The Job Talk (draft)

September 12, 2014
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Steve Krause
September 12, 2014 4:40 pm

I think this is all great advice, Collin. For the searches I’ve been involved in at EMU, we’ve asked candidates to speak for about 20 or so minutes about scholarship, 20 or so minutes about teaching (with obvious connections between the two), and to make sure to expect about 20 or so minutes of discussion. So for us, it hasn’t been straight-up “here’s my research,” but I also wouldn’t want to suggest that all we want to see is teaching stuff.

Besides just generally unorganized/unprepared/nervous/etc. presentation (I am with you about scripting, and my advice is always along the lines of “you don’t want to just read a paper, but you also want to have enough of what you’re going to say written out to be comfortable”), the other thing that I’ve seen as the kiss of death is a candidate who decided to not follow the directions given to them by the search committee. I’ve seen people completely ignore talking about their teaching, for example; or, even worse, I’ve seen candidates with absolutely no sense of time or space and just rambling lost and confused for 60 minutes with no time for discussion. Oh, those are painful to watch.

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Hey there. I'm Collin Gifford Brooke, and I'm currently an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Syracuse University. I'm a digital humanities person, back from before there was a digital humanities. I wrote a book called Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media, about how new media changes the ways we think about rhetoric and writing and which uses the five canons of rhetoric to think about new media. I'm interested in games, streams, networks, objects, genres, memes, and stuff. Oh, and words. Lots and lots of words.

I started blogging back in 2003, on a site called Collin vs Blog, where I banged out close to a thousand entries over the course of about 5 years. For a few different reasons, I stopped, and after a couple of different false starts, I relocated here, where I'm hoping to pick up some of my old site's momentum, start archiving myself better, and return to writing on a daily basis.