[This week marks
this blog’s
9th anniversary! Nearly 2800 posts later, AmericanStudier has
become my most extended & enduring life’s work, and so this week I wanted
to share a handful of the reasons why I’ve kept it going for so long. Leading
up a special weekend list of other scholarly blogs that we should all be
reading—add your suggestions (including your own blog of course), please!]
On the most
overt and a couple subtler reasons why I started AmericanStudying.
I didn’t say
this explicitly in any of my first blog posts, but I remember quite clearly the
most proximate and very specific cause of my starting this blog in the first
week of November, 2010: that week’s historic midterm
elections. The strident opposition to Barack Obama’s presidency had been
building for more than a year by that time (indeed, since the first moments of
that presidency), both in terms of the rise of the Tea Party and through widespread,
telling phrases like “I
want my country back,” but it was those midterm elections which made clear
just how deep those sentiments ran. The “I want my country back” narrative,
along with the power of political and cultural voices like those of Glenn
Beck and his “Beck University,” exemplified for me how much those seemingly
contemporary political debates were driven by particular, and to my mind mythologized
and propagandistic, visions of American history, culture, and identity. I knew
I wanted to space to challenge those visions and write about such topics with
the nuance and thoughtfulness they deserved, and to that end decided to start
my second daily and first scholarly blog (my first, Ben’s Thought for the
Night, was a far more personal one in 2007-2008).
The absence of
such a public scholarly space in my life prior to the creation of
AmericanStudier reflects a second layer to the causes of my starting the blog,
although not one of which I was consciously aware at the time. I believe I had
already begun trying to place op eds here and there by that time, but entirely
haphazardly and without any particular expectation that I would be able to land
one (and certainly with no specific knowledge of how to do so). I was still a
couple years away from finding and joining the Scholars Strategy Network
(SSN), which represented a vital further step in my public scholarly career
(and on which more later in this week’s series). So in most ways in late 2010 I
still thought of my scholarly writing as existing within the traditional academic
spaces of peer-reviewed publications (both journal articles and book projects).
I knew that such spaces wouldn’t work for what I felt I needed to do in
response to the elections, though (not least because it takes literally years
to publish in most of those formats), and so starting a daily scholarly blog
comprised an attempt to create a new, more suitable such space.
My mention of
SSN also reflects one other and perhaps even less conscious factor in my creation
of AmericanStudier: a need for community. I was in my 6th year in
the Fitchburg State English Studies Department that fall, and I’m not
suggesting for a moment that FSU didn’t offer a variety of important and
meaningful professional communities; it most certainly did and still does 9
years later. But I think I did feel (again, without being able to put this into
words at the time) that those wonderful communities, from the department to the
classroom, the university as a whole to treasured friendships with colleagues, needed
to be complemented with another type, with connection to fellow scholars interested
in public engagement and public scholarship. Much of the story of my
professional life over these last 9 years (as the next few posts in this series
will trace) has been a continuing and deepening set of steps into such a public
scholarly community, one that I have found even more supportive and sustaining
and challenging and crucial than I could have imagined, and at the heart of
that ongoing and evolving process has been AmericanStudier.
Next anniversary
reflection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Other
scholarly blogs you’d suggest for the weekend list?
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