Liana Silva

Although she calls both New York City and Puerto Rico home, Liana Silva currently writes from Kansas City, Kansas in the US. Liana obtained her BA in English and Modern Languages from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at Binghamton University. At the moment she is working on her dissertation, an interdisciplinary study on New York City as home in African American and Puerto Rican cultural productions. She is also a Managing Editor and Regular Contributor at http://soundingoutblog.com, a blog about sound studies. On top of that she is busy raising a daughter and getting to know their new hometown, Kansas City.

You can follow Liana’s short bursts of thought @literarychica on Twitter or her longer, better organized ideas at her personal blog. She can be reached at lms@soundingoutblog.com

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Most Recent Articles

May 12, 2013
So You Want to Blog (Academic Edition)
Understanding the genre.  
April 7, 2013
Attending a Conference: Altac Edition
In early March 2013, I attended the 1st Biennial Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism Conference at John Jay College in New York. I presented a selection from Chapter 2 of my dissertation (you can see an early draft of that here) and was very excited to share my work with other Latina/Latino studies scholars.
March 12, 2013
Academic Writer’s Block: A Matter of Form?
I had some writer’s block recently, a particular kind of writer’s block: I was trying to revise a short section of my dissertation to present at a conference. I spent the whole month of February and part of March thinking about it, but it wasn't until the conference was a week away, that I realized that I have a case of academic writer’s block.
February 7, 2013
The Writer Inside Me
As I drove home from work a few weeks ago, I listened to a podcast episode of Writer’s Voice where the show’s producer Drew Adamek interviewed Junot Diaz. The focus of the interview was Diaz’s latest book, This Is How You Lose Her, and his process of writing the book. Anyone who knows me knows I am a big fan of Junot Diaz, and I recently finished This Is How You Lose Her. I also enjoy reading and hearing about the writing process of others, not just because of my job but because you can tell so much about a writer by how they approach their writing, and this particular podcast episode did not disappoint in that regard.
November 12, 2012
What’s My Name?
I received an email from MLA recently addressed to “Professor Silva.” It made me smile, but immediately after that it made me furrow my brow. Professor Silva? Who is this Professor Silva? Nothing in my past emails indicated I was a professor. I put it away, thinking it may have just been a mistake. But it bothered me a little: I did not want to claim “Professor” when I am not one.
September 23, 2012
Rethinking What “Academic” Means
In August, Amy Rubens (@ambulantscholar on Twitter) posted a thoughtful post on her personal blog about her plans for the semester and how to continue her research agenda while teaching (and also adjusting to a new town and new school). Amy and I met via Twitter some time in the past year when we were trying to finish our dissertations, balance work along with dissertating, and blogging about our phd exploits. We both graduated last May, and are embarking on new jobs this fall. In her post, Amy pointed out that in order to get her conference presentations done in time she will be blogging about her reading; it's a way for her to stay accountable and to digest the information on a long-term. She also discussed how she thinks of her blogging as a form of public scholarship, an idea I sympathize with.
July 15, 2012
Considering the Allure of the Tenure Track
Last May, Inside Higher Ed reported that Russell Berman, past president of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and Stanford University professor, has put forth a proposal together with five other Stanford colleagues to rethink the humanities PhD there. They tackled the question of whether and how to make the humanities PhD relevant today. In order to accomplish this, they posit that time to degree must be reduced and students should be trained for a diversity of career tracks, not limited to the traditional tenure track career path.
May 13, 2012
Voices in Cyberspace
On April 30th, Naomi Schaefer Riley, a blogger for the Brainstorm blog on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s website, argued (and poorly) that Black Studies as a discipline should disappear; her argument was based solely on brief descriptions of three dissertations by three PhD candidates from Northwestern University’s first cohort of Black Studies doctoral program, as seen in an earlier article in The Chronicle.
April 3, 2012
Eight Years Later
As I work on the last revisions to my dissertation (by the time this post goes live I will have mailed my dissertation draft to my committee), I oftentimes find myself thinking back to the long road that brought me to this moment. Eight years ago, around this time of year, I was accepted at an upstate New York university for my Master’s degree, and I knew this move would change me forever. In the summer of 2004, I would leave my little island, move to a town a few hours away from New York City, and spend the next five years reading, writing, and thinking deep thoughts in hopes of achieving a PhD in English.
January 17, 2012
Networking aka Getting Outside the Comfort Zone
This semester I signed up for the University of Venus Networking Challenge. The challenge asked readers to reach outside of their departments and meet people in other disciplines, in other institutions, and/or in other countries. Because of my current employment position, I find myself getting in touch with a lot of people from other departments. Thus, I thought it would be unfair to count that as part of the challenge. However, the U Venus challenge prompted me to think about my interactions with faculty and staff from other schools and offices differently.

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