Regular visitors to this site . . . well . . . if such creatures exist, they probably need to get a life. At best, my blogging habits have always followed feast-or-famine cycles. And so regular visits — especially over the past year or so — would not have been a worthy use of most […]
Telling You What You Don’t Want to Hear
Last month, I got to experience — briefly, but enjoyably — my first WorldCon in Glasgow. This opportunity came my way courtesy of a kick-ass panel organized by Rachel van der Merwe, where she, Barbara Postema, and Greg Fuller provided the kick-ass bits, and I provided the short riff on Mrs., Davis I’ve shared below. […]
Another semester, another syllabus…
. . . or two. Fresh editions of “Media, Race, and Identity” and “New Telecommunication Media” (no, I haven’t done anything to get that outmoded title officially changed since last semester). As ever, there are some changes from previous iterations, though most of those are minor. My biggest regret is that I couldn’t quite find […]
Unfixing the race
Twenty years or so ago, I tried to write a book about multiracial identity and media called Mixed Messages. For a variety of reasons, the book never happened. But one piece of the project did wind up in print as a journal article on Eminem . . . and there was a lecture that went […]
The problem with happy endings
Lots of broken patterns this time. This week’s post comes “early”: I’ve fallen into a Saturday posting rhythm, but it’s only Thursday, and I’m back at it. And the content isn’t some dusty old conference paper unearthed from back in the day, but a (Zoom) talk I gave just yesterday (so the digital ink is […]
Back in the saddle
The “spring” semester starts up for us again on Tuesday, though spring itself is still a long way away. And, if recent years are any indication, the weather won’t feel like proper spring until somewhere close to finals week. Maybe not even then. Still. It’s a new semester. There are updated syllabi (“Freedom of Speech” […]
Oakland 2006
One of the recurring quirks of (and gripes about) academic conferences has to do with scheduling. To be sure, conference organizers have it rough in this regard, since they’re pretty much guaranteed to make someone unhappy with whatever they do. No one, after all, wants to be on the first morning panel on the final […]
Found in Translation
Last week, I said I’d share the other thing I did at the shoulda-been-2020-but-there-was-a-pandemic-so-it-was-2022-instead “Crossroads in Cultural Studies” conference. And so here it is. The “Giulia” who gets mentioned is my co-panelist, Giulia Pelillo-Hestermeyer, who only lacks a full name in my talk because she had spoken immediately before me, and the live audience presumably […]
Suspicious Minds
1997 was the 20th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. It was also the year after Elvis After Elvis was published. And so I found myself talking about Elvis a lot that year. In August, I gave one version of the talk below in Memphis, at the third (and also, I think, the last) Annual International […]
Minneapolis 2020
Everyone has a crazy pandemic story (or three). Mine found me traveling to Heidelberg for a 12-day working vacation (part spring break, part set-up for a course I was hoping to co-teach in Heidelberg that summer) in March 2020, and then getting “stuck” there for 9 months. The same travel restrictions that kept me from […]