academic's daydream

The advice for academics was always that you should use your teaching to help foster your research and vice versa. Ideally, you would make things easier for yourself by teaching what you wanted to research. I increasingly understand the pull of this inclination as my reading list grows and my time and brain energy for reading shrinks. Just the other day I caught myself wishing I could do oral comps again, but with a new list of books that I didn't even know I wanted or needed to read when I was in graduate school. Of course, the problem with this advice is that it takes for granted steady student enrollment in literature classes and thus that students will want to read the same things that I want to research. But for now, here's a random little daydream about a class on gender and socialism in literature, which is also just me selfishly turning my reading list that never gets read into a class that will force me to read it.