the Twitter is slightly less wonderful…
Now, if this were my colleagues organising a conference in my honour, this would be deliberate trolling; (more…)
Half The Man I Used To Be
Posted in Musings, tagged disability, Long COVID, work on May 10, 2022| Leave a Comment »
The glass-half-full position is that a problem I didn’t know I had has been solved by the very thing that raised it in the first place. It had simply not occurred to me to wonder whether the still-lingering after-effects of the plague – aka Long COVID – mean that I am now someone with a disability, or someone who is disabled. It’s certainly true that my ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities – and, like, do my job properly, especially the research-and-writing bits – has been substantially impaired, to a greater degree than can be explained by simple old age and uselessness, but surely that’s not the same as being disabled? Well, no need to worry; the Equality and Human Rights Commission has declared that it isn’t. True, the EHRC’s recent record on racism doesn’t promote complete confidence in its judgements, but like other British institutions I can choose to believe in my recent problems being a matter of a few bad apples rather than a systemic issue… (more…)
We All Stand Together
Posted in Musings, tagged beer, hypocrisy, solidarity, Ukraine, Western Civilisation on May 5, 2022| 2 Comments »
I have just bottled my new Ukrainian-style stout, brewed as part of the Brew Ukraine initiative; at the beginning of the invasion, the Pravda craft brewery in Lviv had to stop brewing and switch to a war footing, so they made their recipes and label artwork freely available for other brewers – including home brewers – to produce their beer and help raise funds. I haven’t, unfortunately, found any proper UK breweries doing this, which is a shame as I’d have liked to have had an idea in advance what I was aiming for, but what I’ve got is dark and luscious with a hint of smokiness. Now available for a donation of £2 per 330ml bottle, all proceeds to humanitarian relief – with postage and packing on top if anyone beyond the immediate locality wants to try it, I’m afraid, as I suspect that might be a bit pricy. Cheers! Onwards Ukraine! Putin is a dick, as one of their other beers has it.
Sphinx 