I'm Alive!

Sorry I haven't been posting recently - since classes began, life has been pretty hectic. Even tonight I still have to read about 60 pages (critically read them - not just skim) and write up some thoughts for a seminar tomorrow with a bunch of Ph.D. students. Very hardcore.

But at the same time fun. The discipline I focus on is called "visual transculture" which is something like superstring theory except for art historians. Basically, I am studying the visual aspects of the larger anthropological and sociological perspective of transculture, which in itself posits that cultures cannot exist in discrete units because cultures are inherently incomplete and thus must borrow from the world around them. What this creates are objects, ideas, and people which are not cross-cultural, but transcultural in the sense that the span not only across but above the "borders" of cultural production. This is a radical idea in anthropology, one that is only just being understood, and UW-Madison is one of the only art history departments in America where one can study it in depth.

So basically I feel privileged.

More to come later, including restuarant explorations, more about grad student life, and why Hot Spicy Cheese Bread is the greatest invention north of I-80.