January 2012

Press Author Jill Dolan Wins Prestigious George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism

by Shaun Manning January 27, 2012

Congratulations to Jill Dolan, author of The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1991), Presence and Desire (1994), and Utopia in Performance (2005) and editor of A Menopausal Gentleman (2011), for winning the prestigious 2011 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. The award, administered by Cornell University, carries a $10,000 prize and was bestowed upon Dolan for her insightful essays on her blog, The Feminist Spectator. This marks the first year the award has been given to a blog. Read the full award announcement here. The Guardian also published a great spotlight on Dolan and the significance of such a major [...]

The Chronicle Revisits a “Rogue Scholar”

by Shaun Manning January 26, 2012

Richard W. Bailey’s 2003 book, Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff, has inspired a post on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog. “Edward H. Rulloff was so well-known in his time that he was the subject of two contemporary biographies,” blogger Alan Metcalf notes, but Rulloff’s name has been scrubbed from the field of linguistics due to his other career–a life of crime–which ultimately led to his execution, cutting short his research on what Rulloff promised would be a revolutionary new philological theory. Read the whole post over at the Chronicle, or [...]

Duderstadt Weighs In as New York Times Debate Over College Sports Continues

by Shaun Manning January 23, 2012

Sunday's New York Times featured an article titled "How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life," which examines long-simmering issues of commercialization in college sports–a topic the paper recently reignited with two controversial opinion pieces by columnist Joe Nocera. This time, education writer Laura Pappano compared prestigious universities' academic renown with those same universities' famous football and basketball teams. "Ohio State boasts 17 members of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, three Nobel laureates, eight Pulitzer Prize winners, 35 Guggenheim Fellows and a MacArthur winner," Pappano writes. "But sports rule." She also discusses how the extraordinary popularity of sports leads to [...]

Hair That Touches Heaven

by Shaun Manning January 17, 2012

University of Michigan Press author Bill Talen presented his unique brand of evangelism last week at Busboys & Poets in Washington, DC. Previewing the event, where Talen discussed his Reverend Billy persona and recent book, The Reverend Billy Project: From Rehearsal Hall to Super Mall with the Church of Life After Shopping, the Washington Post's free daily Express looked at Talen's history as a performer. "Reverend Billy has hair so high it practically touches heaven," the Express article begins. "He wears a white suit and a collar that marks him as a man of God." But the sins Reverend Billy [...]

Duderstadt comments on NY Times college sports op-ed

by Shaun Manning January 12, 2012

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera sparked no small amount of controversy with his January 1 opinion piece, "Let's Start Paying College Athletes." Nocera argued that the current system, in which student-athletes are forbidden from accepting payment of any kind under NCAA rules, "enables misconduct to flourish" because players feel that the universities, conferences, and NCAA are taking advantage of their skills. Unlike most intercollegiate sports, the columnist said, college football and men's basketball are a big business, with sometimes millions of dollars paid to coaches and billions paid for advertising on televised tournaments. Nocera notes that "having universities in [...]