About us ...

This blog is the brainchild of two people:  Dr. Beth Heywood and Dr. Steven Hrotic.

Dr. Beth Heywood is a, shall we say, lapsed academic. She exists on the outskirts of academia, somewhat by choice, somewhat by circumstance. She started out life as a music major, but after realizing that becoming a professional musician was out of reach, she decided that a career as a professor would be more easily attainable. You can laugh at this. It’s okay. She teaches various subjects at a handful of schools and blogs about academic things here.

Beth’s goal for this blog is mostly just to work with Steven, but also to write about whatever catches her fancy at the moment that is roughly related to academia, books, cognition, and the strange times we live in. She sees tribal fractures in all aspects of life, as her brain (and yours) never really advanced too far from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. 

Dr. Steven Hrotic is a devoutly interdisciplinary anthropologist—though he prefers to say he’s “polygnostic,” probably because he’s hoping someone will ask him what that means.  After an abortive attempt to study chemical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon, he majored in anthropology at the University of Vermont (while tutoring for Physics and for Religion), before earning a PhD in History and Anthropology at the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast … before conducting postgraduate research with biologists at the University of Utrecht and philosophers at the University of Texas.  He is currently happily teaching at Norwich University back home in Vermont, which he tries to balance against moderate obsessions with birdwatching, antique science fiction, and tea.

Steven is of the opinion (though Beth might have different ideas) that the point of this blog is to explore ideas related to perceiving academia as a tribe:  as a group of people with a unique culture—and as a collection of disciplinary clans, sharing to some degree a vague norm of interdisciplinarity; as a place to talk about shared experiences—rewards, frustrations, opportunities, dangers; and as a place to brainstorm what the new role of academia may be in these “interesting” times.  And, frankly, to amuse himself and his friends who are, by most standards, tragically over-educated.