Always a question grad students have to answer to their non-academic kin, what are you doing with your life? In the end, an academic answer won’t do, of course, but it will do to rehearse one amongst us, in the silence of our shops. Against the idea of the eternal, there is the idea that [...]

That wonderful compliment was originally meant as an insult. I earned the soubriquet a few years ago for my penchant for reducing reducible jargon to sentences your average bloke could understand. “It is more complex than that,” always seemed to follow these famous condensations, as if all the ornament that surrounds an idea necessarily reflects [...]

The first time I realized I was the only Hispanic graduate student in the English Department at the University of Virginia was the only time I thought it was funny. I remember being in the chair’s office —Michael Levenson at the time— when I let the fact out as a joke to break the ice. [...]