Hmm… Seems like an update here is a bit overdue.

In a nutshell:
The Tolkien class is moving along. The students so far have either 1. not discovered that I am a fraud or 2. discovered it and that’s why they never come to my office hours. Either way, less work for me :-) Unfortunately, the reading is killer. Both in terms of quantity and quality. In general, I enjoy Tolkien’s letters. It’s rather nice to get a sense of who he was and why he wrote the things he did. But honestly, not everything the man wrote was gold. And he wrote some pretty shitty poems, frankly. And then liked to attribute them to Sam and Bilbo. Psssh! If you’re going to write crappy poetry, just own up to it instead of attributing it to your fictional characters.

I’m applying to teach another course next year. I’ll already be teaching a History of Psychiatry in the US course–one which I tried to propose to teach for the history department this year, but was summariy rejected by the autocrat in charge of pretty much all graduate teaching positions in the department. So now I’m sucking up to the autocrat and trying to pitch something slightly more canonical as far as US history goes, but still something with that good old R. Batty twist to it. Right now I’m thinking something along the lines of “Crime, Punishment, and Social Reform: A History of Criminal Justice in the US, 1800-19**.” I’m a little worried that it might be at once both too conventional sounding (people like to talk about law and social reform) but at the same time, not radical enough (it doesn’t exactly scream “let’s talk about oppressed minorities”). Of course, I want it to have a bit more of a science-y spin and talk about the invention of the penitentiary, the rise of criminology, forensic psychiatry, and eugenics. But given that I’m still an outsider to the history department, I’m not really sure how best to strike a balance between what kind of class I think the autocrat would like, what kind of class I would like, and what kind of class I think the students will like. Honestly, I think developing a syllabus is one of the hardest parts of teaching. Whatever happened to the days of just sitting the kids down with a textbook and making them do problem sets? Hmm, guess I’m in the wrong field for that.

And last but not least, I’m taking a literary history of schizophrenia class this term. The downside is that the class is focused exclusively on German literature, which means it has little to no immediate relevance to my own work. But on the upside, it’s about schizophrenia in the nineteenth-century! If that’s not inherently a sweet topic, then I don’t know what is. Unfortunately, I seem to be in the minority on this one, since the class is really, really small. I think it must be the German part that turns people off, even though we’re reading all the texts in translation. Regardless, the fact that it’s a small class means that even though I’m just auditing, I’m putting a lot of work into it. But the texts are pretty cool. I can now say that I highly recommend Büchener’s Lenz. And some parts of it are more relevant than others since we’re also reading some more canonical psychiatric texts as well, which will fit in nicely with my dissertation.