Author: Merinda Simmons

About Merinda Simmons: Merinda Simmons earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of Alabama and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies. Her areas of research and teaching include gender studies, southern studies, method and theory in the study of religion, postcolonial studies, African American literature and theory, migration and diaspora studies.

Posts by Merinda Simmons

Making Sense of a Sabbatical

December 6, 2016

In my Introduction to Religious Studies course, my students think a lot about “making the strange familiar and familiar strange.” With those lessons in mind, I thought I’d make a bit more familiar for students who won’t see me as much in the Spring a practice that happens within the academy—the sabbatical. After being awarded tenure (typically in year 5 or 6), professors can apply for a sabbatical by outlining a specific research project that would benefit from some time […]

What You Missed at This Week’s Grad’s Tale

January 30, 2015

Wednesday saw the semester’s first installment of “There and Back Again: A Grad’s Tale,” an event that brings back alumni who graduated from UA with a degree in Religious Studies to talk about life-after-diploma. This time, Prof. Mike Altman talked to Hannah Hicks, now a second-year law student here at UA. A double major in Religious Studies and Philosophy who graduated in 2013, Hannah talked about the ways in which her degrees in the liberal arts helped prepare her for […]

Reexamining the Obvious: “This is Water”

October 16, 2012

Below–well, after a blurb that I pulled from the speech–are embedded clips (there are two parts, about ten minutes each) to the commencement address that the late writer David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. Wallace considers the implications of suggesting that a liberal arts education teaches people “how to think”… Give it a listen. […]

Self-loathing Scholarship

October 4, 2012

Self-awareness is hard. Because, let’s face it—a lot of people don’t like themselves. And in academe, where social ticks and neuroses are disproportionally high per capita, we are bunch of Woody Allens walking around with all of the hang-ups and none of the jokes. Well, okay, not none…there are parodies of the profession galore. The video that circulated on youtube and about which my colleague Russell McCutcheon recently posted on this very blog comes to mind. It made my academic […]