We’re currently in the middle of several weeks during which a variety of posts related to the Society for U.S. Intellectual History’s recently concluded annual conference will be appearing on the blog. One of the many functions of the conference is for those of us involved in the actual business of the Society to meet face-to-face. In addition to S-USIH’s annual business meeting, bloggers who attend the conference have an (always too early-in-the-morning) breakfast in which we discuss the state of the blog. I wanted to write a quick post to note a few things that came out of the bloggers’ breakfast that are of potential interest to our readership.
Some of the most interesting blogging at USIH comes about when, for one reason or another, a number of us write on a single theme. Sometimes the occasion has been our participation in a multi-blog event, like the For the Love of Film Blogathons, sometimes we have held roundtables organized around a theme of our own devising, sometimes a number of us simply choose to address the same issue. Since we enjoy these occasions and think they create very interesting exchanges, we have decided to hold more regular blog events. Starting in December, we are planning every two months to blog around a common theme for one week. These events will rotate between focusing on something related to movies, something related to books, and finally something purely thematic. We’ll have more information about particular events as we get closer to them. In fact, next month, we will be having an event in addition to this new, regular rotation. A number of us who took part in the S-USIH reading group that Andrew Hartman organized on Kenneth Burke’s Attitudes Toward History will be blogging about Burke during the week of November 10. We also hope to make these events more accessible to our readership by developing an interface that will let readers easily create mini e-books out of our roundtables and other events, though I’m afraid we don’t yet have an ETA on this feature.
Finally, we are always on the lookout for new voices on the blog. In the next few months, I hope to announce a number of new regular bloggers. Our goal is still to have two regular bloggers assigned to each day of the week. But we also always welcome guest posts. If you have any interest in writing a post for the blog, please contact me or any of the other regular bloggers.
Please also consider this an open thread for the discussion of blog matters. Is there anything which we’re not doing that you wish we were….or anything that we are doing that you wish we weren’t?
One Thought on this Post
S-USIH Comment Policy
We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.
This is all very exciting! I am relatively new here, of course, but it seems to me that the blog is in excellent health and will only become more and more interesting as new folks come on board.
To that end, I would like to prod anyone who is weighing whether or not to propose a guest post: it is a painless process, it is a terrific way to get feedback on ideas in any state (including very germinal and/or highly speculative), and it is a very direct route to getting to know some of the best and most generous people on the humanities-Internet. So, if you are at all inclined to guest-posting, please indulge yourself.
I would underline, as well, that this is a particularly generative thing to do if your professional or avocational interests do not line up exactly with “US Intellectual History.”