Some Suggestions for Improving the Humanities Dissertation and Defence at McGill

…or at least the dissertation in Communication Studies. How do you improve the dissertation and the defence?  A few weeks back, the faculty members in Communication Studies at McGill met to talk about the graduate curriculum and these topics came up.  But some changes we would like to make would be impossible in the current …

Day 2: Fun and Games With Microsieverts

So we’re getting close to 48 hours of radioactivity here at chez Berri.Yesterday I was up and down and today feels more of the same. I’m pretty tired (though I may in fact, just be tired) and so have slept a fair amount. I get headaches from time to time. My mouth and eyes are dry. …

“With over a hundred millicuries, there’s no fun and games”

The tech had just invited a resident to watch me taking my dose of radioactive iodine. I remarked that I was eager to photograph the pill. That wasn’t allowed–once the pill was out, it was going into me. No fun and games. We walked into a small room with a list of regulations on the …

Winter Break Reading

Looking back over the last six months of so, I have spent relatively little time reading completed books that weren’t either for teaching or directly related to something I was writing, or for something like a review of a tenure dossier.  Of course, I read lots of incompleted books: dissertations, drafts of books, books being …

Feature or Bug? Ebooks roll out later

Authors–especially academic authors–should always be happy when people want to read their work, and flattered by desire for access. And so please consider me flattered: thanks for reading and thanks for caring enough to tweet about it. But since Steven Shaviro’s comment mirrored my own confusion about a month ago (and has been making the …