Academic Life – Page 2 – Miriam Posner's Blog

August 13, 2011May 26, 2013

So, you’re moving to New Haven: Do you need a car? (Answer: No.)

(This is my third post about moving to New Haven. I’ve also written about where to live and what to do. I wish you the very best of luck on your move, but I regret that I don’t have time to answer individual questions about your situation.)

If there’s one thing that everyone knows about me, it’s this: I give the people what they want. And the people, judging by my Google Analytics, want to know whether you need a car as a grad student in New Haven. So here you go: No, you don’t, and you probably shouldn’t have one, either.

Disclaimer: I had a car in New Haven and you’d pry it from my cold, dead hands. But that’s because I’m a) lazy, b) from California, and c) prone to making bad decisions about the short-term/long-term benefits of things. Even I could tell, as I begged rides to the car-impound lot at two in the morning, that if I were smart, I would give up on the whole having-a-car thing.

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July 19, 2011July 19, 2011

Thoughts on the Scholarly Communication Institute

Last week I was really fortunate to attend the Scholarly Communication Institute 9 at the University of Virginia. This was the final in an annual series of meetings designed to provoke discussion (and action) about the way scholarship is produced, consumed, and disseminated.

The roster of attendees was impressive, and I was decidedly junior. Consequently, I spent a lot of time listening (though I happily made some presumptuous statements when invited).

I sort of saw my role there as attempting to represent the interests of those of us in lower-ranking, sometimes tenuous, academic positions: the postdocs and grad students of the world.

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May 16, 2011July 4, 2011

Yale’s film studies “canon”: the readings

My desk in the wake of oral exams — This is what my desk looked like in the wake of my oral exams, back in 2006

Long, long ago, I posted the the filmography from the “canon” exam that Yale’s Film Studies Ph.D. program administers to all of its graduating students. I promised to post the readings, too, and then promptly forgot. Anyway, here they are, in case you’re interested in some light reading. Apologies for the formatting errors; I didn’t have the wherewithal to clean this list up.

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March 7, 2011March 7, 2011

Opposite sides of the cafetorium: notes from a THATCamp Southeast session on librarian-scholar collaboration

"Will You Go to the Dance with Me?" by wireheadinc

I attended a session at THATCamp Southeast (which Shawn Averkamp proposed) on ways to promote collaboration between librarians and scholars (a subject close to my heart). We took notes together using a collaborative Google doc, and here’s my attempt to summarize.

“We get paid to be interrupted!”

The academics in the room started out by saying that they weren’t sure when it was appropriate to ask for assistance from a librarian. At what point, they wondered, are we impinging on the librarian’s time? Librarians responded that it sounded as though they needed to give out better information about the specific services librarians offer, like research interviews. In general, they said, they welcome any kind of consultation. “We get paid to be interrupted!” one librarian said.

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August 21, 2010May 26, 2013

So, you’re moving to New Haven: what to do

Surprisingly, this is one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written. I wish you the very best of luck on your move, but I regret that I don’t have time to answer individual questions about your situation.

(This is Part II in a series of posts about living in New Haven. Look for more, unless I get tired of doing them.)

I first moved to New Haven from the Bay Area, and well do I remember driving up and down Dixwell and Whalley, wondering where the hell the kids were in this town. There are plenty of young adults, don’t get me wrong, but the whole blue-blazered, drinking-at-Mory’s thing was not my scene (and still, thankfully, is not). I must tell you, New Haven Transplant, that there is a lot of that in your new home. And maybe you’re into that! In which case, go nuts!

For the rest of us, though, there are a few hidden gems, and you should find them so you don’t become bitter and angry.

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August 5, 2010December 30, 2010

How to ask questions at academic presentations without being a jerk

OK, let me just start by saying that I have been That Guy (in a gender-neutral sense) many, many times. You know what I mean? The one who asks a question that makes you surreptitiously elbow the person next to you or doodle “WTF?” on your notepad. It’s hard! There are so many ways to be obnoxious at an academic presentation! Especially for those of us with egos (not me, of course — I’m just being helpful), the temptation to grandstand can be overwhelming.

Thus! I am compiling this list of dos and don’ts so that I, more than anyone else, will remember to do them and don’t them. Are there some I’m missing?

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May 23, 2010February 28, 2014

So, you’re moving to New Haven: where to live

Surprisingly, this is one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written. I wish you the very best of luck on your move, but I regret that I don’t have time to answer individual questions about your situation.

Andy and I are in the middle of orchestrating our big move to Atlanta, and all the excitement is reminding me of when Andy and I first moved out to New Haven. It was kind of hard to get a handle on where to live and what to do, even though Yale has some good resources. But here is part one in a multipart (i.e., until I get tired of doing it) series of some information I wish I’d had. (Update: here’s a second post, on what you should do once you get to The Have.)

This is assuming you’re not living in the grad student dorms, which, to be honest, I think is a little weird. Unless you’re coming from far away and can’t apartment-hunt. I guess it can be cheaper, too, depending on which dorm you choose.

Neighborhood boundaries (PDF warning!)

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February 10, 2010May 16, 2011

Yale’s Film Studies “canon”

Yale’s Film Studies program is old-school in certain ways, and one of those ways is that we have an exam at the end of our Ph.D. program to test our knowledge of various essential films and film scholarship. We students have nicknamed it the “canon exam,” although it seems as though the professors avoid calling it that.

I was remembering how, the summer before I started grad school, I wondered what films I should watch to make myself conversant with other film students. I think I just ended up checking out every Criterion Collection movie I could find.

I thought you might be interested to see what we’re drilled on, and I don’t think the canon exam is a private affair (quite the opposite, actually, since it exists in part to assure prospective employers that we’ll be up to speed on the canon). So I’m posting the film list below. I’ll post the reading list later. [Update: here’s the reading list.]

As to the politics of a “canon,” or the wisdom of these particular choices … well, I’ll save that for another post. Suffice it to say that I don’t think this is a bad list, though it’s missing a lot of my favorite movies. (And the movies it does contain are so somber!)

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January 13, 2010

A conference on exhibition at Yale

I guess it must be conference season. We grad students in Film Studies are getting ready for our graduate conference on exhibition on January 28 and 29. Here‘s the website I designed. It has to be static, since on the Yale main server, but I think it does the trick.

I think the conference is going to be really good. The papers are absolutely top-notch, and the keynote speaker is none other than Rick Altman, whom even new Film Studies students will know as the Big Deal of genre theory (and the author of Silent Film Sound).