I’ve just posted my course syllabi for next Fall; you can download them from my department website. I’ve revamped the comparative politics course (POSC 150). The democracy & democratization course (POSC 257) is completely new—and I’ve built the reader from scratch.
Frankly, I’ve had mixed results going through the publisher (it’s certainly not a peer-review press). They contacted me, seemed eager to put together a course pack for me, and promised that it would be a “professional quality” package. Sure, I could simply have posted all the articles as PDF files on Blackboard (our college’s online system). But then the students would have to print them all out—and I thought it might be more convenient for them to have a “textbook” they could carry around more easily. It may not have been entirely their fault (we were putting the manuscript together a week before classes began), but there were far too many typos (the kind of thing a simple spell check would’ve fixed).
I’ve decided to give them another go. But this time I’m taking on the job of editing, laying it out, and basically designing the entire thing myself. It’s been a lot of work. And I hope they can come through for me (I also have a caveat for the maximum price I’m willing to make my students pay for it).
But it’s good to know I’m almost ready for Fall semester. And since I might not be teaching in the summer (my course is under-enrolled), I can look forward to a combination of relaxation and extra time to pursue my own research unencumbered. Or, more practicably, to make sure I have a solid paper for the August LASA (Latin American Studies Association) conference in Montreal.
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PS. As per the comment below, I’ve just added these three books (and others) to my Amazon bookstore. They’re just basic intro textbooks, but they’re once I highly recommend for a crash course on comparative politics [added: May 31, 2007].
