Reading Notes: Miller, Bazerman & Popham walk into this blog…

Blogging on a plane - photo

I appreciate the opportunity this week to reengage with Miller’s work on genre in “Genre as Social Action” and then to see those ideas carried forward into “Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre.” I encountered Miller last semester in an historical review of EDNA-based textbooks in composition studies. Miller’s ideas on the social aspects…
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Am I in The Digital Humanities?

I’m reading a series in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the digital humanities, and it’s sparked this question: assuming I intend to focus on technology and new media in my doctoral program, will my scholarship be considered “digital humanities”? To me, “digital humanities” suggests more visual presentation and analysis of data rather than traditional…
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Reflections on the First Semester

The time lag between this post and the previous post is roughly proportional to my level of stress and busy-ness over that same period. As long as the time was between posts, so was I stressed and busy. The first semester of my PhD studies has drawn to a close—I submitted my two exam question…
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The Discipline is Dead. Long Live the Discipline

Harvard English Department

English studies no longer exists. That’s the conclusion I’ve drawn after half a semester of PhD coursework. Too bad I’m getting a PhD in English. An English department may exist as a political or organizational unit on some campuses, but it’s unclear to me that, at the graduate or higher level, there needs to be…
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This Is the Discipline?

I find myself in this situation pretty often: with about 15 minutes left in my day, however that gets defined (often “the time I go to bed” or “the time I go home from work or teaching”), I sit down to draft a post. At the end of a typical weekday, I spend about an…
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A Crisis – One of Many?

Crisis What Crisis Art Image

During last Monday’s class, I shared that I felt I was in crisis. This is something I’ve felt since a particular professor spoke to the class. I don’t think the professor engendered the crisis, but the presentation’s unwillingness to leave the realm of theory—and my difficulty following what the professor had to say—resulted in a…
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