I have been slowly but surely groping my way back towards a scholarship mindset, after being distracted for the last few months by more sundry issues (job-hunting; logistics of moving an academic office across the state, etc) and more novel pursuits (tattoos; fitness program; vacation glut, etc). I have a number of different irons in the fire all waiting for me pull them out and beat them with mallets, including a few smaller academic tasks I have put off for far too long (book reviews, manuscript reviews, and so on). No plans to go into great detail or specifics right now, but I thought I could provide a brief glimpse into what is sitting on my desk waiting to be read (or read again) as I rev up the academic engine. Consider this a little hint of the different topics and issues I am grappling with right now in my work. These are in no particular order:
Academic To-Do List
Jan Zielonka, Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union (OUP, 2006).
Andreas Faludi and Bas Waterhout, The Making of the European Spatial Development Perspective (Routledge: 2002).
Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, ed., The European’s Burden: Global Imperialism in EU Expansion (Peter Lang, 2006).
Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella, Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 2008).
Gary Murphy and Niamh Puirseil, “‘Is it a New Allowance?’ Irish Entry to the EEC and Popular Opinion,” Irish Political Studies 23, no.4 (December 2008): 533-553.
Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840-1930 (CUP, 2008).
Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origins of Modern Building Types (Routledge, 1993).
James Schmiechen, “The Victorians, the Historians, and the Idea of Modernism,” American Historical Review 93, no.2 (April 1988): 287-316.
Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (Routledge, 2000).
And in terms of non-academic reading, I’m still trying to find the time to finish Kim Stanley Robinson’s Blue Mars. Nearly there on that one.