Current mood:	accomplished
Entry tags:	nickelback - photograph

First day (yay)
First day of grad school today was fairly....anticlimatic? I'm taking two grad classes this semester -- European Thought and Ideology, 1797-Present and The Reformation. These classes require me to be on campus for about 95% of the daylight hours (potentially longer on Thursdays). One's at 10, the other's at 1. Both seem like they're going to be interesting. My professor for my ideology class is rather Irish, therefore he drops F-bombs during class. Very funny guy. My Reformation professor specializes in medieval history and is apparently a hardass when it comes to grading papers. We'll see if he's worse than Devlin was (maybe being sticklers for grammar and stuff comes with being a medievalist....if so, folks should watch out if I ever become one!).

Well. Like I said. Largely an anti-climatic day. Got to campus a little after 9, went and got my student ID and a cup of coffee (coffee there is definately not as good as it was at GV. I might have to talk my mother into stopping at Starbucks in the morning before we drive to OU...or I find a Starbucks within walking distance of campus. Considering I think there's an Applebee's or a TGI Friday's within sight of South Foundation Hall....I'm not worrying too much). Then I hit the bookstore to check prices on books (can't buy them 'til my paycheck comes -- yay paycheck. Hopefully it'll arrive tomorrow.). From there, I headed to class.

Dr. Moran has apparently been running around like a chicken with his head cut off lately. He said he scrambled madly to finish the syllabus yesterday afternoon...and promptly forgot it this morning. I think he'll be cool, though, and so will his class. He was a student radical during the 60s -- he actually got tossed into jail for six months because he was a concientious objector during Vietnam. How cool is that? He was with SDS, too -- very uber cool. The man is insanely overeducated -- he holds degrees in philosophy and theology as well as in history and taught at American U and Georgetown....and as a grad student he got a fellowship at the Folger Library. Very spiffy.

Reading list for his class:
Rousseau, Rousseau's Political Writings
Marx, Selected Writings
Lemontov, A Hero For Our Time
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis
Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories
Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That
Bonhoeffer, Letters from Prison
Virillo, The Information Bomb

Term paper topic: Something on nationalism, not quite sure what yet. Any ideas?

My other professor is Dr. Finucane, and he's a medievalist who's teaching my class on the Reformation. I've already taken a page of notes in his class (go figure).

Reading list for his class:
A.G. Dickens, Counter Reformation
J.H. Elliot, Europe Divided, 1559-1598 Second Edition
E. Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe
E. Rice and A. Grafton, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559 Second Edition
James D. Tracy, Europe's Reformations

Term paper topic: Why did witchcraft accusations only begin to appear as a serious problem from the early 16th century? (he was glad one of the grad students picked this topic -- apparently, he's gotten some pretty flaky stuff on the topic in the past. What the heck is he going to think of what I'm going to say about the topic?)

Yeah. Books are likely to run me something crazy :P Need that paycheck so I can buy them (hopefully it'll get here tomorrow....hopefully...)

But yeah. Otherwise, pretty anticlimactic. Went and got my library card, took some books out -- mostly for my witchcraft paper, though some for background on historiography and the history of ideas in Europe.

Thoughts and such, please tell me! I could really use some help with narrowing my topic for my ideology class....