Article accepted

After months of hard labor, revision, rewriting, and editing, two conference presentations, and two previous submissions, the article I have written with Rob Lamb on Lockean Charity is accepted.

This is pretty thrilling news for me, as having a publication is one of the key requirements for any realistic job application in England or America (and also Canada and Australia, I would presume).  But the the real pleasure is knowing that my work is being appreciated.  It's very important as an academic to know that your work can cut the mustard.

I received the news just a little while after I arrived in Korea, so I was able to celebrate with Ahreum.   She took me out to a very nice little Italian restaurant cafe.  We had some salad with wonderful aged balsamic vinegar and fresh mozzarella, proper pizza with parma ham and rockette, and a little ice cream to finish it off.  We then walked through Apgujeong (a rather ritzy part of Seoul) to find a wine cafe and had a bottle of bubbly.

The jovial attitude continued as we spent Saturday out on the town, doing a little window shopping (rather exhausting), and walking in the Olympic park (brilliant). 

 

 

On Sunday we went to Dongdaemun and had some Korean galbi barbeque and soju with Ahreum's mom.  Afterwards we walked in the Soedaemun area, close to where Ahreum's high school was founded.  She looked quite lovely in the shade of Doeksu palace. 

 

 

 

After the celebratory weekend, I got back to work on Monday, and prepared corrections to the article in response to the feedback we received from our reviewers.  There was some very helpful material there, and I hope that our final corrections will greatly improve the conceptual force of the piece. 

Now I'm returning to my Locke chapter on his opposition to innate ideas and his theory of language.  I've rethought the structure of my Locke chapters, and am moving this chapter to pole position.  This means I have to pretty much rewrite the introduction.  But I think this should make for a stronger and more relevant thesis as a whole.  It should also have the unintended result of less work - always a good result.
But that does not mean no work.  In fact, I have rather a lot of work to get through.  Duty calls.

 

Once more into the breach,

Ben

Harvard Political Theory Graduate Conference

Yesterday I sent out a version of my paper on Lockean will to the organizers of a postgraduate conference at Harvard.  They have a very competitive application procedure.  They want a full draft of the paper, which will be peer reviewed by the PhD students at Harvard.  They are only going to accept seven presenters, which means, I surmise, that there will only ever be one panel of presentations at a time.

 

One of the aims of the conference is to bring together a thorough representation of the different sub-fields in political theory.  This is especially valuable, they claim, because of the limited institutional support political theory receives.  I think this is more representative of the American academy than the British, but it is certainly true that other fields have more research money available to them and are often more compelling to appoint.  But at the same time, just about every politics department in the UK will imagine that political theory is necessary and at least one or two specialists must be on staff.  I don't know if the same modicum is normal across most American political science and government departments.

 

All that said, it seems strange that they will only take seven papers, if there ambitions are such.  The quality of the papers though, will be very high.  I hope that I am able to present; I'll know in a month.  But irregardless I will be there for the conference, my ticket is already booked.  One of my old Elementary through High school friends is now living in Boston, as is a good friend of Aherum and me.  I have another good friend from University who is currently there, but might not be by the time I leave.  But hopefully I'll be able to catch up with Professor Patrick Riley, who started me off on political thought.

 

Afterwards, I'm going home to Janesville for just about one month.  And the best thing: Ahreum is coming home for Christmas again this year.  It will be exactly four years since we first met.  I'm quite excited.

 

Once more into the breach,

 

Ben