Powerful research and scholarship need not be exotic to have an impact. Sometimes a close look at the familiar can be surprisingly powerful. Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, an accessible and informative book by Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert, does just that. The authors examine something that we who work…
Cultural Anthropologists as Public Intellectuals
Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex and Gender in the Twentieth Century is a marvelous book, creative and engaging. A collective biography of a number extraordinarily influential scholars who came together to define an academic field and to reshape thinking, inside the academy and out,…
Hope Certainly Can Write
Hope Jahren is a geobiologist, a writer, a teacher, and an extraordinarily interesting person. In 2016 she wrote Lab Girl, a personal and professional memoir that rightfully garnered all manner of awards. It’s a beautiful, carefully crafted work that I would like to encourage you to read – and for you to recommend to anyone…
One Determined Engineer & the Creation of the Taconite Industry
The drive from Chicago to Ely, Minnesota, goes northwest through Wisconsin, crossing into Minnesota at Duluth. Route 53 winds up steep terrain through the city, heading into Duluth Heights and Hermantown. It’s pretty much due north past the Duluth Airport as signs of human activity thin out. Rice Lake Road winds north and east through…
Housing, Dollars & Racism
One of the recurring themes of thedigitalquad is the intersection of academic scholarship and the “real” world. Academic presses may not sell all that many books, but without them – and the hard work of scholars and faculty across higher education – we would, in many ways, be clueless. Why is so much of American…
You Can’t Unsee Misogyny After Manne
Kate Manne’s outstanding book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, is a powerful, beautifully argued work that could rightly have a warning its cover. Once you read it and think it through, it is impossible not to see gender relations in a new way. Manne’s nominal focus, misogyny, opens up realizations about greater issues of…
The Big Ten: What History Does and Does Not Do
The Supreme Court recently issued an important ruling on college athletics, limiting the power of the NCAA to prevent student athletes from receiving compensation and other benefits. The 9-0 vote was a long time coming. Many athletes, scholars and politicians have argued that the NCAA’s attempts at preserving “amateur” status for college athletes to be…