Have you seen this blog? A Ph.D student in history has put together a blog which he describes as an “ongoing celebration of the academically obscure, pretentious, and bizarre. Read about it in Inside Higher Ed or just head over to “Stuff Academics Like” and check it out for yourself.
In the meantime, here is a snippet from the Inside Higher Ed article:
The new blog takes it for granted that one of the things academics like (too much for their own good perhaps) is titles of papers, series and journal articles that mix jargon, scholarly wit, gerunds and punctuation to come up with easily mocked titles. So the blogger behind the site created “The Guessing Game,” in which all but one or two titles are real, and readers are asked to identify the fake one(s).
Here are some of the titles of various sorts in some of his initial rounds of the games (we’ll let the blogger reveal whether any of these are the fakes):
- “Tossed Overboard: Katrina, Abandonment, and the Infrastructure of Feelings” [conference paper]
- “Shut Your Mouth When You’re Talking to Me: Silencing the Idealist School of Critical Race Theory through a Culturalogical Turn in Jurisprudence” [conference paper]
- “Envisioning Lyotard in Leotards: Queering the Postmodern Condition” [lecture]
- “On Poetry and Stupidity in General” [lecture]
- “On the Legal Consequences of Sauces: Cookbooks, Copyrights, and Creativity” [lecture]
- “Turtle Times: The Cross-Generational Cult Text of Turtles Forever and Gendered Readings” [conference paper]
- “The Fetish of Finance: Meta-Theoretical Reflections on the Relevance of Marx’s Epistemology to Understandings of the 2008 Crisis” [conference paper]
- “Mo’ Dernity, Mo’ Problems” [music series]
Very amusing.
Love this from the “about the site” tab:
“…there are people in the academy who really need to get over themselves…”
My goal in life: don't be one of those people. May be too late.