Blogging, women, and a swipe at ’90s gender psychology

As I’m sure you know, the WordPress license agreement mandates a monthly blog post about blogging. What could I do?
Responding to Emily Gould’s self-exposé in the Times Magazine, Jemima Kiss on last week’s Tech Weekly podcast suggested that gender differences on blogs are most pronounced in the kinds of blogs men and women tend to [...]

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Modblogging Journal Club #1: Sheng-mei Ma on Kazuo Ishiguro

This is the very first Modblogging Journal Club post!
Today: Sheng-mei Ma’s “Kazuo Ishiguro’s Persistent Dream for Postethnicity: Performance in Whiteface” (PDF) from Post Identity 2.1 (Winter 1999).
Ma announces his argument with a grenade:
Although some critics may find it devilishly inappropriate, even unprofessional, to confuse fictitious characters and the fiction writer, surely [. . .] characters [...]

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Introducing Modblogging Journal Club

A great friend of mine, a microbiologist who is now a postdoc in Seattle, used to talk about her lab’s journal club. As I understood it, journal club was exactly like fight club, although with less violence and more microbiology.
Informal reading groups have come and gone in my department, not least because we dissertators always [...]

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Can a dissertation be a story?

This week I read Barak Kushner’s The Thought War to fill in some of the historical gaps in my chapter, and I’ve found myself surprised by his writing. Though an Amazon reviewer calls it “dry, dull, and… like a jumped-up version of someone’s dissertation,” as someone who hopes to jump up his own dissertation [...]

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