Ah email… blessing or curse of contemporary academic life? This letter from a student describes a common email problem between students and supervisors. Below you’ll find my response, which dwells on the importance of lunch, amongst other things. Hi Inger I follow your blog and I have a question for you about email contact with […] … learn more→

A burgeoning subfield of literary studies that focuses on human beings’ impact on the environment is changing the curricula of English departments across the country. Climate fiction — cli-fi, for short — often depicts a grim future of a changed world, portraying how humanity must deal with years of environmental neglect. The genre, which has […] … learn more→

Few sights are as instantly recognizable, and few sites speak more fully to American nationalism. Standing on the South Rim in 1903, President Teddy Roosevelt proclaimed it “one of the great sights every American should see.” It’s true. Every visitor today knows the Grand Canyon as a unique testimony to Earth’s history and an icon […] … learn more→

Last week the university email went down. And the week before. Both times on a Monday morning. You know, Monday, the day when you’re psyched up to go back to work after the weekend. The email was off when I got up sometime around 6.30 – it came back on again around 9 am. As it turns […] … learn more→

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Millions of African girls are becoming wives every year. In Niger, about 75% of girls will become child brides before they turn 18. In Chad and the Central African Republic the figure is 68%. Some countries, like Ethiopia, are recording some important victories in the fight to protect girls from becoming child brides. But the […] … learn more→

I recently revisited press coverage of the 2010 union win for faculty in anthropology and other disciplines at Florida State University, where an arbitrator reversed the termination of 21 tenured faculty members earlier that year, ruling that the firings had violated the FSU faculty union contract. The university’s administration, which had cited deep cuts in state […] … learn more→

Should a teacher reward a whole class for the good deeds of one student? What about the other side of the discipline picture: should a whole class be punished for the misdeeds of just a few students? As adults, we care a lot about whether people receive their fair share of benefits, and whether those […] … learn more→

There’s a popular myth that Alfred Nobel had wanted to create a prize for mathematics but didn’t want his love rival, the Swedish mathematician Gosta Mittag-Leffler, to win and so scrapped the idea. There’s no evidence for this persistent rumour so we have to assume the reason there’s no Nobel Prize for maths is because […] … learn more→

Everyone knows about Saint Patrick – the man who drove the snakes out of Ireland, defeated fierce druids in contests of magic, and used the shamrock to explain the Christian Trinity to the pagan Irish. It’s a great story, but none of it is true. The shamrock legend came along centuries after Patrick’s death, as […] … learn more→