Now Shipping!
May 31st, 2008We’re delighted to announce that Mama, PhD is in stock and shipping now, so if you pre-ordered, look for your copy soon!
Mama, PhD blog on Inside Higher Ed!
May 4th, 2008We are thrilled to announce that InsideHigherEd is launching a new Mama PhD blog, and seven of our contributors — Libby Gruner, Megan Kajitani, Susan Bassow, Dana Campbell, Liz Stockwell, Anjalee Nadkarni and Della Fenster — will be blogging regularly there. This is a tremendous opportunity to bring the discussion of academic work/ family life balance issues out of the book, into the blogosphere and from there into classrooms and campus administrative offices.
Please check out the blog, leave your comments, and send questions to Megan (for now, via info@insidehighered.com; the blog will soon list a more direct address) who will be writing a weekly advice column. And then please spread the word! Tell your friends, add the link to your blogroll, and help us build an audience for our bloggers.
New book by Cynthia Kuhn!
April 17th, 2008
Contributor Cynthia Kuhn’s new book, Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature, cowritten with Cindy Carlson, is out now from Cambria Press:
“Covering a variety of genres and periods from medieval epic to contemporary speculative fiction, Styling Texts explores the fascinating ways in which dress performs in literature. Numerous authors have made powerful—even radical—use of clothing and its implications, and the essays collected here demonstrate how scholarly attention to literary fashioning can contribute to a deeper understanding of texts, their contexts, and their innovations. These generative and engaging discussions focus on issues such as fashion and anti-fashion; clothing reform; transvestism; sartorial economics; style and the gaze; transgressive modes; and class, gender, or race “passing.”
“This is the first academic volume to address such an extensive range of texts, inviting consideration of how fashionable desires and concerns not only articulate the aesthetics, subjectivities, and controversies of a given culture, but also communicate across temporal and spatial divisions. Styling Texts is an essential resource for anyone interested in the artistic representations and significations of dress.”
Mama, PhD in the Berkeley Grad Student Newsletter
April 11th, 2008Check out our nice write-up in the recent edition of eGrad, a newsletter for Berkeley graduate students.
Teaching and Tae Kwon Do
March 31st, 2008Contributor Libby Gruner has an essay in Inside Higher Ed; here’s a blurb:
At first I didn’t mention it at work. I think I felt a little silly about it: a middle-aged woman — an English professor! — taking tae kwon do. But then one day a colleague asked about a small bruise on my arm and, unthinking, I told him I’d blocked a kick with my forearm. It hadn’t been a smart move in tae kwon do, but as I told him about it, I could see the respect in his eyes. I began to think I should bring in my broken boards, leave them in the office, maybe mention how easily my palm had just gone through the wood. It couldn’t hurt.
Read the rest at Inside Higher Ed!
New book by Sonya Huber!
February 21st, 2008
Opa Nobody by Sonya Huber has just been released by the U of Nebraska Press (American Lives Series, ed. Tobias Wolff) and is now available at Amazon.
It had come to this: breastfeeding her screaming three-month-old while sitting on the cigarette-scarred floor of a union hall, lying to her husband so she could attend yet another activist meeting, and otherwise actively self-destructing. Then Sonya Huber turned to her long-dead grandfather, the family “nobody,” for help.
Huber’s search for meaning and resonance in the life of her grandfather Heina Buschman was unusual insofar as she knew him only through dismissive family stories: He let his wife die of neglect . . . he used his infant son as a decoy when transporting anti-Nazi literature in a baby carriage . . . and so the stories went. What she actually discovered was that, like his granddaughter, Heina Buschman was a committed and beleaguered activist whose story echoed her own. Huber’s research not only conjured her grandfather’s voice in answer to many of the questions that troubled her but also found in his story a source of personal sustenance for herself. Based on extensive research and documentation, this story of Heina Buschman offers a rare look into the heart of the “average” socialist trying to survive the Nazis and rebuild a broken world. Alternating with his voice is Huber’s own, providing a rich and moving counterpoint that makes this deeply personal exploration of family, politics, and individual responsibility a story for all of us and for all time.
Kirkus Reviews writes, “[S]harp human insights on the omnipresent complications of living in Nazi Germany make this a worthwhile read… [A] unique, imaginative take on the family memoir.”
New Book by Jennifer Margulis!
January 24th, 2008 
Mama, PhD contributor Jennifer Margulis has a new book coming out this spring, cowritten with her husband, James di Properzio: The Baby Bonding Book for Dads: Building a Closer Connection With Your Baby.
“Many new dads have never even held a baby, or they have little or no experience in taking care of babies. Men feel apprehensive and unsure about how to interact with their offspring, especially when that offspring is a tiny bundle that weighs under 10 pounds! That apprehension, though, shouldn’t put men into the back seat of parenting, as that would be taking a step back from one of the most important experiences of life. Men need to take the initiative and create their own ways of bonding with their children, right from the beginning. Topics include newborn bonding, carrying, skin-to-skin contact, diapering, going places, napping, playing, exercising, and reading to baby. This instructive yet lighthearted text is delivered from a dad who has been there (di Properzio is the father of three), and is paired with the delightful photography of Christopher Briscoe, making this book a handy guide and a perfect gift for any new father who’s feeling a little nervous about the new responsibility in his life.”
The book is available for pre-order, and will be out in time to give your favorite dad for Father’s Day.
Pre-Order Now!!
December 16th, 2007Mama, PhD is now available for pre-order from Amazon and other on-line book sellers. For more information, click here for a pdf of the Rutgers University Press catalog page about the book.
Lovely Lady Lumps
December 15th, 2007Read Elrena Evans’ column, “Lovely Lady Lumps” in the “Nutshell” section of the Winter 2008 issue of Brain, Child magazine. Elrena writes about the new trend in postpartum plastic surgery, with an insight into the issue from Mama, PhD contributor Jessica Smartt Gullion.
New book from Laura Levitt!
December 7th, 2007Temple University professor Laura Levitt’s new book, American Jewish Loss After the Holocaust (New York University Press) is out now; Laura’s Mama, PhD essay, “On Being Phyllis’s Daughter: Thoughts on Academic Intimacy,” is based on a chapter from the book. Here’s a small taste:
On the one hand, my mother adhered to the norms of mothering that defined her early 1960’s generation. Although she was educated and worked as a teacher before she had children, she left her job when my brother and I were very young, and did not go back to teaching for almost five years.
But on the other hand—this is not exactly where I wanted to begin. I wanted to start by saying that my mother, like me, played with dolls. Her favorites, so she tells me, were paper dolls. She spent long days as a little girl cutting out various outfits, experimenting with how they looked. I think about my mother playing with paper dolls when I think about her accounts of what she did during her long days at home with me as a young child. For my mother, staying at home was not easy. She loved teaching, and regretted giving up her job when I was born.
I have few memories of my mother at home with my brother and me. I have memories of playing with friends and a spattering of memories of other adults, but I do not have any clear memories of my mother. What my mother tells me is that she spent a lot of her time cleaning and ironing my various outfits and dressing me up in them. I cannot help but imagine that, in part, my role was quite similar to that of her paper dolls. She did the labor in order to get my clothes ready for me to wear, and then spent her days putting them on and taking them off me. What I recall are itchy crinolines and a longing to take them off, and short lacy socks that needed to be pulled up over my heels again and again. I think I sensed, even then, that my mother was not particularly happy staying home.
Not surprisingly, it was when my mother returned to work that my most vivid memories of her began. My mother’s passion for her work was contagious. I imbibed it. I fell in love with her students and her colleagues, their stories, their intrigues, and always my mother at the center of all of this story telling. Over the years, my specialized knowledge of my mother and her life at school has enabled a kind of intimacy between us. It allows me to share a part of her life, as we communicate through the mediation of other people and their stories. Not unlike a beloved text, these stories have enabled my mother and me to connect in ways that seemed to foreshadow the kinds of academic intimacy I now share with many of my own students. My mother and I have always communicated most profoundly in this way, and this is very much the kind of intimacy I know best in my own life.
