- You don’t.
- There is no step two.
Always good to get out of grading purgatory.
🛫 To Nashville for a conference.
For those following me here on the blog or via micro.blog, just a note that I’ve been on Twitter of late sharing articles and my thoughts on Ukraine. If you’re interested in that, you can find me there.
Coffee and Bayes. My friends who know me will laugh at what has befallen me. ☕️
Full day of teaching, office hours, and students already worried about writing papers. Nature is healing. We’re getting there, folks. Slowly, but steadily.
In a first for student emails. The entire email—greeting, body, salutation—is in the subject line.
How to course prep for the first day of class tomorrow when your wife is recovering from Covid, and it is also her birthday:
Daily Stoic Journal
📚 I’m teaching a course on political leadrship this semester (only ten days until classes start!), and among the required books for my students is Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic Journal. It’s a daily journal with prompts and reflections from the stoics. I am integreating it with our readings because I hope to teach them the art of critical self-reflection.
But as a teaching method, I decided I would practice what I preach and do it with them. Although I keep a semi-daily journal of professional things, like research notes, this seemed like a fun challenge. They won’t start until the first day of class. That’s by design, so that I have a head start to think about how the daily prompts are working for me.
Not quite a New Year’s Resolution—more like a new semester experiment. But since it coincides with the new year, I guess we’ll count it but with the asterisk.
Show Me
Earlier this month I defended my dissertation and submitted all paperwork to complete my PhD. It has been a long time coming and I am obviously glad to be finished. My dissertation examined the development of international religious freedom and U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. In it I make a very simple claim that efforts to promote religious freedom have been present in American national security strategy for much longer than most realize. I’m not the first to argue this. Anna Su ([Twitter](Exporting Freedom)) has argued something very similar in Exporting Freedom. (Indeed, when I first learned of her book my stomach sank because I thought my dissertation project had been scooped, as it were. Thankfully there are enough differences that my advisors and I agreed that I was good to go.) These are welcome developments in the IR scholarship. I am eager to add my voice to the scholarly discussion.
Shortly after defending—by which I mean the next day—my wife and I packed up our place. This fall I begin a two-year appointment as a postdoc fellow at Kinder Institute on Constituional Democracy. My primary duties will be working with undergraduates in some of Kinder’s very excellent programming for first and second year students. In the spring I am slated to teach a course on U.S. Foreign Policies. In addition to my book project, I have some other manuscripts in progress, but more on those later as they get closer to completion. For now, it is time to settle in and crank out my widgets.