Review: On Campus with Women
August 24th, 2008A recent issue of On Campus with Women reviewed Mama, PhD; here’s an excerpt:
“These frank essays recognize the value of communicating with others over shared experience, and they offer comfort and sustenance to women who have found that motherhood shakes the foundations of academe’s infamous mind-body divide.
“…Celebratory but realistic, these essays illustrate the multitude of choices available (and still unavailable) to women and the great rewards (and considerable pitfalls) of fitting motherhood into the academic mold. In offering concrete suggestions to improve institutional support for women with children, the anthology connects personal experience to systemic change and gestures toward academe’s potential to provide truly family-friendly workplaces. Its stories will be of interest to young scholars contemplating motherhood, to current parents who feel isolated by expectations that they “perform childlessness,” and to anyone wondering how mothers are faring within the academy. ”
Click here to read the complete review!
The MotherTalk Blog Tour!
August 20th, 2008We’re thrilled to announce that the MotherTalk blog tour for Mama, PhD has begun with a great post from blue milk:
“Mama PhD is not just a shoulder to cry on for readers grappling with what they may have thought were unique troubles in juggling academia and motherhood, it is also a call to arms for women and men in academia to make change happen, to make academia a place consistent with the lives of both men and women. Evans and Grant, the editors of the book, understand that there is a power in speaking out, that when women hear many other women are struggling in exactly the same fashion we suddenly see our experiences not as personal incompetence but as a larger injustice.”
Today, Compost Happens (I have to say, I am loving the blog names almost as much as the reviews) weighed in with this:
“I hope that Mama, PhD will spread the word through the bastions of higher education: policies that marginalize women also marginalize our children, our future, and our present. The glass ceiling is cracking in the business world; the marble ceiling has shattered, but gender equity hasn’t cracked the ivory tower yet.”
Twenty bloggers will review the book over the next two weeks; you can check for updates here at MotherTalk.
Question, Question, Who’s Got a Question?
August 5th, 2008Tedra Osell, aka Bitch PhD, is now fielding questions about combining family and academic life over at the Mama, PhD blog on InsideHigherEd. Click on over and send her your questions; she’s got answers!
Mama, PhD on The Debutante Ball
July 28th, 2008Months ago, the lovely and talented Gail Konop Baker, a former Literary Mama columnist, invited Elrena and me to guest blog at The Debutante Ball, a group blog for writers publishing their first book. It was a fun post to write — and I hope a fun post to read! Here’s an excerpt from “3,000 Miles, Two Writers, One Book:”
Meet over email. Of course; you live, after all, 3,000 miles apart, but it helps our relationship get into writing right away. We are literally words on a page (screen) to each other for the first year of our collaboration (we don’t even talk on the phone!) It doesn’t hurt that we meet via Elrena’s submission to the section of Literary Mama that Caroline is editing at the time.
Meet when one of you is pregnant. This helps get the conversation personal, pronto, as Caroline cautions Elrena that she might not get back to her very promptly with edits.
Don’t always stick to the point. We know we are both writers, and mothers, and if we’d stayed on topic it might have stayed at that. Instead, we digress into breastfeeding and parenting and graduate school and ivory tower life — and friendship. And then, ultimately, a book.
Click on over to The Debutante Ball to read the rest!
Review on Author Magazine
July 27th, 2008Check out the review by Kevin Lauderdale in the new edition of Author, which highlights the essay by Jamie Warner:
Contributor Jamie Warner and her husband endlessly debate whether or not to have children. In what is the book’s most crucial and telling line, she writes that their indecision comes from “the same skills that got us our degrees and jobs in the first place: fertile imaginations, a compulsive need to make lists, the ability to see problems from a variety of perspectives, and worst of all, the need to question societal norms.”
Click here to read more.
A Review!
June 15th, 2008Mama, PhD is getting out into the world now, making its way to readers and reviewers. Today, we spotted this review on Activistas, by the wonderful Bob Drago (whom we considered wonderful, for the work he does on academics and family life, even before he wrote this review). Here’s an excerpt:
This is easily the most important piece of work to date on academics and family issues, full-stop, because the editors draw out from the authors all of the messiness, the highs and lows, the fears and hopes, the pride, guilt, anger, love and sense of failure and accomplishment and mainly great stories that comprise life for so many moms who try to make it as academics. The panopoly of supportive or unkind department chairs and colleagues, high and low status schools, childcare arrangements that work or don’t work, supportive or non-existent partners, and perfect and not-so-perfect children is all here.
You can click on over to Activistas to read the rest!
Mama, PhD: The T-Shirt! and the hat! and the bag!
June 13th, 2008
Get your Mama, PhD shwag here at Cafe Press and let the world know you’ve got it going on , body and brain.
Now Shipping!
May 31st, 2008We’re delighted to announce that Mama, PhD is in stock and shipping now, so if you pre-ordered, look for your copy soon!
Mama, PhD blog on Inside Higher Ed!
May 4th, 2008We are thrilled to announce that InsideHigherEd is launching a new Mama PhD blog, and seven of our contributors — Libby Gruner, Megan Kajitani, Susan Bassow, Dana Campbell, Liz Stockwell, Anjalee Nadkarni and Della Fenster — will be blogging regularly there. This is a tremendous opportunity to bring the discussion of academic work/ family life balance issues out of the book, into the blogosphere and from there into classrooms and campus administrative offices.
Please check out the blog, leave your comments, and send questions to Megan (for now, via info@insidehighered.com; the blog will soon list a more direct address) who will be writing a weekly advice column. And then please spread the word! Tell your friends, add the link to your blogroll, and help us build an audience for our bloggers.
Mama, PhD in the Berkeley Grad Student Newsletter
April 11th, 2008Check out our nice write-up in the recent edition of eGrad, a newsletter for Berkeley graduate students.
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