Enfilade

At the beginning of a new academic year, recent postings at The Long Eighteenth address various themes related to teaching. Laura Rosenthal tackles grading and tactics for teaching with ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online). David Mazella responds to a posting by Kenneth Mostern at Leaving Academia (he found it at Perverse Egalitarianism), which suggests that “the scariest thing a young faculty member experiences is not, as is conventionally supposed, the ‘need to produce’ and therefore her/his experience is not aided by the ‘mentorship’ of an experienced scholar. Rather, the young scholar’s fear stems from the fact that no one in the department is talking to each other about scholarship.” Mazella also describes an assignment he gives students to make use of the Burney Collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers (as noted earlier here, the Burney Collection is available for free until October 30 through Early Modern Online Bibliography). The postings are all accompanied by dozens of comments. For the most part, the specifics apply to literary studies, but the larger concerns and goals would seem to bear on art history in the eighteenth century as well.