Heading Back to Europe

01Jun13

The semester is done, and it’s a time of news & transitions. As this blog serves as a kind of public professional archive, I should mention that a couple of weeks ago, I officially was promoted to full professor, making my new title Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies. At Middlebury, the gap between Associate & Full is less significant than many other institutions, so it doesn’t quite feel momentous (and certainly far less pivotal than my promotion from Assistant to Associate) – but still it’s a very nice thing.

Even more tangibly, the final push is underway for the publication of How to Watch Television, the book Ethan Thompson & I co-edited, as we sent off the revised proofs & index yesterday. You can view the fabulous table of contents, pre-order the book on Amazon, and if you’re an instructor thinking about assigning it, preview the whole book online. More to come as the September publication date approaches.

One year ago, my family and I were wrapping up our final month of our year in Germany. Now we are preparing for a trip back starting Monday, combining business & pleasure to return to Germany and Holland for most of June. I will be giving four presentations this month, so if you happen to be in the region, perhaps I’ll see you there. First, I’m keynoting the Popular Seriality conference in my old Göttingen haunts on Thursday 6 June – the title of the lecture is “The Ends of Serial Criticism” and it will be wandering around the conclusion of Complex TV, which should be posted within the next month.

We then head to Berlin, where I’ll be giving a lecture on 12 June at 4pm, about transmedia storytelling & television paratexts at the JFK Institute (alas I don’t have a room number and cannot find an online reference to the talk). Then I’ll be attending the Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image in Berlin, where I’ll be talking about narrative comprehension & serial television on Friday 14 June. Finally, after a brief beach vacation on the North Sea, we’ll go to Amsterdam, where I’ll be giving a talk about the core arguments in Complex TV on Friday 21 June.

And then the transition that feels most liberating: when I return to Middlebury in July, I’ll no longer be department chair. While I’m happy with what our department accomplished in the four years I was chair, I’m also ready to not be “nibbled to death by ducks.” I look forward to discovering what I’ll find to feel the free time after two books and department chairdom are taken off my schedule.

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Filed under: Academia, Conferences, Media Studies, Middlebury, Sabbatical   |  1 Comment