First things first: I passed my dissertation defense. Assuming I manage to meet the requisite deadlines and get the necessary paperwork completed -- admittedly unsafe assumptions -- I will graduate in August of 2009 with a Ph.D in medical humanities.
Second, I mentioned that changes were afoot at MH Blog. These changes will not be instituted all at once because, frankly, I don't have the time to do so. Once I defended, the six projects I had put on hold to concentrate on the defense demanded my immediate attention, and so I have been preoccupied with their requirements.
There will, however, be changes to MH Blog, and I plan to gradually phase them in over the next few months. What can readers expect?
When I began this weblog in September 2006, I consciously modeled the format over Larry Solum's wonderful Legal Theory Blog. Though the quality of the blogging over there puts most of the rest of us to shame, this blog has evolved into something quite different from Larry's masterpiece. For example, the literature metacrawlers have become much less thorough and less formal, for a number of reasons, mostly pertaining to the enormous scope of interdisciplinary scholarship relevant to the medical humanities (and concomitant resource limitations).
I still enjoy highlighting recently published or forthcoming work that strikes me as important to the medical humanities, and therein is the key to understanding the changes that will come to MH Blog: they will all revolve around me.
Self-deprecating jabs at my own narcissism aside for the moment, MH Blog has never formally been a record of my own academic pursuits and interests. Over time, the functional separation I tried to maintain between my own work and what I deemed important to the medical humanities eroded, if it was ever perceptible to begin with. Indeed, as I've noted, no student of the medical humanities can with a straight face maintain the existence of an ontological separation between the subject and the object of investigation (for more on why, read Montaigne).
Therefore, all of the changes at MH Blog will reflect my desire to formally collapse this attempted separation entirely. MH Blog will, in relatively short order, become intimately connected with my own work and scholarship. These connections to a greater or lesser extent have already been obvious to the able reader, but I intend to make them more consistent and even more transparent.
This should not result in any dramatic and immediate alterations in the style, the substance, or the format of the posts; but I expect and hope that the differences in how I intend to blog about my work and the medical humanities will emerge from the posts themselves, as any good piece of interdisciplinary work ought to demonstrate.
In short, it is as just as Montaigne, who remains the patron saint of MH Blog, says in the emblazoned quotation: It is myself that I paint.
