writing.markfullmer.com

Reasons why teachers say you shouldn't use first person:

• good academic writing sounds objective ("I can't believe how much Americans buy" versus "Americans tend to buy more than other nationalities")
• first person is often implied ("I think Americans may have forgotten the true meaning of Christmas.")
• academic writing isn't primarily personal ("I grew up in Alaska, so I know all about...")

Reasons why academics (and you) should use the first person:

• to directly respond to another scholar's ideas ("I, however, disagree with Smith's assertion because...")
• to clarify a point in the writing ("I do not intend to claim that all women...")
• to put the writer's thoughts into perspective ("My thoughts on this subject are clearly influenced by my gender...")
• to simplify wording ("the relationship between corporation and universities consumerism and religion is suggested to be.." versus "I suggest that corporations and universities...")

2 examples of academics using first person

Millette Shamir, “Foreigners Within & Innocents Abroad: Discourse of the Self in the Internationalization of American Studies” (2004)

I should make clear that I have absolutely no practical objections to Mitchell's diagnosis. From the perspective of an Israeli leftist, his observation about a Zionist idolatry of land appears both superfluous and intriguing, no so much for what it articulates about the Israeli other, but for what it assumes about the American self. What I wish to suggest, in other words, is that Mitchell's observation about how, out of the seemingly innocent national landscape, Israelis forged the very idol which they historically sought to annihilate, can turn back on the innocent critic abroad and his own particular idols, idols that may prove to be quite voracious in their own right.

Jose David Saldivar's “Nuestra America's Borders: Remapping American Cultural Studies” (2005)
Culturally, I write these days as a teacher and avid reader and consumer of U.S.-Mexico border texts, soundings, and visual cultural performance. Like many U.S. Latino/a intellectuals, I have lived both in the North and in the South and the South in the North as Ruben Martinez once dizzyingly and aptly put it. While I now find myself located in what some hundred and fifty years ago was called the northern frontier of Alta California, I spent the first half of my life at the mouth of the Rio Grande in South Texas. The purpose of these brief personal remarks in not to demonstrate a Manichean clash of identities and affiliations, but rather to begin mapping out the phantasmatics of Nuestra America's borders at our own complex fin de siglo.

Further reading

http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/should_I_use_I.html