Jason M. Kelly's Blog, page 8

Summer Reading: A War and Peace Reading Timeline

A schedule for reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace over three months (about 10 pages each day).

Infant Mortality in Indiana

Indiana ranks 43rdfor its infant mortality rate (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2017). Over the past 5 years in Indiana, an average of 596 babies have died annually, approximately one baby every 14 hours (Indiana State Department of Health, 2017). Twenty-nine of Indiana’s 988 (2.9%) zip codes account for 27% of Indiana’s infant deaths. Major contributors to the persistence of poor birth outcomes in Indiana’s high risk zip codes are racial/ethnic, geographic and socioeconomic dispa...

Soft Launch of our IUPUI Public Art Walking Tour Art

For the past year, I have been working with a team of scholars from across the IUPUI Campus to develop a few public art projects. In addition to commissioning two new works of art, we have created a Public Art Walking Tour app. Right now, the app is in beta and focuses exclusively on sculpture on the IUPUI campus. In the next six months, we will be adding architecture and painting to the the app. You can try out the app by clicking here.

Google Trends Data Shows Increasing Public Interest in the "Anthropocene"

There are numerous indicators that suggest increasing public interest in the Anthropocene—a concept that suggests humanity has transformed the earth to such an extent that we have entered a new biogeophysical age. In this interactive graph, I have pulled data from Google Trends, which shows quantitative evidence of growing interest in the Anthropocene.

Could Your Kid Could Do That?

How many times in the last few months have I heard somebody say, "my kid could do that"? At our weaker moments, I’m sure many of us have wanted to offer a snarky response…

John Ruskin on the Tomb of Agostino Sanctucio at the Basilica of Santa Croce

These are a couple photos from the Basilica of S. Croce in Florence that I took while I was there in December. In addition to my Blue Guide, I brought along John Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence, which he published in 1875. Here is his description of the tomb of Agostino Sanctucio, which sits quite neatly with his chapter on the nature of the Gothic from Stones of Venice.

Aesthetic Categories in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Looking at Neoclassicism, the Renaissance, and the Gothic through Word Frequencies

One of my ongoing projects has been a historiography of the concepts of neoclassicism, the gothic, and the renaissance over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As part of this work, I ran some Google n-grams to chart the emergence of these categories. I don’t think that there is anything surprising in the data, but it’s nevertheless interesting to see it visualized. The first graph looks at the terms “Neoclassical,” “Renaissance,” “Gothic,” and “Arts and Crafts.” The s...

A Multimodal Approach to the Anthropocene

Using An Anthropocene Primer as our case study, this essay is organized into three sections. The first section introduces the primer as a tool that bridges disciplinary boundaries to advance critical and timely sociocultural research examining changing earth systems and the human experience. The second section examines the ways that anthropologists might productively engage with the dominant interdisciplinary debates and metanarratives about the Anthropocene and the role that tools such as th...

The Wrong Question: Is This Higher Education's Golden Age?

In sum, I don't disagree with Brint's data. Rather, I think that his essay unnecessarily rejects valid critiques of the state of higher education. Certainly, by some metrics, the US system of higher education is running on all cylinders. However, this has come at a cost: the increasing commodification of knowledge; cuts in public support and the concurrent rise of private debt; the instrumentalization of public education to serve market demands; and the balooning of the faculty precariat.