About

I’m Krista Kennedy, a Rhetoric Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Minnesota Department of Writing Studies. For the past five years or so, I’ve been studying various ways networked texts intersect with intellectual property law and theory. Now, I’m working on a dissertation about authorship and ownership in the 1728 Chambers’s Cyclopaedia and the English-language Wikipedia. If you'd like to know more about that part of my life, check over here.

This blog began in January 2003 as Areté. I planned to use it to document an independent study and close it down at the end of the semester, but it pretty quickly became apparent that wasn’t going to happen. I met all sorts of wonderful folks online right away, and I enjoyed reading them and being read by them too much to quit. Areté was originally anonymous and genderless, but I finally became full-identity in January 2005. In February 2006 the name changed to Thinkery. (If you want to know why, look here.) I find that the longer I blog, the less I write about my scholarship. There are still quite a few posts that point to materials and discuss professionalization, but more often I find myself using this space as a way to gauge the balance between my personal and professional lives. I’m also fascinated by the cultural implications of being a redhead and a feisty woman, and maintain the