For the next few weeks, I need to take a leave of absence from my blog posting duties. So I would like to line up some guest posts to run on Saturdays from now until the end of June.
Why the leave of absence?
I will be taking my qualifying exams.
At my school this is a month-long process — three written exams, a week apart, followed by a two-hour oral defense. I am scheduled to start the written portion of the exams during the first week of June. If I survive that phase of the ordeal, then during the last week of June I will be afforded an opportunity to defend myself as a scholar and historian whom the academy would not be ashamed to call one of its own.
As the reader might guess, I have some thoughts (and perhaps an opinion or two) about this process, but for the time being I will keep those to myself. Now, I can’t promise that I won’t vent on some forum or another, but it won’t be here. I think.
Instead, I simply want to thank this marvelous community of writers and readers for the role that all of you have played in helping me to become such an intellectual historian as I am. I don’t think I would be an intellectual historian at all if it weren’t for this blog community. You take the credit; I’ll take the blame.
And I’ll take volunteers to write some guest posts, to run on Saturdays between now and the end of June. My magnificent colleague Ben Alpers, our blog editor, has agreed to handle the logistics of running the posts.
If you would like to write a guest post, please email me in the next couple of days (Lora [DOT] Burnett [AT] utdallas [DOT] edu). I will put together a schedule and send it to you and to Ben, and you can contact him directly when you are ready to submit your post.
I am ready for these tests. Oh, I’m not ready to take them; I’m just ready for them to be over. If I make it through, I’ll be playing Van Morrison’s “Brand New Day” on loop for at least a week after.
In the meantime, training days are over. Now I must suit up for battle, so that I am able to stand my ground and, after I have done everything, to stand.
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Good luck! Knock ’em dead.
LD: If there were ever a graduate student prepared for comps, it’s you. Break a leg!
I’m saying congratulations already because I know you will do so well!
Thanks for the encouragement. I am generally a confident person, but I am not confident about these exams.
Thanks also to the reader who emailed and volunteered to write a guest post.
A guest post can be on any subject or issue connected with U.S. intellectual history broadly construed. Posts are (generally) short — around 1200 words would be plenty.
And I should remind our readers that if you are interested in writing a guest post, you can always contact any of the regular bloggers on the roster (link in sidebar). We usually check with each other about when we might run a guest post, so I’m sure if my colleagues don’t have a guest post lined up for their own day, they’ll be able to post it on a Saturday until we return to our regularly scheduled programming.
Thanks again to yet another guest blogger who has agreed to step up and help us keep offering regular new content to our growing readership.
My term as Publications Committee chair ends on May 31, and my exams don’t start until the first week of June. So between now and then, if anyone has questions / issues / problems with posting to / commenting on the blog, please feel free to contact me.
I’m doing a lot of stressful prep work, but not so much that I can’t do my small part to keep the lights on in this wonderful virtual community of the like-minded and the good-hearted. So if anybody needs anything blog-related between now and the end of May, and you can’t reach our editor, send your requests my way and I’ll see to them as well as I can.
LD youare so full of yourself it isn’t funny. You keep tripping on your ego. Do us all a favor and stop blogging. No one cares for your illogical rants. You’ve got problems that you need to sort out first.
Not sure about the source of this hostility. But there’s no place for it at this blog.
Seriously. Who are you? Lay off.
Good Luck on your comps L.D. and thanks for all of your wonderful work as PC chair!
Wouldn’t trade my colleagues here for the world. You guys are boss.
But the dude has a point — nobody likes my illogical rants.
My logical rants, on the other hand, seem to go over okay.