#reverb10, day 22: Travel
Prompt the 22nd:
Travel. How did you travel in 2010? How and/or where would you like to travel next year?
Ooh, this is timely. I’m writing from the executive lounge of the Prague Marriott hotel, where R. and I are enjoying another of our vaunted working vacations. I know they make some people I know crazy — we should be out, doing touristy things! But neither of us is big on the touristy stuff, and given that this is our third trip to Prague, we’ve seen most of what we wanted to see. Mostly what we want to do on these trips is be elsewhere, to settle into the sounds and flavors of another culture in the way that we would if we lived there. (Okay, if we lived there in a fancy schmancy hotel with no real responsibilities.)
It’s my favorite way to travel: go somewhere, settle in, drink lots of coffee, write like a fiend.
But this year’s travel has also included a fair number of conferences and an exciting bunch of lecture trips to amazing places:
- January: Resting up for what was to come, apparently.
- February: A talk at the University of Michigan; the Digital Media + Learning conference at UCSD.
- March: SCMS in Los Angeles (not exactly travelly, but I did stay in a hotel downtown); keynoting the NITLE Summit in New Orleans.
- April: Speaking at a one-day conference on the digital university at CUNY.
- May: The beginning of travel insanity, including an MLA Program Committee meeting in New York; a one-day conference at Dartmouth; and THATCamp at George Mason, followed by a two-day meeting in DC (interrupted by a very nasty stomach virus which I will not consider further).
- June: An astonishing trip to Istanbul for an ESF-COST workshop on digital textuality, followed immediately by the cognitive dissonance of the Association of American University Presses meeting in Salt Lake City, followed immediately by the Association of Departments of English West summer seminar in Claremont.
- July: A trip through New York in preparation for my fall sabbatical, followed by a trip to London for DH2010, followed by a brief return through New York on my way to Charlottesville for the Scholarly Communications Institute (where I mostly became famous for having lost my suitcase).
- August: No travel per se, just a little moving-to-New-York thing.
- September: Only a quick visit to see folks in Louisiana, which surprises me in retrospect, because…
- October: Included a return to George Mason for the Archiving Social Media workshop; a lecture at the Rochester Institute of Technology, followed immediately by a Hudson River Valley retreat with the NYU Humanities Initiative, followed immediately by a trip to Gothenburg, Sweden for IR11; and a two-day trip to speak at Boston University.
- November: Happily a more restful month, taking me only to Rutgers for a seminar at the Center for Cultural Analysis; followed by a trip to Haverford to keynote the undergraduate DH conference, Re:Humanities; followed by a one-day DC venture on college business.
- December: Only the current trip, which began on the 15th with a holiday visit to Baton Rouge, has now taken me to Prague, will send me to Dublin in a few days, and then, in the first days of the next year, will find me in Los Angeles for the MLA.
The 2011 lineup already includes:
- January: The aforementioned MLA, plus a three-day symposium in New York the following week.
- February: Lectures at the University of Kansas and Duke University.
- March: A talk at UIUC, SCMS in New Orleans, and, if I’m very lucky, a quick trip to SXSWi.
- April: A talk at Vassar, and possibly one more awesome European adventure, if the planning works out.
Happily, being on sabbatical, I’ve been able to accept almost all the offers that have come my way, but it’s clear that I won’t be able to keep up this pace once my leave is over. So once I move back to Claremont — probably in early June — the travel should slow a bit. But I’m hoping to get one more good writing vacation in over the summer.
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