Hacking the Ph.D. Degree
Posted: May 27, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: #hackacad, academia, archives, grad school 2 Comments »How is/should/could digital technology change the Ph.D. program in the humanities?
Tanya Roth’s great Hacking the Academy post on “Hacking the Dissertation” pushed me to think through how one might hack graduate training. Roth has seen the light on the other side of ADB (all but dissertation) and she does a good job rethinking the dissertation process. I, however, have just passed through two years of course work and I am now staring down the barrel of four exam lists and comprehensive exams in October.
From this position in the middle of my own specific degree program in American Religious Cultures in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory, I want to offer a few modest suggestions for hacking the Ph.D. degree. For most of these suggestions I rely a lot on my own experiences in my own program/university so I’m hoping to hear more from people other places.
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Why I Started this Blog
Posted: May 27, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: academia, blogging, digital humanities Leave a comment »In short, Dan Cohen convinced me.
I came across an article-post by Cohen while exploring Hacking the Academy titled “Professors Start Your Blogs” that made me realize I wanted to be a part of what he was talking about.
In the post, Cohen counters all the reasons most people, including myself have not started blogs. I fully accept his argument and look forward to using this blog as a valuable piece of my graduate study and academic career.
Thanks to Cohen, I’m also considering posting a contribution to Hacking the Academy in the next day or two.
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‘Juggernaut’ in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 1878
Posted: May 12, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: American history, Conference Papers, Harper's Magazine, Hinduism, media, Religion Leave a comment »I gave the following paper at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion to the Religion and Popular Culture Group in November of 2008. This is the first in a series of old conference papers I’m putting on this blog in order to open the up to a larger audience. The full text of the article I discuss is available through the Making of America Collection by Cornell University here .
As many of you may know, this year’s AAR conference here in Chicago coincides with the 115th anniversary of the World’s Parliament of Religion held in this same city. And while there are probably papers being given this weekend championing the importance of the Parliament and what it meant for American religious history, I take a little different perspective. Contrary to the popular narrative that the Parliament served as America’s great introduction to Asian religions in America, my most current and ongoing research project has been to delve into sources prior to the World’s Parliament of Religion in order to build a history for Hinduism in America that precedes, and in some ways preconditions, the World Parliament of Religion.
Today, I would like to use one example from that research to explore two inter-related points regarding colonial knowledge, popular culture, and American religious history. First, as I have partly revealed, I challenge the “great event” history that locates the beginning of Hinduism in America with the World Parliament of Religion. Second, I explore how colonial knowledge seeps through leaks in the colonial project and finds its way into popular culture. I address these points through the example of an 1878 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine article entitled, “Juggernaut.” So, I will begin with a brief background of Harper’s New Monthly . Next, I will move through a close reading of the article, and finally, I will conclude with some thoughts as to how this article addresses these points.
