Monday, September 4, 2017

Fall 2017 update

a plane sighting in New Orleans

I'm back in New Orleans, and back in the classroom with my Loyola students. This semester I'm teaching an Environmental Theory seminar for juniors and seniors, and two first-year seminars on air travel. It's been something of a jolt, after having been away from campus for a year—but it's good work and I'm grateful to have such energetic students and dedicated colleagues. As I transition back into teaching, and as I think about the unique demands of advising and mentoring students in these strange times, I am trying to work this material into my next book The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth. Here are some recent writings, and a few of these pieces are wending their way into The Work of Literature:

On ticks, for The Philosophical Salon.

On morel mushrooms, at Guernica.

On finding and fighting words after last year's election, with Stewart Sinclair for Avidly.

On the difficulties scholars have writing for broad audiences, with Ian Bogost for Inside Higher Ed.

On humanities at the airport, for Inside Higher Ed.

On Sarah Manguso's 300 Arguments, for 3:AM Magazine.

On ecological disorientation in Don DeLillo's Zero K and in various airline ads, for ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature & Environment.

On the importance of sabbaticals, for Inside Higher Ed.

"Wait," a chapter for the book Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking.

"Air Force One: Popular (Non)Fiction in Flight," in the book Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings.

Finally, my new book Airportness releases this month! Here's one of the early cover designs for the book that we almost ended up using, but we couldn't track down the artist or gallery to acquire permission:


The image on that cover is part of an artwork from 2005 by Ho-Yeol Ryu, and which periodically goes viral online. I like this image a lot, but I also love the final version of my book's cover, as it better reflects the pensive mood and outward-looking subject positions that frame the book:



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