Stratofanatic's Emporium

Rough day yesterday over here at the University of Arizona. The numbers are still in flux, but non-renewal letters went out to around 36 of our 54 faculty in the English Department's Writing Program. All of us were lecturers, all contingent labor. Since fourteen of the people retained were on multi-year contracts (a right instituted just two years ago for promoted faculty), this means that only four out of 38 faculty on the chopping block didn't receive a non-renewal letter. Luckily, I was one of them . . . but only because I teach a really popular online Gen. Ed. course on Monsters, Ghosts, and Aliens whose budget comes from UA online rather than our Writing Program. If enrollment projections increase by the end of the summer, a few of our non-renewed faculty might get offers. But still, not many. Although we had been expecting the worst for weeks, the reality of the layoffs is still a sucker-punch to the gut. EDIT on 6-3-2020 -- the final tally is on: 29 of 54 lecturers w...

So, I've been doing a lot of work recently on Poul Anderson as part of my R. D. Mullen Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from Science Fiction Studies . Basically, besides Tolkien, Poul Anderson is probably the most important SFF writer of the 20th-century alliterative revival. I know he grew up bilingual (English and Danish), and he did translations from Old Norse . . . but when and where, exactly, did he ever learn Old Norse? Did he take it in a college class, or did he learn it entirely on his own? So after doing some digging around, it finally occurred to me -- maybe I could just ask the University of Minnesota for his college transcripts. Turns out, I can  do that . . . so I did. And now I'm looking at Poul Anderson's transcripts. A number of things leap out at me. First, they misspell his name Paul Anderson. This is funny, not only because a transcript is an official document, but because the draft programmer for ICFA made the same spelling mistake when he p...

As a scholar, of course I'm always curious if someone cites my work. I mean, I do work rather hard on my academic articles, so it's always nice to know that they're -- well, maybe not having an effect -- but at least being read . Since I've only been active a few years, there's not been much chance for anything of mine to have really infiltrated intellectual discourse, but I just checked my Google Scholar citations. . . .and one of them left me scratching my head. The article in question is " Ghostbusters is For Boys: Understanding Geek Masculinity’s Role in the Alt-right " for the journal Communication Culture & Critique . It's a communications journal, obviously, in APA style, and my name appears in the lit review section. Here is the citation: This [alt-right] discourse becomes even more ludicrous when employed in the service of a fandom, as an examination of the comments on the Ghostbusters trailer demonstrates (Koh, 2009; Wise, 2016). [on ...

So, a little over a week ago I blogged about finding a published version of an skaldic poem by J.R.R. Tolkien, which appeared in a article on the dróttkvætt form by Roberta Frank, a well-known medievalist from Yale. Since I'd never heard of any such poems by Tolkien, naturally I was curious, so I contacted Frank, who couldn't have been friendlier or more helpful. Since the Tolkien Estate would still hold the copyright for those poems (even if they weren't previously aware of the poems' existence), I told Frank that I'd dig a little deeper into who knew about these mysterious skaldic verses. Well, the search ended up being rather quick. Before I contacted the Tolkien Estate, I first contacted another Tolkienist, Douglas A. Anderson, who runs the Tolkien and Fantasy blog. Well, he keeps insanely thorough notes . . . and he told me that the three skaldic poems in question were known to the Estate and listed within Tolkien's unpublished papers. Intriguingly, the ...