I am a Professor in the English Department, where I teach film studies and British literature. I have published two books and many articles about British print culture. On the EDLM team, I serve as organizer, head cheerleader, theory wonk, and bagel provider.
My dairies for this seminar reveal the commonalities I share with other people’s everyday lives and the eccentricity of my passing moments. Like other diarists who are part of this project, I consume a great deal of media (more than I would have guessed); fixate on food and fitness and worry about my health; sing in the car on my way to work. My everyday life while working on this seminar, however, has been anything but routine. In a normal semester, my schedule would be worked out in great detail in advance and settle into a reasonably repetitive rhythm. This semester has been more fluid and improvisational, which has been both exciting and unnerving. The one day that felt like a normal, old-fashioned teaching day — with many appointments on campus and two scheduled meetings with my students — seemed strikingly intense, non-routine, and pleasurable, its ordinary activities feeling “conscious and important,†as I wrote in that day’s diary.