Summer has finally begun, as we had our last faculty meeting yesterday. My previous two summers were almost insanely productive. This year, as I am in a lull waiting for The Prince of This World — by the way, did you know it’s available for pre-order? — to come out, I am trying to take it relatively easy and let my brain heal up a little bit. The academic-related things I actually need to do this summer are as follows:
- Finalize my travel arrangements for Australia
- Write one lecture and revise another, for repeated use in Australia
- Translate Agamben’s (very short) book The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days
- Correct the proofs and do the index for The Prince of This World
- Design a syllabus and place a book order for the Shimer senior capstone course
- Write my contribution for the volume Carlo Salzani and I are co-editing, Agamben as Reader
All but the last item need to occur before I leave for Australia (mid-July). The last item will require reviewing some Agamben texts, and I’m figuring I can bring them along for airplane and other miscellaneous reading during the trip.
This is all quite manageable and far less than I have done in recent years, yet I feel overwhelmed, as though I won’t have a free moment all summer long.
What about you, readers? What do you have planned for the glorious freedom of summer, that blessed time when academics get time off work so that they can finally get some work done?
An und für sich 
Hoping to get 2 dissertation chapters and an article drafted. They’re all more or less springing from the work I’ve done as an MA thesis, and are built around the doctoral reading i’ve done since October so it’s not as horrific as it sounds.
The other two major things are looking over the reading list for a few papers i might supervise next year; I come from an English Lit background via an interdisciplinary MA to a History PhD, so there’re definite gaps in my knowledge on the economic and political side. I also want to squeeze some preliminary reading on similarities between Frances Burney and Edmund Burke. It won’t fit into the thesis, and proper investigation will take a postdoc, but I’m hoping to get an article out of it in the next few years.
Will you be coming to Brisbane?
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out for me to get to Brisbane.
What about Melbourne?
I’m doing Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Christchurch, and Auckland.