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In Which The Blogger Returns To The Academy

I spent around seven years of my life (roughly from 18 to 25) thinking that whatever I ended up doing with my writing career, I'd do it out of some kind of academic base. The plan for most of that period -- particularly when I was working towards my doctorate in English Lit at Columbia -- was to get tenure somewhere nice and play the university game a little, but also write for a larger audience outside the academy. (A model that I'd taken from one of my old advisors, Edward Said.) But then FEED came along and pulled me off my dissertation (never finished, alas) and while I've had some wonderful semesters teaching seminars as an adjunct at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, I've never had a regular home base in the university system. For the most part, that's worked out fine, because I have no interest in a full-time position anywhere -- I'm traveling too much now giving speeches, and I love spending the rest of my time working at home with the kids in Brooklyn. And I'm trying to write a book every 18 months or so, which takes a lot of commitment.

Still, I love teaching, and there's part of me that is still attached to the academic world. So I'm very pleased to report that the NYU Department of Journalism has appointed me a Distinguished Writer In Residence. I'll be teaching one course a semester there -- one grad seminar followed by an undergrad lecture. I start in the spring, teaching a seminar on new media ecosystems, based loosely on the ideas in my Discover column this month. It's a great honor to join the faculty there: the other Distinguished Writers make my bio look undistinguished by comparison, and I've long admired the work of many of the colleagues there, including Mitch Stephens, Mark Dery, Ellen Willis (all of them FEED alums) and Jay Rosen, who made a valiant effort to revive FEED in the months after we went dark, before 9/11 ended up killing off the idea.

This should be a lot of fun.

Comments

Congratulations on the appointment at NYU.

Scary. I've just given up on my own dissertation (with that being the only thing left to do) in English lit. Hopefully that means I'll have the same success as a writer that you've had!

Oh, excellent. I'll be there Spring term too, though no one is calling me DISTINGUISHED. Wohhoo! Congratulations.

Congratualations!

Welcome to academia! You make your grandmother proud!

Fabulous, Steven! I look forward to your seminar on Lost.

Congratulations, Steven. I'm sure you'll be great. Every student that has the pleasure of taking a class with you should count themselves lucky.

That's great! It sounds like it will tons of fun. Not to mention the honor, which you totally deserve.

Congratulations.

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    • I'm a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of five books. In early 2007 I went and foolishly got myself a day job running the hyperlocal community site, outside.in that I co-founded the year before. We spend most of the year in Park Slope, Brooklyn, though I'm on the road a lot giving talks. (You can see the full story here.) Personal correspondence should go to sbj6668 at earthlink dot net. Media requests should go to Matthew.Venzon at us.penguingroup dot com. If you're interested in having me speak at an event, drop a line to Wesley Neff at the Leigh Bureau (WesN at Leighbureau dot com.)

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      Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
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