Monday, April 07, 2008

Delia Lloyd on Academic Blogs

But will she start a blog? My Mexico City amiga (now living in London), political scientist and writer Delia Lloyd has a guest-blog post on academic blogs over at Urban Muse:
For a long time, academics sat on the sidelines of the public sphere. Sure, there were famous professors like John Kenneth Galbraith--or more recently, Paul Krugman--who had tremendous influence inside the scholarly community and also shaped the public debate. For the most part, however, academics just seemed to do "something else" and we, as a society, had little knowledge of--or interest in--exactly what that was.

In recent years, however, a growing number of Ph.D.s--both inside and outside of the university--have begun sharing their expertise with a wider audience on a range of subjects that spans economics, law, political science, even literature. And the way they've done this is through blogs.

Among the most famous of these "academic blogs" is probably Freakonomics, the New York Times blog (based on the best selling book by Steven. D. Levitt and Steven J. Dubner) that sheds economic insight onto everyday occurrences....READ MORE