When I was in middle school I loved history: ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, the Middle Ages always fascinated me. Often during the summer vacation, I would read the history books in advance to prepare for the upcoming history classes (big surprise, I am a nerd). Old...
I replicated the go-to method for using ChatGPT to “cheat” on college essays. Here are my takeaways.
When I first started teaching intro to IR, I closed the semester with lectures on climate change and the second Congo war (or "Africa's world war"). This was part of my effort to include current and...
It’s no surprise that current events regularly lead us to update our syllabi. That doesn’t mean we can’t make “surprise” an important feature of our courses.
I wrapped the 2022 edition of my undergraduate “Grand Strategy” seminar this past Tuesday. This must have the eight or ninth iteration of the class. I like teaching it. I really do. But I have significant reservations about “grand strategy” as a classroom subject. I’m not at all convinced that grand strategy is a thing. Yes, plenty of people advocate for a preferred “grand strategies.” Not a few of them would love to become the ‘next George F. Kennan,’ which leads to some truly eyeroll-worthy titles. It’s one thing to point to a proposal, such...
In this “Whiskey Optional” episode, PTJ facilitates a conversation among four colleagues from dif…
The volume calls on international-relations instructors to make use of “subversive pedagogies” — ones that embrace a more holistic understanding of teaching. It invites academics to interrogate what we teach, how we teach, where we teach, and whom we teach.
Daniel J. Levine is Aaron Aronov Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Alabama, where he divides his time between the Departments of Political Science and Religious Studies. Information on his research can be found here. Last fall, I taught – as I have done every year since coming to the University of Alabama (UA) – an upper-division lecture-seminar on the Israel-Palestine Conflict. The topic is never an easy one, with both the transition to remote teaching, and the acutely partisan political climate of the US elections, adding to the...
In less than a month, I'll be teaching "Introduction to International Relations" for the first time in over ten years. As luck (for certain values of "luck") would have it, this means I'm building a 100-200 person course from scratch and teaching it online. But where some might see a yawning black pit of despair, I see a yawning black pit of despair... and opportunity. Why not experiment a bit? I know a lot of professors are thinking this way, so at the start of the summer some of us talked about working together to produce shareable content. We had plans! We had pants to match! And massive...
How do we communicate ideas to our audience? What steps can we take to introduce advanced concepts to our students or the general public? Scholars work for decades on the content of their arguments but spend very little time thinking about how to translate their ideas for specific consumers of information. In Phil Arena’s review of Braumoeller’s new excellent book, he makes a baseball reference, later noting that he does not even like sports. This is a typical tactic in Political Science, if not all of academia. We often make sports metaphors and analogies in order to push our point...
The first video ever played on MTV, back when MTV played music videos most of the time, was the one-hit wonder "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles. A lament about how new technology ended the career of a singer who was well-adapted to the production standards and genre constraints of an earlier era, the song recounts an irreversible process: In my mind and in my car We can't rewind we've gone too far Pictures came and broke your heart Put the blame on VTR Maybe this rings a faint bell for some of you. In any case, for a quick refresher, you can watch the whole thing here. The great...
With all of the focus on APSA, there’s been little discussion of another Labor Day ritual—the Revising of the Syllabus. In truth, I should have begun this ritual a few weeks ago. Now that the panic dreams have kicked in—you know, the ones where you show up to class on the first day without a syllabus and thus lose all authority over your students for the rest of the semester…you do get those too, right?—I know I must take action. My first task is to revise my introductory-level course on security studies and, luckily, it’s in pretty good shape, thanks to some major overhauls I did over the...