One of my students recently asked me why I don’t write much about my academic life here on the website. The question gave me pause, largely because I hadn’t realized that I’d not written much about academic things. Yet looking over the site I can see the student was right: I’ve not written much about it. So why?
Good question.
Well, what I write about here tends — for obvious reasons — to be a selective slice of my life, geared toward an outside world of readers. What I decide to include here is material that I think folks might be interested to know about for one reason or another, and the majority of my visitors — near as I can tell, anyway — come to me via my fiction life. My guess is they’re probably not very interested in hearing about, well, this stuff:
Five Academic Projects on my Desk
1. An edition of The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament. I have posted a few things about this, but this 700-page beast isn’t exactly “fun” in most senses of the word.
2. An article about the structure, meaning, and authorship of The Alliterative Morte Arthure. I’ve “finished” this several times, only to begin adding additional stands to my argument.
3. An article about Robert Jordan’s placement in popular culture and the history of Fantasy. I have some drafted materials, yet the more I poke at them the more I think this deserves a book.
4. An edition of Cursor Mundi, a poem that is simply enormous. I suspect it will be published in multiple volumes when all is said and done — which is several years off, I’m afraid. Luckily, my colleague David Allen is working on it, too. Here’s hoping he has less on my plate than I do!
5. An article about Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. This one has been even more amorphous than item #2 … I really need to split the darn thing into three or four articles instead of just smashing so many thoughts into one. Or make it a book. Yeah. I got time for that, right?