New Books in Higher Education

Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan's The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2020) is an excavation of a discipline through the work of its teachers, the traces of the tremendous and varied labour that went into preparing for and practicing literary study in classrooms from the first decades of the twentieth century to the 1970s. Exploring the teaching papers of scholars and instructors at institutions private and public--prestigious and privileged universities, extension schools, and HBCUs--the authors revisit the work of some of the scholars frequently identified as "founders" of the discipline, including T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks. They also show how the work of women and other scholars/teachers neglected as shapers of literary critical methods before the 1960s and 1970s was indeed essential to the development of the ideas and practices at the heart of the discipline. At once an intellectual and a labor history, the book emphasizes practices, complicating the stories literary study has told about itself about innovation, canon, and more while making a meaningful and moving contribution to urgent contemporary discussions of higher education more broadly. It is a book for anyone interested in what happens inside classrooms, how their content and form has changed over time, and how what takes place there is always already imbricated with research, with lives and contexts "outside." It is also just a wonderful read, written truly collaboratively from start to finish by two scholars and teachers deeply committed to an inclusive history of their field, to their work in the present, and to a better future for all of us.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Founded in 1884 and incorporated by Congress in 1889 for the promotion of historical studies, the American Historical Association provides leadership for the discipline and promotes the critical role of historical thinking in public life. The Association defends academic freedom, develops professional standards, supports innovative scholarship and teaching, and helps to sustain and enhance the work of historians. As the largest membership association of professional historians in the world (over 11,500 members), the AHA serves historians in a wide variety of professions and represents every historical era and geographical area. James Grossman is Executive Director of the American Historical Association. He was previously Vice President for Research and Education at the Newberry Library, and has taught at the University of Chicago and the University of California, San Diego.James H. Sweet is Vilas-Jartz Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has taught since 2004. He is a historian of Africa and the African diaspora, with a particular focus on the cultures and politics of enslaved Africans in the Americas.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Sean Guillory. Sean did something pretty remarkable (and hard): He started a successful academic podcast. It's called the SRB Podcast and deals with Russian and Eurasian affairs. In the interview, Sean explains how he did it, how he does it, and his current project, a wonderful narrative podcast called Teddy Goes to the USSR. I highly recommend you subscribe to the SRB Podcast and Teddy Goes to the USSR. You can follow Sean on Twitter here: @seansrussiablog. Sean Guillory is the Digital Scholarship Curator at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is a magisterial examination of the turmoil that rocked American universities in the 1960s, with a unique focus on the complex roles played by professors as well as students.The 1950s through the early 1970s are widely seen as American academia’s golden age, when universities—well funded and viewed as essential for national security, economic growth, and social mobility—embraced an egalitarian mission. Swelling in size, schools attracted new types of students and professors, including radicals who challenged their institutions’ calcified traditions. But that halcyon moment soon came to a painful and confusing end, with consequences that still afflict the halls of ivy. In The Lost Promise, Ellen Schrecker—our foremost historian of both the McCarthy era and the modern American university—delivers a far-reaching examination of how and why it happened.Schrecker illuminates how US universities’ explosive growth intersected with the turmoil of the 1960s, fomenting an unprecedented crisis where dissent over racial inequality and the Vietnam War erupted into direct action. Torn by internal power struggles and demonized by conservative voices, higher education never fully recovered, resulting in decades of underfunding and today’s woefully inequitable system. As Schrecker’s magisterial history makes blazingly clear, the complex blend of troubles that disrupted the university in that pivotal period haunts the ivory tower to this day.Ellen Schrecker is a retired professor of history at Yeshiva University and the author of numerous books, including No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, and The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University.Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office's role in the Cold War. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Dave Harris, a writing coach who uses principles from design to help authors develop writing practices. We talk about his book, Literature Review and Research Design: A Guide to Effective Research Practice (Routledge, 2019), and the ongoing conversation that is research.Dave Harris : "And one of the important elements of thinking of your research as a conversation with your community of scholars is that the gaps in the literature are, to some extent, the things that others have left unsaid. So, we're in this conversation, and one person mentions an idea and they mention three factors of that idea, and there's a fourth factor that they didn't mention — well, that's your gap in the literature, and you jump in and you say, 'Well, we also want to talk about this fourth factor.'"Clear your thoughts with Dave!Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today’s episode of How To Be Wrong we welcome Adrian Lenardic, who is a professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Rice University and an avid scakteboarder. Adrian has an interesting background, having started as a visual arts major at UW Madison before switching to geophysics. He went on to get his PhD in planetary science form UCLA and did his postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley. Our conversation explores the systemic problems in higher education that work against intellectual humility and that tend to have a negative influence on how scholarship operates in the modern university. Quite a bit of our conversation explores the negative impact the business model is having on higher education and particularly on junior faculty and graduate students.John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We continue our discussion with Mark Nordenberg, who shares lessons from his successful 19 year tenure as Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh and his subsequent career as Director of the Institute of Politics, including his recent stint chairing the Committee charged with making recommendations on Pennsylvania redistricting.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The American Association of Geographers (AAG) is a non-profit scientific and educational society aimed at advancing the understanding, study, and importance of geography and related fields. Its headquarters is located in Washington, D.C. The organization was founded on December 29, 1904, in Philadelphia. As of 2020, the association has more than 10,000 members, from nearly 100 countries.Emily T. Yeh is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder and President of the AAG. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A Guide to Academic Podcasting is a practical guidebook introducing scholars to the multiverse of podcasting. It’s an open-source publication made by Amplify Podcast Network, written by Stacey Copeland and Hannah McGregor. In this conversation, we talked about embodied knowledge, gendered (and racialized) voices, and how new media publishing is transforming the relationships scholars have with the public(s). We entered into the territory of the vulnerable scholar, examined our discomfort with silence, and the spaces of possibilities academics may discover in podcasting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Targets of bullying are often the most vulnerable members of the scientific workforce-they may be low-paid graduate students or postdocs, living in a foreign country, navigating a foreign language and culture, and whose immigration status is tied directly to their employment. They may also have young families, be living paycheck-to-paycheck, and have health insurance and other benefits that depend on a contract position that can be revoked with little to no notice or cause. Finally, targets on the low end of a power differential are not likely to be supported by their institutions, particularly institutions that rely on the big grant earnings brought in by senior "bullies." A Brief Guide to Academic Bullying (Jenny Stanford Publishing, 2021) is a brief guide to the causes of academic bullying and to their solutions.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices