ISA 2017

Harbor view from Hyatt Regency

I attended the 2017 ISA conference in Baltimore this past week. It's enormous and I have ambivalent feelings about it. There are 75 to 80 panels at a time, with at least 5 people usually on each panel (4 or 5 papers is typical on "regular" panels, plus a chair/discussant). Lots of people complain about under-attended panels, but many show up for roundtables featuring prominent scholars in the discipline.

I managed to see a few old friends from academia and from the "real" world. I visited a brewpub and a craft beer bar, walked around Camden Yards, and took the commuter train to DC in order to do some work tied to my job as department chair. Soon, I'll try to upload a few pictures with this post.

Pictured below left: the Babe Ruth statue outside Camden Yards and the beer menu from The Brewer's Art last Wednesday night.

Saturday morning, I presented a paper on "Trump and American Foreign Policy; A Threat to Peace and Prosperity?" I've uploaded it to my Academia.edu page and my Research Gate page. I'm grateful to Fabrizio Coticchia for his helpful comments. I'm not sure what to do with the paper, but Fabrizio had helpful insights about Silvio Berlusconi that seem directly applicable to Trump and about the literature on political "outsiders" who assume executive power.

If anyone reads the paper and has comments, please send them along. Also, I'm genuinely looking for ideas about what to do with it. At minimum, it has prepared me for teaching about Trump in class.

Note: "The Voice" TV program was conducting auditions just around the corner from my hotel and near the conference. I've included a photo of the line:

The Voice auditions

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