As she says so, the veteran scholar, now in her mid-70s, laughs at the idea. But it’s clear from our talk that moral reservations wouldn’t stop her.

Heels of four inches or more are a stripper’s go-to footwear. Hanna describes their hazards, and much else, in her new book, Naked Truth: Strip Clubs, Democracy, and a Christian Right, just out from the University of Texas Press.

Hanna, a former Los Angeles high-school civics teacher with a master’s degree in political science and a doctorate in anthropology, is a longtime dancer (modern) who has published numerous books as well as hundreds of journal, newspaper, and magazine articles. Now an affiliate senior research scientist in anthropology at the University of Maryland at College Park, she has written on exotic dance in journals of performance, urban studies, sexuality studies, and for the op-ed pages of The New York Times.

She argues that exotic dancing is a form of artistic expression to be celebrated—at the very least to be protected from concerted attacks by Christian Right activists who would like to see it banned everywhere.

Her new book makes the case for artistic merit, and also argues that activists on the Christian Right have been engaged in a campaign to drape exotic dance in charges that are tantamount to lies. “To those unfamiliar with the history and beliefs of the CR [Christian Right] and the methods of a segment of the politically active CR, this book may appear, at first blush, to be an unfounded diatribe and a brief for the clubs or dancers,” she writes.

Not so, she insists: “The unfolding saga of my on-site experience (ethnography), buttressed by the writings of current and former members of the CR, scholars, and journalists, all combine to suggest otherwise.”

What has this shadowy cadre of activists been up to? By claiming that strip clubs inflict a litany of “secondary effects” on communities—crime, harm to property values, among them—the activists have been provoking public denunciation of exotic-dance clubs, Hanna charges. The activists are entitled to state their case, she allows, but “no study shows a link between what exotic dance is—the dance movement, costumes, props, and distance or touch between dancer and patron—and any negative effects.”

Of course, she adds, “there are good clubs and bad clubs, and good bosses and bad bosses. Every industry has that.” And domestic disputes may bring violent men to clubs where their partners perform. Some patrons offend by groping dancers. But “gentlemen’s clubs” belonging to Déja Vu and other national chains that trade on the stock exchange—a major trend in exotic dancing, since the 1980s—are hardly likely to tolerate untoward activities, she argues.

“There was a time when clubs were pretty sleazy, after burlesque died, and TV came along.” But those are now the “has-beens” of the industry, she contends.

Hanna has studied the world of exotic dance since 1995, when a land-use planner in Tampa, Fla., and a lawyer in Seattle asked her to appear in an exotic-dance-related First Amendment case. “They wanted me to apply the same anthropological approach to studying adult entertainment dance that I used to study dance in African villages and cities and in U.S. schools and concert theaters,” she writes.

She agreed, “excited to apply my somewhat esoteric anthropological knowledge to a world I did not know.” Since then, she has appeared in 46 cases in courts from the city to the federal level, and at alcohol-control-commission hearings. In all but one case—a sexual-harassment case that a dancer filed against a club—she has appeared for the clubs. In all, by Hanna’s count, she has worked with 59 lawyers on 125 cases in 29 states and the District of Columbia. She has observed 1,500 dance routines and dancer-patron interactions. She has interviewed more than 1,000 dancers, managers, owners, bartenders, house-mothers, and patrons at more than 140 of the country’s 4,000 clubs.
Hanna’s involvement increased after 2002, when she served as a judge in the Miss Exotic World Pageant at the Exotic World Burlesque Hall of Fame in Helendale, Calif. That led to an invitation to judge the 2005 Exotic Dancer Expo in Las Vegas.

All this, she can reasonably claim, makes her “the world’s only expert court witness” on the “nonverbal communication” of stripping—on its claims to be “a form of dance, art, and theater that communicates with its own aesthetic.”

Hanna says she undertook to wrote a scholarly book about exotic dancing and all its variants—nude and near-nude go-go, table, lap, and couch dancing—because, while many ethnographies of exotic dancing have appeared, as well as studies of the history, motivations, exploitation, objectification, and self-esteem of dancers and customers, she wanted not only to study the dancers and their world, but also to analyze the role of religiously inspired groups in organizing to shut the clubs.

Poring over municipal and court records of many kinds, Hanna realized that efforts to shut down dance clubs are almost always headed by pastors or church groups. Bringing lawsuits, picketing clubs, lobbying government, and organizing to have their anti-dancing representatives elected to legislative bodies are all within the activists’ rights, the scholar agrees. But far from scrupulous, she insists, is the unstinting misinformation they have spread about exotic dancing. Hanna sees her role, in court appearances and in her book, as opposing laws that infringe on First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights, as well as to defend dancers against false charges. Frequently trumped up, she insists, are charges of prostitution, lewdness, indecency, or obscenity.

The “stripperization” of America perturbs many people, even as it attracts many others. With growing public expression of sexuality in the media, in college spring-break antics, in the performing arts, and in many other quarters of American life have come “strip aerobics” in gyms, pole-dance parties in private homes, and instructional DVDs on stripping for the everyday woman. “Wives and girlfriends are flocking to classes,” she writes.

In the opposition of the Christian Right, she sees signs that “women attempting to control their own bodies are viewed as seizing God’s power.” More generally, she believes, anti-exotic dancing forces wish for “dominionism,” the “grand design to supplant our constitutional democracy with a Bible-based, Christian, theocratic governing elite.” The dominionists’ battle strategy is “imbued with militaristic rhetoric, boss political actions, multimedia campaigns, ‘street fighting,’ and psychological and legalistic approaches,” she writes. “Exotic dance is merely one among several battle targets in a broader culture war.”

Hanna does not always win in court by arguing that exotic dance, far from obscene, is “speech” with “serious artistic merit.” That is no surprise in a country with so many elected judges, she suggests. Her tack is to argue that nudity is an expressive element found in many past and present forms of mainstream arts.

Beyond judges, that argument does not convince all dance theorists either. Once more, that doesn’t surprise Hanna, who says the dance world has had its own battles for respectability—to escape a stigma of being part of the demimonde. “Contemporary dancers don’t want to bring that up again,” she says.

Some feminist theorists, too, oppose exotic dancing as an instance of the exploitation of women. The research she and others have done suggests otherwise, Hanna retorts. For starters, it suggests that stripping enhances dancers’ self-esteem. Also counter to opponents’ claims, she says, is the complexity of men’s—and increasingly, women’s—motivations in visiting adult-entertainment clubs, as well as dancers’ ploys and playfulness as they encounter male fantasy and vulnerability.

“Every generation thinks the next generation’s dance is obscene,” she notes, in a phone interview. That has included 19th-century waltz partners who went so far as to touch each other, and 1920s’ flappers who wore little and jiggled it about. It has proven true, too, of the demotic dance forms of today, such as what the young people call “booty dancing.”

“Now we accept wiggling hips, or some people do—although in some localities, they don’t want simulated sex. But what is that? You shake or move your hips?”

The scholar says she holds no brief for violence—but in eroticism, “I don’t see the harm.”

Tom Lutz is a professor in the department of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside and the founder and editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

A. If I had been asked these questions three years ago, all my answers would have been different, and not because the media landscape has changed so dramatically. I am now running a daily publication, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the majority of my reading consists of manuscripts in various stages of production.  So before getting out of bed, I read through the newly posted pieces, triple-checking the prose, the links, the layout. The first stop after LARB is always the email accounts, sometimes to actually get to work, sometimes just to see if any fires need putting out.  Then I begin the rest of what is a very brief daily tour:  Talking Points Memo and The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, then Google Analytics to check our numbers, Facebook to do some marketing, and then back to email. I bounce out of email regularly based on links—to pieces forwarded to me by friends or newsletters, and those sometimes send me on a trail of links.  I somewhat less regularly check Arts & Letters Daily and follow their leads.

Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print vs. online vs. mobile?

A. We subscribe to The New York Times and the L.A. Times, and rarely take them out of their wrappers.  I recognize this as an ecologically stupid practice; I just want to do my little to help keep them alive, but I’ve always seen the stories online before the paper arrives.  We take The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, The Economist (dislike the politics, love the coverage and the astounding efficiency of the prose), Los Angeles magazine, Vanity Fair, New York Review of Books, LRB, TLS, and there always seem to be a number of food magazines arriving related to my wife’s work [Laurie Winer is a culture and food writer.] When I get to any of these, except for the newspapers, it is almost always in print.

Q: What is the best article you’ve read recently?

A. Trick question:  of course they have all been on LARB…..

Q: What books have you recently read? Do they stand out?

A.  Much of my reading now is instigated by travel, so Peter Godwin’s books on Zimbabwe, Thant Myint-U on Burma (and Orwell’s Burmese Days), Liao Yiwu on China.  Other authors this year, for fun, Edward St. Aubyn, Andrey Kurkov, Paul Cain, Derek Raymond, Vanessa Veselka, Chad Harbach,  Teaching literature means regularly rereading great books. Thus Love Medicine, which is absolutely beautiful, for a course on collagelike novels, which started with In Our Time, Cane, and Winesburg, Ohio, and runs through The Noodle Maker, The Imperfectionists, I Hotel, and A Visit from the Goon Squad. I have recently been visiting some book clubs for fundraising purposes (LARB is reader-supported), and for them I reread House of Mirth, again thrilled by Wharton’s truly nasty sense of humor, and A Hazard of New Fortunes, with the more restrained and yet profound wit of Howells.  I’d say the mix these days is 65% physical and 35% a mix of iBooks and Kindle, with the e-books gaining.

Q: Has your reading of professional journals changed in the past 10 years?

A. I don’t read scholarly journals anymore.  I look things up in them, use them as research tools, but otherwise, no.

Q: What is your next book project?

A.  I have a noir-ish novel I am ready to get published, and I am working on a book of narrative travel essays and a multimedia e-book history of the 1920s.  If we can raise enough money to hire regular staff for LARB I’ll finish these before I die.

Q. What has been the most surprising aspect of starting a new book review?

A. Three: the incredible enthusiasm and kindness with which it has been received, the beautiful willingness of people to dive in and help make it happen, and the difficulty of raising money to sustain it.

Q. The book as object: Is it a pleasure, necessity, anachronism?

A. It remains a superb technology. There is nothing a cassette tape player can do better than a digital music player, but the physical book remains superior in a number of ways to the electronic book.  The e-book has its advantages, too, and as we get better at integrating video and audio, nonfiction e-books will quickly outpace physical. There is no reason the pleasures of the novel in physical form need ever be superseded.

Q: Do you read blogs? If so, what blogs do you like best?

A. LA Observed, my friends’ blogs too irregularly; but the place blogs once held in my reading has been superseded by The Rumpus, The Paris Review, Jacket Copy, The Millions, TPM—blog-like online magazines by more than a single hand.

Q: Do you use Twitter? If so, whom do you follow?

A. I have destroyed Facebook for myself by having 5,000 friends; I use it to let people know what’s happening on LARB, and occasionally see things from real-life friends popping up that I respond to, amidst the cacophony. We have Twitterers on the LARB staff, and I once in a while poke my head in, but mostly not.

Q: What are the guilty pleasures in your media diet?

A. I will just assume this is not a question about porn. My guilty pleasures are the dumb parts of Vanity Fair and television.  Perhaps the least defensible are Burn Notice, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (thank god it’s over), and Tosh.0. Our film editor just did Survivor, so I’ll be watching that.  I also watch shows I don’t feel particularly guilty about—Justified, Girls, Veep, 30 Rock, Mad Men, The Killing, Key & Peele—but I feel guilty watching so many of them.  If I’ve had too much to drink, I watch reruns of Rockford Files or the latest bad B noir movies added to Netflix.  And, on most days, the shows that keep me sane when I get depressed about our political sinkhole are The Daily Show and Colbert.

Sketch by Ted Benson

“The challenges were many and varied.” writes Alfred Mac Adam, a professor of Spanish at Barnard College, whose translations of the Mexican literary giant include the novels Christopher Unborn, The Years with Laura Diaz, and The Death of Artemio Cruz.

“Fuentes had a huge vocabulary, spoke several languages fluently, and could concoct wordplay among all those languages,” Mac Adam says in an e-mail to The Chronicle. “Sometimes he used Mexican slang (of the 1960s in particular in Christopher Unborn), which made life difficult for his translator. The important thing was to try to replicate the rhythm of his prose.”

As noted in many obituaries and tributes, Fuentes was a public intellectual whose influence went far beyond the literary. “Carlos’s significance for Mexico is huge: he admonished Mexicans to take charge of their history and their culture as early as 1962,” writes Mac Adam. “He was always a constructive critic, both of Mexico, the United States, and any other country he felt was acting against his idea of civilization. Carlos was a great advocate of human rights and equality before the law for all. That stance is an important one, now and forever.”

In 1981, the Paris Review ran an interview with Fuentes by Mac Adam and Charles Ruas, who met the author one wintery day in Princeton, N.J. “That interview helped Carlos map out his writing, see where he’d been, and to plan for the future,” says Mac Adam. “It was in a way the nucleus of the memoir or autobiography we all knew he would never write.”

“The last time I spoke with him, about three months ago, he outlined a memoir that would cover his early years. Whether he finished it or not I can’t say,” the scholar adds.

“Carlos Fuentes was a loyal friend. He was a human being with all the faults we humans have, but he was a glowing mind and a man who could never stop writing.”

That continual writing—novels, plays, short stories, criticism, more—has created quite a translation market. For what may be the newest Fuentes translation, readers can turn to the Dalkey Archive Press, a non-profit publisher that is housed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In July Dalkey will issue the first English version of Vlad, a vampire-themed novel that Fuentes first published in Spanish in 2010. Vlad was translated by Ethan Shaskan Bumas, a professor at New Jersey City University, and Alejandro Branger, a writer and filmmaker.

“It’s a terrific book—not, interestingly enough, a “postmodern” vampire novel (as one might expect from Fuentes) so much as just a really well written . . . vampire novel,” says Martin Riker, Dalkey’s associate director.

Fuentes’s legacy “is first of all the work itself, the immense intellectual and artistic scope of it. We have this amazing body of work that managed to remain vital over his entire career—that’s the real legacy.” Beyond that, “Fuentes was an extremely cosmopolitan writer, and his work resists all the easy classifications that American readers tend to assign to Mexican literature or art,” Riker says in an e-mail.

“We have a pretty narrow view, from this country, of what sort of art the country of Mexico produces. Magical realism, for example. If you try to say that Fuentes was a magical realist, you are faced with the gross inadequacy of that term to define the sophistication and richness of what this man was doing, and by extension what many other Mexican writers are up to.”

Dalkey Archive Press, which has issued reprinted translations of Fuentes as well, has plans for two more first-time English translations along with Vlad. Adam in Eden will be released in the late fall of 2012. In addition, a collection of Fuentes’s essays, The Great American Novel, will debut sometime in 2013.

Fuentes “came to us with his new books because he liked that we’d supported his work and kept it in print and alive in the culture. It says something about us but also says something about the changing priorities of publishing,” says Riker.

“That Fuentes came to us with these three books is of course very gratifying.”

“The politically emergent—how to interpret and write about it—is an explicit theme of the Occupy articles,” writes editor Angelique Haugerud. “A participant-observer who writes about Occupy plunges into disciplinary dilemmas of ethnographic voice, engagement, and collaborative knowledge production.”

First to take that plunge are Maple Razsa and Andrej Kurnik, authors of “The Occupy Movement in Zizek’s Hometown: Direct Democracy and a Politics of Becoming.” They offer a firsthand look at the movement in Ljubljana, home city of the philosopher Slavoj Zizek. Apparently Slovenian Occupiers were stunned as they watched their native son give an enthusiastic public address to Occupy Wall Street in New York.

Has been known to be grumpy (photo by Mariusz Kubik)

“Activists had not expected Zizek to support OWS because, his international reputation as a radical philosopher notwithstanding, his writings largely dismiss the possibility of political resistance to capitalism,” write Razsa and Kurnik. True to form, the famously grumpy theorist ultimately “dismissed protesters’ pursuit of direct democracy as a ‘dream.’”

Closer to home is Jeffrey S. Juris, whose “Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation,” draws on his observations of the Boston Occupy encampment on Dewey Square, both pre- and post-eviction.

AE’s third Occupy-related offering is “Democracy, Temporalities of Capitalism, and Dilemmas of Inclusion in Occupy Movements,” by David Nugent, who comments on his colleagues’ essays and muses further on Occupy.

Founded in 1972, American Ethnologist is the flagship journal of the American Ethnological Society, a division of the American Anthropological Association.

She succeeds Nicole Mitchell, who left Georgia in late 2011 to become director of the University of Washington Press.

Between December 1966 and May 1967 the then-64-year-old writer contributed 58 columns on the Vietnam war to Newsday, the Long Island, NY, newspaper. In them, the 1962 Nobel Laureate in literature came out strongly in favor of American actions in Southeast Asia.

Reporting from various theaters of the war, Steinbeck had 400,000 readers at Newsday, and millions more at the 29 other papers that syndicated his columns.  Now, as its lead title this season, the University of Virginia Press has issued Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War. This is the first collection of the columns and their first publication in 40 years. The dispatches “infuriated the doves and delighted the hawks,” says Thomas E. Barden, the collection’s editor and a professor of English and dean of the Honors College at the University of Toledo. Publishing them permits readers “to consider from this distance how important the essays must have been to the large number of readers who were undecided and bewildered about the war and who considered Steinbeck a reliable moral witness.”

Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), Grapes of Wrath (1939), East of Eden (1952), and other novels had provoked awareness of social injustice. Far less well known was that he had intermittently written war correspondence since the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The American incursions into Vietnam and its neighbors prompted him to renewed expressions of patriotism and support of the military. So, too, did his and his wife’s close friendship with then-President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck applauded his “Great Society” initiative, and in 1964 accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian award.

With those qualifications, Steinbeck enjoyed unusual access to the war. High-ranking officers squired him about Vietnam, Laos, and northern Thailand. Evenings, at the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, he wrote up what he had seen.

Steinbeck praised American soldiers as “glorious knights” standing against advancing Communism: “I have not been celebrating war, but brave men. They are our dearest and our best and more than that – they are our hope.” The would-be soldier emerged in the author when he fired a 105-mm. howitzer from a helicopter and referred to North Vietnamese soldiers as “Charlie” and “leprechauns.” Steinbeck also ventured out with river patrols on the Mekong, trained on the M-79 grenade launcher, witnessed a B-52 bombing run, and flew on reconnaissance missions. He offered such tactical suggestions as shipping homeless Saigon street boys to rural areas to serve as spies.

The author heaped scorn on anti-war protesters back home: “Their shuffling, drag-ass protests that they are conscience-bound not to kill people are a little silly,” he wrote in January 1967. Barden says that Steinbeck believed that the true motivation of “the hippies, folksingers, and self-indulgent college students who opposed the war while hiding behind their 2-S draft deferments” was cowardice.

Protesters branded Steinbeck a warmonger who had betrayed progressive politics just as opposition to the war peaked on American campuses and streets. His columns perturbed journalists at Newsday, too, according to Anthony Marro, its editor from 1987 to 2003. In a review of Barden’s volume, he recalls that “the columns caused much muttering in the newsroom at the time, not just because they were so fiercely hawkish but because many staffers considered them too unequivocal even for commentary.”

Marro observes, however, that Harry Guggenheim, the paper’s owner, applauded Steinbeck. The author had labeled his dispatches “Letters to Alicia” in reference to Guggenheim’s wife, who had died three years earlier after serving as the paper’s editor since 1940.

The columns also put paid to doubts about Steinbeck’s patriotism. In 1943, the U.S. Army’s intelligence service had declared him unfit for military service; indeed, the Army rejected Steinbeck several times. A Federal Bureau of Investigation dossier spoke of “substantial doubt as to subject’s loyalty and discretion” due to associations with the Communist Party which amounted only to some Communist publications excerpting his writing, notes Barden.

The scholar says such aspersions unfairly tarred Steinbeck. He says Steinbeck was “basically an enthusiastic and liberal New Deal Democrat” who had gone to work without pay during World War II at the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, to combat Nazi propaganda. With his “emphatically anti-collectivist mindset,” he had traveled to the Soviet Union for the State Department and penned a scathing indictment of Soviet oppression.

Steinbeck did come to question the war, but never publicly. Barden quotes from a Steinbeck letter: “I know we cannot win this war, nor any war for that matter. And it seems to me the design is to sink deeper and deeper into it, more and more of us.” He admitted the war could not be made “decent.” Writes Barden: “By the end of the summer of 1967 Steinbeck had actually grasped a great intractable predicament of the war, the thing that the best and brightest military strategists kept missing—that the American presence was, in the eyes of the Vietnamese people, an army of occupation.”

Barden regrets Steinbeck’s silence. During the years when the novelist’s opinions might have altered American attitudes towards continued engagement in Southeast Asia, Barden himself was drafted into military service, and deployed to Vietnam. But the professor thinks well of the columns: “Many of them still have the spell-casting power of Steinbeck’s great works of fiction.”

Other critics are less convinced. Kirkus Review ridicules the writing: “Sometimes Steinbeckian in texture and bite, but often tone-deaf, tendentious, and surpassingly sad.”

Marro, the former Newsday editor, agrees: “The columns, for the most part, were not particularly good when they were written and seem even less so in retrospect.”

Helen Sword is a professor in the Centre for Academic Development at the University of Auckland.  Her new book,

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

A. On weekdays I get up at 6 am, put the kettle on for a cup of tea, and settle myself in front of my computer to write for an hour before breakfast. If I’m being good, the first thing I read before I start writing is the last paragraph that I wrote the day before. If I’m not being good, I take a sneak peek at my email first.

Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print vs. online vs. mobile?

My family subscribes to the New Zealand Herald and The New York Times online, plus a few glossy magazines such as National Geographic, the Princeton Alumni Weekly, and Rugby World (a publication of high intellectual caliber, according to my husband).  I tussle with my teenaged kids at the breakfast table to get a glimpse of the NZ Herald before work—a quick hit of local news and international stories from the major U.S. and U.K. wire services—but for deeper coverage I go to The New York Times. Whenever I travel to the U.S., I devour back issues of Harper’s and The New Yorker at the homes of friends and relatives; however, I don’t think I could do that much reading every day of my life and get much else done.

Q: What books have you recently read?  How do they stand out?

A. Ann Patchett’s wonderful novel State of Wonder sent me back to reread Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which Patchett subtly and not-so-subtly rescripts.  Now I’m making my slow and fascinated way through Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, whom I can’t help comparing to Patchett’s Dr. Swenson and Conrad’s Kurtz: a charismatic leader who sucks followers into a “reality distortion field” that makes them believe anything is possible.  Whether the setting is the Congo, the Amazon, or Silicon Valley, it’s essentially the same story: ethics and individuality are sublimated to one person’s overwhelming vision.

Q: What is the best article you’ve read recently?
My current research focuses on “stylish academic writing” from across the disciplines, so I get to read a lot of scholarly articles that fall outside my own fields of expertise.  A few days ago, for example, following a serendipitous trail of recommendations and links, I came upon an article by management professor Amanda Sinclair called “Body Possibilities in Leadership” – a compelling account of how contemporary leadership discourse fails to account for the gendered, racialized, and otherwise embodied reality of leaders’ physical presence.  Although it was aimed at an audience of management scholars, I found the article both accessible and illuminating: now I look at media photographs of local and world leaders in a completely new way.

Q: What is your greatest criticism of much academic writing?

A. In contrast to Sinclair’s lucid and engaging paper, many academic articles are quite frankly unreadable, not only by disciplinary outsiders but by close colleagues.  Often the problem is simply poor craftsmanship:  perhaps the author has tried to cram three or four major ideas into a single sentence, leaving the reader to do the hard work of disentangling all those nested subordinate clauses.  Another common issue is an excessive allegiance to the discourse of abstraction: it’s not uncommon to find nine, ten, or more spongy abstract nouns (examples: allegiance, discourse, abstraction) cohabiting in a single sentence. The human attention span has trouble coping with that much vagueness.  Stylish academic writers anchor abstract ideas in the physical world, using stories, case studies, metaphors, illustrations, concrete nouns, and vivid verbs, and lots and lots of examples.

Q: Has your reading of professional journals changed in the past 10 years?

A. I now find it almost impossible to read an academic article without analyzing its style.  For example, if I open up a higher education research journal and find a sentence that says, “Rarely is there an effective conceptual link between the current understandings of the centrality of text to knowledge production and student learning and the pragmatic problems of policy imperatives in the name of efficiency and capacity-building,” I automatically note the high proportion of abstract nouns, the total lack of concrete language (even the word link is used abstractly), and the erasure of human agency (neither students nor higher education researchers, the subjects of the article, are grammatically present in the sentence.) Fortunately, this tendency works both ways: I am also highly attentive to and hugely appreciative of stylish academic writing.

Q: Do you read blogs? If so, what blogs do you like best?

I don’t follow any specific blogs, but I nearly always click on links to online articles and blog posts recommended by colleagues on the various educational email lists I subscribe to—a useful filtering system. I seem to end up most frequently at The Chronicle of Higher Education and the Harvard Business Review Web sites.

Q: Do you use Twitter? If so, whom do you follow?

A. No.  Who has the time?

Q: What are the guilty pleasures in your media diet?

I’ll admit to being somewhat addicted—is that the same thing as a guilty pleasure?—to my own WritersDiet Test. When I paste in a sample of my writing and click “Run the test,” I either get a reassuring diagnosis that my prose is “fit and trim” or a salutary warning that it “needs toning.” The test reminds me to favor active verbs, avoid excessive abstraction, and banish unnecessary clutter from my prose.

Sketch by Ted Benson

Kaiserlian has been director at Virginia since 2001, a position that capped off a career of more than 40 years in scholarly publishing. Before going to Charlottesville, she was at the University of Chicago Press, where she became editorial director and associate director in 1983.

When asked about her most gratifying projects at Virginia, Kaiserlian mentions Rotunda, the press’s electronic imprint. When she arrived, money was available from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the university’s president’s office to create a digital imprint for “peer-reviewed, born-digital scholarship.”  Rotunda, she says, “has now developed a number of prestigious projects, some born-digital, and some converted from major scholarly editions of the past 40 years.”  Examples of the latter include the papers of five of the Founding Fathers, while the “born-digital” editions have included the correspondence of Dolley Madison and other figures of the Founding era.

Kaiserlian is also pleased to see the growth of Virginia’s architecture list. In 2005, the press picked up “Buildings of the United States,” a series from the Society of Architectural Historians that was originally published by Oxford. Not surprisingly, there’s a digital wrinkle to that project as well. SAH and the press are collaborating on the SAH-Archipedia, a resource based on the available materials from the series that is scheduled to be released this fall. Plus, an open-access version of a portion of the material, SAH-Archipedia Classic Buildings, was just announced at the SAH meeting last week, Kaiserlian says, and will soon be available to the public, free of charge.  “It’s a web-based resource, but it works fine on a smart phone too.”

Kaiserlian says that UVa plans to form a visiting committee before a formal search committee, so the hunt for her replacement will likely not begin before summer.