The Duck of Minerva

This is my 20th year at the University of Texas. Although my dad was a university professor, I'm something of an accidental academic. I sought to get my PhD with the hopes of doing something more in terms of public service. I started off my PhD at Georgetown inauspiciously. In the first week of school, I sat down with the legendary comparativist Sam Barnes who asked me what my plans were. I said I wanted to run for Congress and if that didn't work out, I'd teach. Talk about clueless! I'm surprised he didn't kick me out of his office then and there.To be fair, I didn't really understand what...

Instead of Dry January, I'm going review free for January after having nearly 80 review requests last year. My New Year's resolution was to have a healthier relationships with reviewing, which had become a part-time, unpaid job (though I recognize that I'm still coming from a place of privilege). Nevertheless, while I didn't accept all of those requests, I did more than 30 last year. My fear is becoming Reviewer 2: the more reviews I do, the more I potentially resent the review process (former Duck contributor Laura Sjoberg has a good post on not becoming Reviewer 2). I don't want to take...

My New Year's resolution for 2026 is to somehow make peace with reviewing for journals. Something is amiss, at least for me, but perhaps it reveals a larger problem related to journal and book publishing. I kept a running tally of review requests for 2025. Give or take some error, I had 79 review requests, which includes some R&Rs, book proposals, and a several full books. I'm not including tenure letters. I didn't say yes to all of them, but I did do more than 30 reviews last year. It's occupied more of my time and mental bandwidth than I can deal with, and I've got to come up with a...

I started this post sort of confessionally. It's been a while since I wrote on the blog. I had started one earlier this year on the destruction of USAID and PEPFAR but redirected my energy into advocacy (such as it was). One reason for my relative absence on the blog is government service. From 2021 to 2023, I was in the Biden Administration serving as a Senior Climate Advisor in the Department of Defense. More recently, my father was in ill health and died at the age of 79 in August. He was also an academic, a distinguished scholar of southwestern American literature at Texas State...