[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 three of the
many ways (along with those I highlighted in yesterday’s post, and those to
which the rest of the week’s posts will connect) I’ve benefitted immeasurably
from my work on AmericanStudier.
1)
Experimentation: As I mentioned yesterday, when
I started the blog most if not all of my scholarly writing existed within the traditional
peer-reviewed formats. Besides the frustratingly long time-lag between writing
and publication, another limitation of those formats (which, to be clear, I
still value and continue to work in alongside blogging and other forms) is that
they require both the writing and the ideas to be entirely developed (indeed,
as close to perfect as we flawed humans can produce) by the time of submission.
Whereas in this space, I’ve found the opportunity and freedom to write about
things I’ve just begun to consider, to explore topics and texts about which I’ve
just begun learning, to share partial and preliminary and provisional ideas, to,
in a word, experiment.
2)
Books: I genuinely had no idea that this would
be the case when I began blogging (nor for at least a year or so thereafter),
but it turns out that such experimentation isn’t just a complement to more traditional
academic formats—it can also become a starting point for work in those formats.
I can’t remember if the final work on my second book, which
came out in the summer of 2011, was influenced at all by the blog, although it
may well have been. But I know for sure that each of my
last three books
has started quite overtly with posts and ideas here (among other influences of
course, but with this space as a consistent and crucial one). When I talk up
the benefits of scholarly blogging, as I did earlier this fall at the annual Teaching
at Teaching-Intensive Institutions conference, I make very clear that it’s
not only not a distraction from our other scholarly writing and work—it’s also
and especially a pipeline to that work!
3)
A Consistent Scholarly Identity: The title of my
TTII talk was “Maintaining a Scholarly Identity on a 4/4 Load,” and that’s
perhaps been the most beneficial blogging benefit of all. During semesters and
academic years at a teaching-intensive institution, it’s nearly impossible to
do any long-form scholarly writing; that’s what breaks and summers are for. But
when we get to those times, it can feel like it takes a long time (far too
long, indeed) to get back into a scholarly writing headspace. And a daily
scholarly blog (or one on whatever schedule works for you, although I do
recommend some sort of a schedule) fights that problem head-on, making our
scholarly writing and work part of our life throughout the semesters and years.
Even though I no longer write the blog each day (writing and scheduling in
bunches), I get to see it, read it, share it each day, and that makes my
scholarly writing and identity part of my daily life in an incredibly beneficial
way.
Next anniversary
reflection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Other
scholarly blogs you’d suggest for the weekend list?
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