From the Busy Basement

Begun as a requirement for a graduate seminar on visual culture, "From the Busy Basement" details my progression through obtaining my M.A. in Cultural Studies (and, hopefully, my continuing academic adventures after that).  Film...television...popular culture...gender....history and memory.....those are just a few of the areas I'll tackle.  The goal is to get ideas from my head down onto (virtual) paper, workshop pieces of scholarship, and engage in discussion - it's all about discourse, so please let me know what you think!

As for the somewhat strange title, its origins lie in the way my graduate school is physically set up - 2/3 of my classes are held in the basement.  To be fair, they are very nice classrooms and several of them are technically barely below ground level thanks to the strange hill the building sits on - but it is a basement nonetheless.  I also thought it was an amusing metaphor for academia in general.  If administrators and tenured, senior faculty are up in ivory towers, grad students are the ones toiling away in the bowels of the castle.

...but "basement" sounds a little better than "bowels", wouldn't you say?