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Aaron Hanlon Profile picture
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14 Jan, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Whereas I have tons of pedagogical chill (being patient, supportive, encouraging, looking for the good in student work) the material I teach has no chill. Sometimes I wonder what students think of that.
Sometimes I feel bad about the prospect of students coming to my course because of what they've heard about me and then I'm like 'Cowley was the last of the metaphysical poets according to Johnson...let's talk about Aristotelian referentiality and anti-Ciceronianism...'
'You've signed up for a literature course...Let's talk about the emergence of 'Literature' at the end of the 18th century and why we're not reading any of that...'
But honestly, I think they enjoy it and learn new stuff in the end. I just worry about letting them down at the beginning, I suppose :(

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More from @AaronRHanlon

Aaron Hanlon Profile picture
16 Jan
1) A speculative thought on class in the US, prompted by @jbouie's excellent newsletter, in which he quotes (to take issue with) this miserable assessment of the capitol insurrectionists by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic ... Image
2) @jbouie concludes, correctly and contra Flanagan, with this. Which honestly made me think of class in 18th c. Britain, in the sense that ... Image
3) ... we're not quite talking about 'lower,' 'middle,' and 'upper' classes, but a more fine-grained 'class' system of socioeconomic ranks, as in the 18th c. To explain ...
Read 8 tweets
Aaron Hanlon Profile picture
7 Dec 20
1) I've said for years now that 'STEM' vs. 'humanities' is a silly and destructive dichotomy, as is the blame game that goes along with it. I've also said non-biz 'STEM' fields will face pressure similar to 'hum' fields. Viz., cuts to the math dept. at Murdoch U:
2) By 'non-biz' I mean fields without a direct biz application & that don't pull in profit for the institution. 'STEM' marketing relies on the 'T' and the 'E,' & 'STEM' has been valuable branding as biz incentives have increasingly driven higher ed governance & policy choices. ..
3) The 'S' and the 'M' won't be able to ride this marketing wave forever. People will realize an English degree and a biology degree have near identical employment prospects and start asking ?s of biology they now do of English. ...
Read 6 tweets
Aaron Hanlon Profile picture
5 Dec 20
1) Quick thread about tenure (I'm up for tenure right now). I value the prospect of tenure. Highly. I don't think people like Dean White at UC Boulder understand that if you take that away then people like me work elsewhere, including in another industry altogether. ...
2) I quit a consulting job to get a PhD in English. In 2008. I wasn't naive abt what it meant for my financial & employment prospects to make that decision. If you're thinking, whoa, that was stupid, I don't agree, but that should tell you how much I value the prospect of tenure.
3) I wouldn't have quit my job to do a PhD if there were no prospect of tenure. Notwithstanding the impression you have by now from this thread of my appetite for risk, I'm an extremely risk averse person. The best I can explain this is with a poker analogy (sorry). ...
Read 12 tweets
Aaron Hanlon Profile picture
11 Nov 20
1) Thread for literature scholars and psychology researchers, both of whom will be cranky with me but for different reasons. Let’s talk about ‘Literary’ versus ‘Popular’ or ‘Genre’ fiction in this new(ish) study about their effects on readers. psypost.org/2020/10/readin…
2) Here’s how the authors of the study distinguish between Literary and Popular fiction:
3) Lots of interesting stuff in here, much of which literature scholars would agree with (that's part of the problem, I think, and will explain). But I'd break it down roughly this way:
Read 15 tweets
Aaron Hanlon Profile picture
28 Oct 20
1) You’ll sometimes hear reporters for right-wing campus ‘watchdog’ groups (pressure groups to chill faculty speech) working the non-newsworthy professor Twitter beat say ‘I’m just reporting, I don’t want my target to get threats and harassment.’ I think that’s genuine. HOWEVER..
2) It’s like you’ve watched someone lob a water balloon into a crowd of 100 about 1000 times, and some of those times it was even you who threw the balloon. ‘I was just observing the trajectory, I didn’t mean for anyone to get wet.’ ...
3) You really need to stop and think about what you’re doing. There’s no plausible deniability here. You’re part of an apparatus designed to chill faculty speech by leveraging media networks to whip up angry mobs that threaten and harass the targets and call for their jobs. ...
Read 4 tweets
Aaron Hanlon Profile picture
26 Oct 20
1) I started as an economics major and now teach and study literature for a living. Here's a short Monday morning thread (especially for students) on how that happened and why I still value perspectives from where I started.
2) In college I paired political science w/ econ, ended up dropping econ for legal studies (thinking I'd go to law school). Let go of econ bc the people teaching it to me were speaking of certainties that didn't seem at all certain. I lost trust in it.
3) This experience prejudiced my orientation to the social sciences in general. By the time I realized this and mustered the resolve to change something, I was about to graduate. I took one literature course in college, a Victorian lit. survey. That's it.
Read 9 tweets

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