I'm Naomi Chana. It's my Hebrew name, so it's legitimately mine, and I occasionally even use it in foreign countries where my English name doesn't translate. Still, it's not the name I use professionally, simply because I'd rather my students and colleagues not be able to Google me. If you read through the blog carefully and spent several minutes on Google, you could probably make an educated guess at my legal name -- I'm not all that obsessed with the Secret Identity business -- but I'd rather stay Naomi around the blog, if you don't mind. In the unlikely event you're dying to know more about me:

I'm from the somewhat northern Southeast; my Home State is one of the few where you can get decent bagels and decent grits, and I miss it terribly. I've lived up and down the East Coast, but for the last little while I seem to have wound up in the Midwest, which is a source of mild perplexity and inexpert pretensions to cultural anthropology on my part. I have wonderful parents and a large extended family which spans several states, several religious traditions, and innumerable minor neuroses. I'm Jewish -- "observant Reform," if you want a label, but I'm not sure I quite fit into any of those.. I perpetually overschedule myself, then complain about it. In a not unrelated point, I am a professional academic, by which I mean that I am by turns a scholar, teacher, researcher, and writer and people pay me for it. As a lifelong humanities geek, I tend to think this is unspeakably nifty.

In the interest of not making it too easy to track me down, I'm deliberately vague about where I'm currently employed and where I've gotten my training; I don't even specify my discipline or field (although the perceptive reader can probably make some accurate guesses).However, I can tell you that I recently completed my dissertation at Unspecified University in Metropolis, did a fellowship year at Large Midwestern University, and am now a first-year assistant professor at Boondoggle University in the lovely city of Boondoggle. My hobbies include gardening, quilting (or, more accurately, planning designs for quilts that I never seem to get around to finishing), speculative theology, baking, playing assorted instruments poorly, watching a few TV shows, advocating educational reform, and toying idly with HTML. ("Reading" is not a hobby; it's a way of life. "Collecting library cards," on the other hand, is becoming perilously close to a hobby.) I also like people -- yes, in academia, this is a necessary disclaimer. And speaking of disclaimers...