If you don’t have any foreign languages as a historian you’re stuffed. This is not just true for those of us who decide to undertake research on a foreign country or do any sort of comparative or transnational study. My own work on a seventeenth-century English republican thinker took on its very own dynamics when… Continue reading Foreign Languages and the Historian
Category: Academia
Academic Tourism
We’re all tourists in academia. With short-term contracts being so common, it’s more or less natural to slide from PhD into hourly-paid teaching, into a Post-Doc, a fellowship, or a maternity/ research leave cover. Many of us are well into our thirties before we get the first full-time permanent job, if we haven’t succumbed to… Continue reading Academic Tourism
The homeless man in the library
I’m intrigued by the story of a homeless man slipping into St John’s College Library at Cambridge for several weeks. Good on him, is the only thing I can say. There are certainly worse places to while away a cold winter’s day. His assortment of supermarket bags aside, he was probably not so different from… Continue reading The homeless man in the library
On Research Leave
As of tomorrow, I will be on research leave. I will not have to teach again until the end of September. Don’t get me wrong, I love teaching. But the idea of not having to write any lectures or do any lesson prep this semester fills me with an enormous feeling of freedom. I can… Continue reading On Research Leave
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