Now that I’ve completed Year 3 on the tenure track, I’m finally reaching a point where I feel ready to work on serious, in-depth scholarship again. (At teaching-heavy institutions — and especially in service-heavy disciplines — the time and space to crank out anything more than a conference paper or an on-campus talk is impossible to come by.) I’ve had multiple projects at various stages of completion “marinating” behind the scenes during the past three years, and now it’s time for that work to reach a more public audience.
To borrow phrasing from the now-omnipresent superhero movie genre, the redesign and relaunch of this website is “Phase One” of my return to academic writing. I’ll soon be posting notes & errata from the two articles I’m currently working to finish this summer, as well as mini-reviews of the poetry, literature (both literary and YA), critical theory, and education books I’ll be reading over the next few months. Most of these posts will consist of little more than awkward questions and half-baked conclusions — the kinds of things I would have been mortified to share with a public audience as a grad student. But if I’m going to tell my students that the best way to become a good writer is to read & write way more than they think they need to, then I probably owe it to them to “practice what I preach” in my own work as a scholar and teacher.
(Unfortunately, I don’t have a clear vision for “Phase Two” of my return to writing just yet; in my head, it’s something like “PUBLISH ALL THE THINGS!” But after watching Justice League last November, I’m 100% certain that DC didn’t either.)
More to come.
tom jesse 