Independent Scholars Meet the World

Independent Scholars Meet the World

Author: Christine Caccipuoti

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2020-10-16

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0700629912

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For too long graduate school was viewed solely as a pipeline to teaching positions at colleges and universities. As MAs and PhDs proliferate and opportunities in the academy narrow, this timely book reminds us that the academy is only one of many venues for satisfying and successful scholarly endeavor. The contributors to Independent Scholars Meet the World represent a spectrum of graduate school experiences, from leaving midprogram to completing an MA or PhD. They include those who sought nontraditional paths and others who started in the familiar professorial direction only to change course. Ultimately, they are independent scholars—contributing to their fields but working outside the academy. Their stories illustrate the variety of options that exist beyond the university setting, from museum education and high school teaching to newer professions like podcasting and creating historical coloring books. These scholars impart advice about encountering difficulties, overcoming challenges, and learning to adapt to changing circumstances. All have something to share that the graduating scholar and those who guide them ought to hear about—cultivating networks; viewing departure from familiar terrain as an option, not a failure; and understanding the real value that an independent scholar brings to any number of situations. Perhaps the most important lesson this book offers is for those steeped in the belief that the only “right” way to be a scholar is as a tenured professor, and how, therefore, to embrace the label independent scholar The contributors to Independent Scholars Meet the World offer the advice and encouragement they wish they’d received when heading into uncharted postgraduate territory. They demonstrate that success awaits the determined and resourceful scholar pursuing a different path towards “expanded-ac.”


Chasing Chickens

Chasing Chickens

Author: Rachel Neff

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2019-05-08

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 0700627936

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So, you have your PhD, the academic world’s your oyster, but teaching jobs, it turns out, are as rare as pearls. Take it from someone who’s been there: your disappointment, approached from a different angle, becomes opportunity. Marshaling hard-earned wisdom tempered with a gentle wit, Rachel Neff brings her own experiences to bear on the problems facing so many frustrated exiles from the groves of academe: how to turn “This wasn’t the plan!” into “Why not?” Fully expecting to be Doctor or Professor Neff someday, Neff instead found herself in the company of the 66 percent of doctoral graduates—more than 35,000 a year—who cannot find a full-time, tenure-track teaching job. In Chasing Chickens, she retraces the steps that took her from her moment of reckoning (aka “failure”) to a new way of seeing and grasping success. Each chapter in her pilgrim’s progress along an unlikely career path—whether revealing how she ended up chasing chickens on New Year’s Eve or explaining what happens when a PhD becomes an executive assistant (The Devil Wears Prada with a dash of Portland plaid? Yes, please!)—comes with the benefit of hindsight, lessons as practical as they are entertaining. How to face a fear of “No”; how to see the bigger picture; how to find your next career, ace an interview, and stick the landing: with every step, Neff takes the uncertainty and stress out of reinventing yourself, suggests fresh approaches along new directions, and provides the tools for finding, and making, your own way. Finally, as if enlightenment, guidance, and the occasional moment of hilarity weren’t enough, her book offers every academic itinerant the chance to one day look back and say: “At least I didn’t have to chase chickens.”


Scholarship Reconsidered

Scholarship Reconsidered

Author: Ernest L. Boyer

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1119005868

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Shifting faculty roles in a changing landscape Ernest L. Boyer's landmark book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate challenged the publish-or-perish status quo that dominated the academic landscape for generations. His powerful and enduring argument for a new approach to faculty roles and rewards continues to play a significant part of the national conversation on scholarship in the academy. Though steeped in tradition, the role of faculty in the academic world has shifted significantly in recent decades. The rise of the non-tenure-track class of professors is well documented. If the historic rule of promotion and tenure is waning, what role can scholarship play in a fragmented, unbundled academy? Boyer offers a still much-needed approach. He calls for a broadened view of scholarship, audaciously refocusing its gaze from the tenure file and to a wider community. This expanded edition offers, in addition to the original text, a critical introduction that explores the impact of Boyer's views, a call to action for applying Boyer's message to the changing nature of faculty work, and a discussion guide to help readers start a new conversation about how Scholarship Reconsidered applies today.


Spies and Scholars

Spies and Scholars

Author: Gregory Afinogenov

Publisher: Belknap Press

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0674241851

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A Financial Times Best Book of the Year The untold story of how Russian espionage in imperial China shaped the emergence of the Russian Empire as a global power. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire made concerted efforts to collect information about China. It bribed Chinese porcelain-makers to give up trade secrets, sent Buddhist monks to Mongolia on intelligence-gathering missions, and trained students at its Orthodox mission in Beijing to spy on their hosts. From diplomatic offices to guard posts on the Chinese frontier, Russians were producing knowledge everywhere, not only at elite institutions like the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. But that information was secret, not destined for wide circulation. Gregory Afinogenov distinguishes between the kinds of knowledge Russia sought over the years and argues that they changed with the shifting aims of the state and its perceived place in the world. In the seventeenth century, Russian bureaucrats were focused on China and the forbidding Siberian frontier. They relied more on spies, including Jesuit scholars stationed in China. In the early nineteenth century, the geopolitical challenge shifted to Europe: rivalry with Britain drove the Russians to stake their prestige on public-facing intellectual work, and knowledge of the East was embedded in the academy. None of these institutional configurations was especially effective in delivering strategic or commercial advantages. But various knowledge regimes did have their consequences. Knowledge filtered through Russian espionage and publication found its way to Europe, informing the encounter between China and Western empires. Based on extensive archival research in Russia and beyond, Spies and Scholars breaks down long-accepted assumptions about the connection between knowledge regimes and imperial power and excavates an intellectual legacy largely neglected by historians.


Saving Yellowstone

Saving Yellowstone

Author: Megan Kate Nelson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2023-04-25

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1982141352

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From historian and critically acclaimed author of The Three-Cornered War comes the captivating story of how Yellowstone became the world’s first national park in the years after the Civil War, offering “a fresh, provocative study…departing from well-trodden narratives about conservation and public recreation” (Booklist, starred review). Each year nearly four million people visit Yellowstone National Park—one of the most popular of all national parks—but few know the fascinating and complex historical context in which it was established. In late July 1871, the geologist-explorer Ferdinand Hayden led a team of scientists through a narrow canyon into Yellowstone Basin, entering one of the last unmapped places in the country. The survey’s discoveries led to the passage of the Yellowstone Act in 1872, which created the first national park in the world. Now, author Megan Kate Nelson examines the larger context of this American moment, illuminating Hayden’s survey as a national project meant to give Americans a sense of achievement and unity in the wake of a destructive civil war. Saving Yellowstone follows Hayden and two other protagonists in pursuit of their own agendas: Sitting Bull, a Lakota leader who asserted his peoples’ claim to their homelands, and financier Jay Cooke, who wanted to secure his national reputation by building the Northern Pacific Railroad through the Great Northwest. Hayden, Cooke, and Sitting Bull staked their claims to Yellowstone at a critical moment in Reconstruction, when the Ulysses S. Grant Administration and the 42nd Congress were testing the reach and the purpose of federal power across the nation. “A readable and unfailingly interesting look at a slice of Western history from a novel point of view” (Kirkus Reviews), Saving Yellowstone reveals how Yellowstone became both a subject of fascination and a metaphor for the nation during the Reconstruction era. This “land of wonders” was both beautiful and terrible, fragile and powerful. And what lay beneath the surface there was always threatening to explode.


Colleges That Change Lives

Colleges That Change Lives

Author: Loren Pope

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2006-07-25

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 1101221348

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Prospective college students and their parents have been relying on Loren Pope's expertise since 1995, when he published the first edition of this indispensable guide. This new edition profiles 41 colleges—all of which outdo the Ivies and research universities in producing performers, not only among A students but also among those who get Bs and Cs. Contents include: Evaluations of each school's program and "personality" Candid assessments by students, professors, and deans Information on the progress of graduates This new edition not only revisits schools listed in previous volumes to give readers a comprehensive assessment, it also addresses such issues as homeschooling, learning disabilities, and single-sex education.


Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me

Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Publisher: One World

Published: 2015-07-14

Total Pages: 163

ISBN-13: 0679645985

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.


Hubert Harrison

Hubert Harrison

Author: Jeffrey Babcock Perry

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 636

ISBN-13: 9780231139106

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This first full-length biography of Harrison offers a portrait of a man ahead of his time in synthesizing race and class struggles in the U.S. and a leading influence on better known activists from Marcus Garvey to A. Philip Randolph. Harrison emigrated from St. Croix in 1883 and went on to become a foremost organizer for the Socialist Party in New York, the editor of the Negro World, and founder and leader of the World War I-era New Negro movement. Harrison s enormous political and intellectual appetites were channeled into his work as an orator, writer, political activist, and critic. He was an avid bibliophile, reportedly the first regular black book reviewer, who helped to develop the public library in Harlem into an international center for research on black culture. But Harrison was a freelancer so candid in his criticism of the establishment-black and white-that he had few allies or people interested in protecting his legacy. Historian Perry s detailed research brings to life a transformative figure who has been little recognized for his contributions to progressive race and class politics. Copyright Booklist Reviews 2008.


The Three Questions

The Three Questions

Author: graf Leo Tolstoy

Publisher: Creative Company

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 32

ISBN-13: 9780871919625

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A king visits a hermit to gain answers to three important questions.


The Formation of Scholars

The Formation of Scholars

Author: George E. Walker

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2012-06-19

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1118428617

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This groundbreaking book explores the current state of doctoral education in the United States and offers a plan for increasing the effectiveness of doctoral education. Programs must grapple with questions of purpose. The authors examine practices and elements of doctoral programs and show how they can be made more powerful by relying on principles of progressive development, integration, and collaboration. They challenge the traditional apprenticeship model and offer an alternative in which students learn while apprenticing with several faculty members. The authors persuasively argue that creating intellectual community is essential for high-quality graduate education in every department. Knowledge-centered, multigenerational communities foster the development of new ideas and encourage intellectual risk taking.