Please join the Juvenile Instructor in welcoming Edje as the newest guest blogger to the JI. Edje is a regular commenter here at JI (and other sites around the ‘nacle), and is, like the rest of us here (except for ol’ man Taysom), a grad student in history. Here is what he has to say about himself:

My mother calls me Edward. Most other folks in meatspace call me
Ed—which in my native East Texas has two syllables—or Edje, which
is pronounced like “edgy,” which is how most Brazilians pronounce
“Ed,” which, by my estimation, beats the Brazilian nickname for
Edward, which sounds like “doo-doo” to most Americans. I am,
apparently, a fan of complex sentence structure.

My standard introductory joke is that after obtaining an undergraduate
Electrical Engineering degree I attempted an MRS degree and failed.
Thereafter I taught high school English and Math for three years at an
experimental school targeting troubled students. Then, having never
taken a university-level history course, I resolved to become a
History professor. I am in the third year of Master’s degree (plus
some undergrad courses so I could be admitted to the MA) at Sam
Houston State University (an hour north of Houston, Texas). I hope to
begin a PhD in 2009, location to be determined.

My research focus is post-bellum nineteenth-century identity
narration—how groups decided who was in and who was out and what
sort of stories they told to support/respond to those determinations.
I’ve been participating in the Bloggernacle since 2005. My most common
reaction to blog conversations is, “I’m out of my depth.”

Welcome, Edje.