I have written so far two posts on the matter of supervising PhD students (see “A doctoral student abandons: At a loss what to advise…” of 2014, and “Supervising doctoral students: A complicated task” of 2015). Actually, I have published three more posts on doctoral students, but these two are most directly connected with the […]
Nine months ago I published the post “Depression and Anxiety: The Main Academic Keywords Today” and I return today to the topic out of a need to process a situation that is beginning to make me quite angry. I am going through a personal complicated period, with immediate material causes that are slowly sorting […]
You may have noticed that newspapers have started carrying audio versions of a selection of articles, perhaps in some cases of all their articles. I first noticed this in La Vanguardia, which offers the audio version only to its subscribers, considering it a premium service. Obviously, the audio versions are not uploaded for the benefit […]
I’m returning to James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse, which I discussed two posts ago, this time to reflect on the strategies required to face such a long read for academic purposes. Whereas mainstream and literary novels are usually published as stand-alone volumes, series abound in genre fiction. They are sometimes bound by the presence […]
I’ve been reading these days a delicious book edited by non-fiction guru Lee Gutkind, What I Didn’t Know: True Stories of Becoming a Teacher, and I’m borrowing his title for my post (you can take a peek at the book on Google Books). This lovely volume gathers together twenty brief memoirs by a variety of […]
Next semester I will teaching an MA subject on popular music and masculinity as a sort of sequel to the BA course I taught last year which led to the publication of the collective e-book by the students Songs of Empowerment: Women in 21st Century Popular Music (downloadable for free). I wrote a post presenting […]
I re-read the posts I wrote in early September 2020 and 2021, at the beginning of the academic year, and bad as the situation was then because of the widespread presence of Covid-19, they even sound optimistic in comparison to what lies ahead. Talking yesterday with my seventeen-year-old niece, who starts next week her studies […]
Releí los posts que escribí a principios de septiembre de 2020 y 2021, al inicio del curso académico, y por muy mala que fuera la situación entonces por la presencia generalizada del Covid-19, incluso suenan optimistas en comparación con lo que se avecina. Hablando ayer con mi sobrina de diecisiete años, que comienza la próxima […]
I have an immensely talented doctoral student from Australia, and when I asked her whether she has considered applying for a job at a university back home, I got all confused because she started telling me that fees have gone up dramatically, and this makes things complicated. Sure, I replied, but I meant applying for […]
In a recent teachers’ meeting the pressing issue of students’ low attendance this last semester came up. I have not been teaching but my colleagues tell me less than 50% of the students have attended classes, which is even lower than what I saw in the first semester, when we were all still wearing facemasks […]