Given the cultural hierarchies it reproduces, perhaps it is time to consider decommissioning ‘the Middle Ages’ as a historical era.
Read MoreWhen We Talk About the Middle Ages
Visit the Extractocene!
Centuries before the Industrial Revolution inaugurated the Anthropocene, miners were denuding, carving and perforating mountains across the countryside. Today these are heritage sites balancing local pride and extraction’s complex legacy.
Read MoreAcademic Publishing in a Global Age of Extremes
Censorship has become increasingly visible of late around the world. As part of that trend, the academic freedom of scholars can also come under threat when the financial and intellectual agendas of their publishers run up against nationalist and other populist ideologies in different countries. I recently experienced such tensions when a book I co-edited met with some unexpected obstacles while being translated. On this basis, I can offer other academics, their publishers and institutions some insights about how to prepare for and address such circumstances.
Read MoreThe Evolving Uses of Preprints in Humanities Scholarship
Humanities scholars, including medievalists, are generally free from scientists’ imperative to “publish or perish.” We tend to value quality over quantity, are used to the slow pace of publication and low citation rates, and appreciate our works’ literary and artisanal quality. So why accelerate the process unnecessarily by uploading early (or un-formatted) work in the form of preprints to public, non-profit repositories like BodoArxiv? Here we discuss six reasons why we should consider doing so and why in part it’s already happening, sometimes in response to larger cultural shifts in and beyond academia.
Read MoreBetter Teaching Starts with Asking Early
Neoliberal universities love generating data about taught classes—once they’ve been completed. But asking systematically about students’ expectations and mindset coming into a specific class is uncommon. So, as campus life resumed after two turbulent years of teaching mostly from home, I decided to circulate a brief, individual and anonymous questionnaire at the first session of a class. Here’s what it taught me.
Read MoreLooking Back and Staying Healthy
Apart from testing, administering the Coronavirus vaccine is the first major instance in which governments will be making use of a complex biomedical product. So far, they relied on prophylactic methods that date back hundreds, if not thousands of years. And once vaccination begins in earnest, the requirement to present a clean bill of health will likewise date back at least to the introduction of health passports in sixteenth-century Europe. But the success of simple, preventative measures relies on sufficient public infrastructures, adequate communication and trust in those who maintain them.
Read MoreThe Open-Door Fallacy
An open door alone does not an ally make. To many in academia who are in distress and who feel voiceless and vulnerable, knocking on another, especially senior, person’s door can be an immense psychological barrier to overcome. After perhaps a lifetime’s worth of discrimination, the path leading to such a door is seldom paved, let alone clear of obstacles. Believing that someone behind it may be an ally stems from a combination of individual experiences that are hard, if not impossible, to anticipate.
Read MoreCalling Some Public Health Initiatives “Medieval” is Harmful
Dividing public health initiatives into the categories of medieval and modern is harmful
Read MoreUnusual Business: A University Press Goes Private, And No One is the Wiser
Difficult questions remain unanswered about how the University of Amsterdam ushered the privatization of Amsterdam University Press, colluded in embellishing the shift’s circumstances, and what that tells us about the value of academic labor when leaders of a public university embrace rather than resist breakneck capitalism.
Read MoreLong Live the Curator! Preprints and a Future for Humanities Publishing
Editors, often relying on reviewers’ labor and input, tend to spend more time and energy waging a defensive war on their journal’s identity and quality than actively discovering exciting new work. Field-specific preprint repositories are one way to streamline editorial boards’ activities, allowing them to identify and curate collections from a far greater pool of papers—and potentially at earlier stages of gestation—than is their current habit.
Read MoreWhy Arts & Humanities Scholars Should Care About Preprints
With less pressure to publish or perish, arts and humanities scholars can play a pivotal role in developing truly open preprint services, as one element of sustainable infrastructures for scholarly communications. Private, commercial repositories are not a viable alternative.
Read MorePreprint to Monograph: A Path to Travel By
A creative use of preprints can benefit authors and publishers of monographs, as well as the scholarly community at large, no less than preprints are currently benefiting those working with journal articles. This is a good in and of itself, but one that may also help pave the way to a constructive dialogue with publishers about the production, work flow and marketing of monographic literature and edited volumes.
Read MoreBeyond Sci-Hub
If you have a pressing need to read an academic paper that’s hiding behind a paywall, your quickest course of action may well be to use Sci-Hub. Less myopically perhaps, you should also ask the paper’s authors why they continue to cooperate with those for-profit publishers whose high prices have made breaking the law your path of least resistance
Read MoreHerring out of Brine 4: The Academic Book Workshop
The academic book workshop for pre-tenured staff risks becoming yet another exercise in branding under a thin veneer of learning. Here are some suggestions on how to avoid that.
Read MoreHerring out of Brine: Indefensible
The PhD defense or viva voce examination is the Humanities’ ultimate rite of passage. In part, a court of your own, soon-to-be peers; in part, a speech act conferring and in some less lucky cases denying the status of a Philosophiae Doctor. Despite its arcane name, the variety of graduation formats and procedures is surprisingly broad, and it tells arguably more about the granting institution and its surrounding culture than the discipline, department or quality of research being evaluated.
Read MoreHerring out of Brine: True Colors
The neighborhood bully has won. In coming to terms with it over the past few days, my main source of comfort and concern as regards the elections’ impact on Europe are one and the same: the electoral system and its role in the public sphere.
Read MoreHerring out of Brine: Tientjescultuur
Students in top US colleges are famous for being over achievers. But the emotional pressure on them (and staff) means that campuses are less likely to be safe havens for developing curiosity and daring to fail.
Read MoreDwing wetenschap niet in keurslijf van scoren
Weg met die belachelijke cultuur van 'winnaars' en 'verliezers' die is ontstaan aan de universiteiten, vinden hoogleraren Guy Geltner en Thomas Vaessens.
Read MoreDownwards Accountability
Despite a welcome increase in transparency and openness at the UvA/HvA, its stonewalling Supervisory Board (RvT) remains both a symptom of old-school politics and a cause for unrest well beyond Amsterdam. The situation at our institution exemplifies a problem common throughout the Dutch public sector: top management operates unconstrained by any meaningful form of democratic accountability, as crucial decision-making power is held by inaccessible political appointees drawn from entrenched elite business circles.
Read MoreUpon Leaving Academia.edu
Early last week I uploaded to my Academia.edu homepage a brief note signaling and explaining my decision to close my account on that site. As a medieval historian, I had been an active and enthusiastic member since 2010, with moderately high exposure, and while “On leaving Academia.edu” was meant as a provocative goodbye, I hadn’t expected it to draw much attention. In the four days that elapsed between uploading my note and closing my account, however, the text was accessed more than 22,000 times and the critical discussion board accompanying it (known as a Session) was still going strong, attracting some 2,000 active followers making numerous contributions, including from the site’s founder and CEO, its Product VP, and of course hundreds of engaged scholars and academics from around the world.
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