By Prof. Hacker. This past April, the University of Virginia Scholars’ Lab‘s Praxis Fellows released their practicum project, the Ivanhoe Game. Since the launch, the Fellows have dispersed for the summer: I graduated, and several others went off to visit family and friends. We all wrapped up our semesters and took a well-earned vacation, as, I hope, did most ProfHacker readers. Now, however, the fall semester quickly approaches, and the moment is ripe for renewed consideration of the Ivanhoe Game. Read more...In Defense of Theory
By Julia H. Chang. Is gender theory relevant to undergraduate students? Skeptics have long dismissed theory’s intellectual import largely on the basis of style. In the 90s, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, and Homi Bhabha were scrutinized for their “pretentiously opaque” prose, “bad writing,” and “indecipherable jargon” respectively. Of course not all scholars are equally subject to these sorts of critiques. As Butler noted in her response, “The targets … have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism.” Refuting similar critiques in regard to queer theory, Michael Warner has recently asserted that “the attack on difficult style has often been a means to reassert the very standards of common sense that queer theory rightly challenged.” More...


