In some fields—notably, foreign languages—second majors make up an unusually large share of the students receiving degrees. If we compare the number of second majors in a field with the number of first majors, we see that second majors range from 3%–5% of the number of first majors in fields like communication and psychology to 10%–16% in economi…[Read more]

Short piece on the structure of the typical academic job interview in languages and literatures.

Short reflection on the marginalization of foreign language departments and teachers on the typical college campus (written in 2001).

For the narrator of Invisible Man, the abjection of women and homosexuals operates at first as a discursive strategy for making the black male’s position more subjectively endurable, but the narrator must eventually confront this discursive strategy as an illusion of hetero-phallic agency, since he continually fails to acquire the sorts of i…[Read more]

The state of academic freedom today, the particular vulnerability of certain areas of study, and the special relevance of scholarship in the humanities to defenses of academic freedom.