Tuesday, March 1, 12:30-1:45 PM
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135
“Stop Being Polite and Start Getting Real: Professional Education for Professional Humanists” by TIM CARMODY
We’ve generally done everything we can in the humanities to ignore that a PhD is a every bit as much a professional degree as a degree in law, medicine, educational administration, information science, or business. The irony is that explicit training in the professional tools employed by professors, would actually make PhDs who end up off the tenure track, more widely employable. This presentation is intended to open up a discussion to identify professional tools that will make PhDs better professors, better alt-ac employees, and create better paths to non-academic careers. All we have to do is shake the fantasy that scholarship alone will save us, that everything practical can be absorbed through osmosis, that even admitting contingency is tantamount to failure. It’s time to get real about who we are and what we do.
TIM CARMODY has a PhD in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania (2009), where he also served as a postdoctoral fellow in 2009-2010. From 2007-2009, Tim was the graduate student representative on the MLA’s Nominating Committee, and member and co-chair of the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession. In 2010, he left the academy to become a full-time technology and culture journalist, joining Wired.com and writing for The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, Kottke.org, Lifehacker, and HiLobrow. He also blogs about ideas & journalism at Snarkmarket, pop culture at The Idler, and the history and future of reading at Bookfuturism.com. He specializes in crossover pieces — writing about cell phones or video game consoles for liberal arts audiences, or the shift from parchment to paper for e-reader enthusiasts, or what William Carlos Williams’s Paterson can teach us about cyborgs. Mostly, he likes to think really hard while talking as fast as he can.
A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues webpage.
Unable to attend the events in person? Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions.
All talks free and open to the public! Refreshments are often provided but attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.
Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).