Odd question, but how does somebody write an academic biography? I'm so used to history being about broad social forces I'm not sure how someone would write a rigorous and well grounded work on a single individual.

On the public engagement front, tonight I will be giving a 90-minute lecture at the library's main branch about the tensions between fiction and history as seen through the lens of Downton Abbey. As my prep work has basically involved rewatching lots of episodes of the show, I can't really say I've been displeased by the process.

Well, the thing "blowing up" in Africanist circles lately is #CadaanStudies. It's part of a furor over questions of power and appropriation of identity in the academy, mostly by white academics (who are still the majority of academic experts on Africa). The catalyst was a grad-launched journal (Somaliland Journal of African Studies) that not only had no Somali editorial board members, but it also had no papers actually on Somali topics! The argument really exploded when a German specialist on the Horn commented with some rather amazing things that sound so perfectly attuned to Edward Said's archetypical Orientalist that it's hard to believe they're real. (And yes, I know this reaches beyond history--but rarely are walls around African subjects labeled as history; the same issues obtain.)

There's a decent article here on the kerfluffle as of a week ago. It's led to some meaningful discussion and certainly a lot of awareness, and I expect next year's ASA and ASAUK will be quite interesting as a result. The questions of who has the right to speak for people in a country as an expert, and whether any special right accrues to nationals in that scheme, are thorny ones full of vituperation and loaded down with the weight of a lot of history themselves. I don't think too many people will defend this "journal" based on its content, but some will--and have--defended the concept itself.