Tag: research


We Are the Beneficiaries

As I sit here making the Spring 2017 class schedule for our department I recall the many times that I’ve heard academics lament being involved in administration. (That they equally complain about no longer being much involved in the governance of their institutions is an irony too rich to overlook.) “My condolences” is the witty reply many offer when learning that a colleague has fallen on the dagger (yes, that’s how it is portrayed) of becoming a department chair, coupled […]

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Should We Pull at Our (Funding) Strings?

              The American Academy of Religion recently held a consultation with its membership about “Responsible Research Practices: A Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct for AAR Members.” A grand total of four scholars responded to the statement on the AAR’s website. A online quick search for responses elsewhere returned nothing, other than a series of posts by Russell McCutcheon. Unless members of this scholarly association are just waiting for the session at the AAR’s annual meeting where further discussion […]

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Of Good Things and Small Packages

On the weekend I saw the news stories about Columbia University’s bizarre — yes, I’ll just go ahead an label it as such — attempt to ban food services workers from, among other things, speaking Spanish while on the job. The rich irony, at least as posed by one blogger (a Brooklyn College poli sci prof) and then repeated in other online stories, was that while seeking to contain or marginalize lower class workers who might speak Spanish as their […]

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Second Sabbatical: First Thoughts

For those other than academic colleagues—primarily our students and our non-academic supporters—a sabbatical is a special benefit every seven years, upon application and approval, awarded to those of us who teach, for “time off” to purse sustained research and sustained writing without the additional responsibilities of teaching, grading, committee meetings and the like.   In my case, spring, 2015, is my second opportunity to take full advantage of this award to pursue two special projects, the first on my mind for […]

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REL Faculty Stay Class in San Diego

Don’t be surprised if a few offices are empty next week. Many of our wonderful REL faculty will be spending November 22-25 in sunny San Diego for the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature or AAR/SBL for short or #SBLAAR14 for hashtag. What will our faculty be doing in San Diego? Glad you asked. Some will be giving papers or talks to other scholars and sharing the research they’ve been doing. Others […]

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Patience is a Professional Virtue

Some years ago I met a grad student at the U.S.’s main national scholarly conference in our field — “the big show” is what we’d call it if we were baseball players — who knew some of my friends in the profession and who bumped into me while walking through the book display. Being new to the conference-scene, he asked me a question: So how do I present a paper here next year? […]

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The Challenge of the Humanities

An article in the Wall Street Journal last week decrying the shift in English departments away from the classics reflects the challenge that the Humanities faces because Humanities research often creates discomfort. The article specifically used UCLA’s 2011 curriculum change, which no longer requires semester-long courses on Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer, favoring courses that focus on issues of gender, class, race, etc., as a symbol of a focus in critical theory on everyone being victims. Her characterization of these courses […]

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