In my last post I cited the doctoral dissertation by Leonardo Sánchez Ferrer, currently of the Universidad de Burgos, Políticas de reforma universitaria en España: 1983-1993 (1996). I downloaded it to take a quick look, and ended up devouring it, given its informative, reader-friendly tone. PhD dissertations are not a genre I tend to read […]
I’ve had the honour of being a guest speaker at the seventh doctoral seminar that AEDEAN (Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-norteamericanos) has organized at the Universidad de Cantabria, in Santander. This has been held less than one month after the conference organized by ASYRAS (Association of Young Researchers on Anglophone Studies), at the University of […]
The “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” also known informally as ‘The Vanderbilt Report’ was published online by said university on June 5. It has created quite a stir, which is not surprising considering it is addressed “to university chancellors and presidents” all over the USA. […]
Somewhat rashly, I told my last-year BA students that if any was interested in an academic career they were welcome to discuss their future plans with me. The first email message I have received indicates that they are not necessarily familiar with the concept ‘academic career’, so this post is intended as a beginners’ introduction […]
My post refers today to L’absentisme a les aules universitàries de la UAB: per què val la pena anar a classe [Absenteeism in UAB’s university classrooms: why attending classes is worthwhile], a report coordinated by José Luis Muñoz Moreno and Edelmira Badillo Jiménez, and authored by Patricia Olmos Rueda and Dolors Márquez Cebrián. You can […]
Today’s post is partly inspired by Ana Bravo-Moreno and Francisco Javier Ogáyar-Marín edited collection Los males de la academia: Abuso de poder, endogamia, acoso, corrupción y otras violencias (Peter Lang, 2026), which can be downloaded for free here. This is a necessary book to animate a conversation carried so far discreetly away from public attention, […]
So that you know, according to the current regulations of my university, and following Catalan legislation, a full-time teacher (24 ECTS) is supposed to devote 640 yearly hours to teaching, out of the 1640 we’re supposed to work annually. Actually, if I multiply the 215 working days of the current academic year 2025-26 by 7,5 […]
I’m writing today out of stubbornness, because if I let a third blank week go by I fear that I might give up entirely this blog. I’m procrastinating my proper academic writing (an article and a book chapter have been waiting for too long), and I worry that if I also delay writing yet another […]
Today I’m using my post as an excuse to read an article titled “Against the Uncritical Adoption of ‘AI’ Technologies in Academia” by Olivia Guest and 18 other authors based mostly in the Netherlands. This text can be found in a pre-print repository (https://philarchive.org/rec/GUEATU) where it was filed on 7 September of the current year. […]
Sooo….. I asked ChatGPT after failing to find the information on Google about two matters. Here we go… I wrote: “I have read an academic book by Christopher Gillie called Characters in English Literature (1965), which has no bibliography. When did it become compulsory for academic books to have a bibliography or a works cited […]