History News Network

Despite its name, the Invisible Adjunct’s weblog was not defined by its attention to the problem of adjuncts in higher education. Or more properly, its interest in the plight of adjuncts was not reducible to a list of specific and narrow grievances suffered by the Invisible Adjunct herself.

The Invisible Adjunct held up a mirror to higher education and asked whether it liked what it saw. She drew in readers who had thought their own alienation from and disappointment with academia was only a private and personal feeling. In her postings and in the discussions that followed, they discovered that they were not alone. Whether they were currently suffering the trials of adjunct employment, had left academia as ABDs, or were struggling to make sense of life as a tenured professor, many readers found that they shared common dissatisfactions with academic life.

However, Invisible Adjunct’s site was not for whiners, or axe-grinders with primordial grudges against the professoriate. She also pushed readers to consider what was valuable and precious about higher education. She consistently elevated the tone and substance of the conversation as a writer and as a host. The Invisible Adjunct’s site brought together many readers and many issues under a single roof, in a shared dialogue. When the site ended, many of those conversations fractured and became far more divisive.

Maybe that was inevitable. Certainly no one faulted the Invisible Adjunct for shutting down her site, as she had promised, once she decided to give up on the quest for a regular tenure-track position. I think that one of the signs of academia’s underlying problems is that someone like the Invisible Adjunct wasn’t able to find a regular position, and that in some small but crucial way, academia has suffered for it. Because I like to think that had she found the position she was seeking, and kept her site going, that perhaps some of the most frustrating contemporary debates about academic politicization and similar issues might have been less divisive, less captive to the larger fractures in the body politic. One host, and one writer, really can make all the difference, and for an important time, the Invisible Adjunct did.
-- Timothy Burke

Mode for Caleb (July 2004 - August 2006)

I discovered Mode for Caleb, Caleb McDaniel's brilliant blog about history, academia, religion, politics, culture, and jazz, in September or October 2004, right around the time I was launching my own blog on a few of those subjects. Every post Caleb wrote made me realize that I'd have to work a lot harder than I'd planned. What Mode for Caleb showed me was that this new medium we're improvising need not be flimsy or disposable. Like the jazz music Caleb loves, blogging and history blogging in particular can be deep and rewarding and complex. With all due respect to the instapundits and daily link harvesters (we need them too) Caleb showed how well the history blog works in the long form. Call it "smartblogging"--or don't, that's pretty awful--week after week, Caleb delivered sustained intellectual solos, extended virtuoso riffs on teaching and writing, American and transnational history, nuclear weapons and the abolitionist mind. Each of his posts claimed to be "improvised," but if that's true, he's an even more terrifying genius than I think he is. They all struck me as meticulously crafted, and worthy of serious thought and time. They're worth rereading, too: do yourself a favor and spend some time with his series on transnational history, or his case for nuclear abolitionism, or his essay on the origins and meanings of Memorial Day. It doesn't matter that these posts were written by some graduate student somewhere you'd never heard of. If anything, that makes it cooler. Those posts represent a powerful mind at work, and you got to see it in action (or else you get to now), in your browser or RSS reader, for free. If the story of Invisible Adjunct, our other inaugural Hall of Famer, exposed a failure--not a personal failure, by any means, but a collective failure of the academic profession--Mode for Caleb represents a glowing success. It's Caleb's success--he's got his PhD now, a tenure-track job, and a new baby on the way. We envy his students and wish him well. But it's a success for the medium of academic blogging, too.
-- Rob MacDougall

Posted on Wednesday, September 6, 2006 at 9:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

The Cliopatria Symposium is an irregular/monthly feature here at Cliopatria -– monthly to remind us to do it periodically and irregular so we won't necessarily do one just because the calendar says so. Manan Ahmed has agreed to keep the agenda for the symposia. We'll need worthy articles to discuss: If you come across an article that appears to be a likely candidate for attention here, please recommend it to him: manan*at*uchicago*dot*edu.

The list of symposiums held to date:

Valérie Rosoux's "Forgiveness: Grandeur or Political Slogan" April 2008
"Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms" August 2007
"Jamestown 2007" May 2007
"A Historian for the People" March 2007
"British and American 'Imperialisms' Compared" July 2006
"Transnational Histories of America" April 2006
"Wilentz on Bush's Ancestors" October 2005
"Empires: Beyond Imperialism" August 2005
"America's Unfinished Revolution" July 2005
"Forget the Founding Fathers" June 2005

Valérie Rosoux's "Foregiveness: Grandeur or Political Slogan" (April 2008)

Call for Comment including links to "Forgiveness: Grandeur or Political Slogan?" and "Human rights and the ‘work of memory’ in international relations (excerpt)" by Valérie Rosoux.
Cliopatria: Robinson-Ahmed dialogue
Elsewhere: Andrew Ross, Jonathan Dresner

Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms (August 2007)

Nicholas Wade's preview of Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms, "In Dusty Archives, A Theory of Affluence," NYT, 7 August

Responses to In Dusty Archives, A Theory of Affluence

Brad deLong, "Greg Clark's New Book, A Farewell to Alms, Grasping Reality with Both Hands, 7 August, argues that right or wrong, the book is "brilliant."
Mary Dudziak, "Was the Industrial Revolution Caused by Evolution?" Legal History Blog, 7 August, says the claims are provocative, but we'll wait to see the book, itself.
Jason Kuznicki, "A Farewell to Alms?" Positive Liberty, 11 August, where our colleagues, Sharon Howard and Nathanael Robinson, respond in comments.
Nathanael Robinson, "Tales from the Monocausal Universe, pt 1," Rhine River, 15 August.
______________, "Tales from the Monocausal Universe, pt 2," Rhine River, 18 August.
Richard Stern, "Genetic Values," Open University, 14 August.
John Carter Wood, "Some Thoughts on Evolution, History and Capitalist Genes ...," Obscene Desserts, 14 August.