September 24-29,2012: Grad Student Crowd-Sourced Post Extraordinaire!

On Friday, September 28^th, my friend and grad school colleague Jeff Renye defends his PhD dissertation, “Panic at the British Borderlands: The Great God Pan, Victorian Sexuality, and Sacred Space in the Works of Arthur Machen.” In honor of that occasion, I thought I’d open up this week’s blog as a crowd-sourced post extraordinaire, one dedicated to the great work being done by graduate students (in every discipline and field) around the country and the world.

So … please share in the comments below! If you’re a grad student yourself, I’d love to hear a bit about what you’re working on, whether for a dissertation, a Master’s thesis, or in any other aspect of your work. If you’re a faculty member who has worked or is working with grad students, please feel free to highlight aspects of their work. If you’re just friends with such a grad student, have one in your family, or otherwise know of his or her work and think it’s worth sharing (and I’m sure it is!), please feel equally free to do so. Bottom line, I’d really love for this to be a space where we can hear and talk about the great work being done by graduate students, to honor Jeff’s work and add all these voices and ideas to the conversation—so please share some of that work, if you would. Thanks!

September recap on Sunday, next series next week,

Ben

PS. Here’s a quote Jeff has highlighted, to get the ball rolling: “But no one could look into the alchemical writings of the Middle Ages and deny them the name of literature. Alchemy, in spite of all confident pronouncements on the subject, remains still a mystery, the very nature and object of the quest are unknown. The baser alchemists – there were quacks and impostors and dupes then as now – no doubt sought or pretended to seek some method of making gold artificially, but the sages, those who practiced the true spagyric art, were engaged in some infinitely more mysterious adventure...initiated in the perfect mysterious."—Arthur Machen, "The Literature of Occultism," 1899.

9/24-9/29 Memory Day nominees: For each day’s nominee, please see the Memory Day Calendar!