Doesn’t it always, you might be saying…
But anyways, that is a quote from a paper entitled “The Wine in the Urine: Managing Human Waste in French Farce” and, as Charlotte Allen has it, pretty much sums up the state of affairs in the unlikely venue of Kalamazoo, Mich., where the largest Medieval Studies conference is held annually.
Academia is a place where the lowest (or even just the lower) rungs of the totem pole must specialize to novel and weird limits in order to justify a scholarly existence. Anyone who thought that such parochial-sounding fields like Medieval Studies were immune to this trend — well, this piece is for you. (Indeed, with a smaller source base to work with, medievalists seem to be among the more postmodern of scholars these days.)
P.S. Reading Allen’s piece reminded me of a trip to the African Studies Association a couple years ago, which I wrote about here. How amusing, though not surprising, that both events have dance parties and professorial friskiness on offer.