the headline is cute, but this actually has really expansive implications regarding the public turn against higher-ed and how we got here

I was a an "AP Fellow" recently. The mc format is not conducive to close reading or critical application of concepts. It tests reading comprehension using pre-defined terms like "tone," "setting," or "character." It's fine, but not what students learn in college-level lit classes.

Academic authors: self-promote! 💫 This is not a particularly popular account but: 🚨 If you have published a book in the last 5 years (since the hype wears off after a while), especially in the humanities, feel free to reply here and repost! 👇

Paging Elizabeth Costello. . .

The new Illinois Luddite Society have become regulars at @skeuomorphpress.org community hours. Their prints from last night are pretty sweet

I'm reading one more article before I sit down to start writing new stuff. Trying to hold on to this feeling of unbridled excitement (which I know will dissipate as soon as the writing process begins).

what a metaphor for being alive in 2025

oh wow. this was worse than anything i could have imagined. it reads like a colbert segment.

Love this! Would work, I think, across humanities and not limited to the digital.

The Future of Totality coming next june from @dukepress.bsky.social www.dukeupress.edu/the-future-o...

Admin / assistant professor / grad student

Check out the preconvention half-day workshops. Train to be an external reviewer or work on such topics as banned books or and writing studies research or the perennial favoite--AI. Worth coming early to #MLA26 in Toronto. www.mla.org/Events/2026-...

I'm with Costco! I think becoming comfortable with navigating uncertainty is one of the greatest strengths of a humanities education. Where we differ is in the how to effectively mass produce this education at a low cost to the consumer. In this essay I will . . .

My latest column for the Chronicle of Higher Ed is now live. It's an argument for including AI-critical voices in campus conversations and policymaking workgroups, and I'm proud to get this dissenting piece into the mainstream genAI/higher ed discourse. Please read and share if you're so inclined 🙂

Hey thanks to @lithub.com.web.brid.gy for including my recent piece on translated bestsellers in their daily roundup of “the best of the literary internet”! Check it out: lithub.com/lit-hub-dail...

Reminder to please submit to and circulate this seminar at the 2026 ACLA on translation and its institutions: www.acla.org/seminar/b718...

Had a great time presenting @recsys.bsky.social today! Having computer scientists interrogate my ideas really made me have to elucidate values that we often take for granted in the humanities. 10/10 would recommend.

Atlanta! The AIAI Network is hosting the fabulous journalist and novelist @vauhinivara.bsky.social on Thursday, October 16. She will give a talk at 4PM in Atwood 360 titled “If Computers Can Write, Why Should We?” Come out!

Big essay out by @sdileonardi.bsky.social in @publicbooks.bsky.social today, drawing on 100 years of translations and bestseller data to show that the US has seen three waves of translation: European; Latin American Boom; Nordic Noir. And what this means for us. www.publicbooks.org/how-translat...

With students heading back to the classroom, a group of cognitive scientists and AI researchers has published one of the most forceful and evidence-backed calls yet to reject the "uncritical adoption of AI" in academia:

Love a great reading rec!

The JWL Special Issue, Constructing the Other: Narrative Empathy and the Ethics of Border-Crossing in World Literature, co-edited by @somishmash.bsky.social & myself, is out! A heartfelt thanks to my co-editor, the JWL staff, & our wonderful contributors. brill.com/view/journal...

As a mom who lives in Florida, my heart goes out to all of the kids (with vaccinated parents!) who will no longer be protected by vaccines because their parents presume to be able to judge medical risk better than doctors and scientists. What a catastrophe for all of us.

ACLA paper submissions are now open! Consider submitting to my seminar, co-organized with Matthew Eautough, on "Literary Translation and Its Institutions"! www.acla.org/seminar/b718...

It’s a double Gutenberg day! (NYPL on the left, Morgan Library on the right) #BookHistory

My drawn statement on Ai as standalone from my now finished minicomic as syllabus for new liberal studies class! As promised this is shareable, printable - all from my site, feel free to make use of it, cite me & let me know how it’s received. Share away all here! spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-sy...

Another pretty one from @knifeforkbook.bsky.social—Neil Surkan’s Their Queer Tenderness! For my Sealey Challenge: reading 1 book of poetry/day in Aug. to raise $$ for the Sameer Project, with @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social Donate, RT, etc! open-books-a-poem-emporium.myshopify.com/products/sea...

Really fascinated by this @us.theguardian.com piece on literature in translation by Vincenzo Latronico, which brought to mind a new @umasspress.bsky.social book, Making World Literature: Actors, Institutions, and Networks in the United States since 1890, by @annamuenchrath.bsky.social.

The Marvel Universe is expanding.

I just reread an essay I wrote at the start of this year (currently under review) on Labor, Education, and AI in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, and I am (somewhat unusually) still so hyped about it and can't wait to share it!

Making a CLEAN, SHAREABLE dataset is fucking hard! I'm super proud, then, to publish this one, on a team led by @sdileonardi.bsky.social and @beccacohen.bsky.social, with @post45data.bsky.social. It has more than a decade of 21C int'l bestseller data, revealing how popular world lit circulates....

I know this is totally out there, but how about instead of adding automatic AI summaries to its ebooks, proquest just improves its actually useful functionality (like allowing me to copy relevant passages from a book, which is currently glitching so that I have to type everything out manually).

For better part of this year, I've been working on this report as part of AAUP's committee on AI and Academic Professions. We surveyed over 500 members across ranks, job types, and institutions about AI deployment in higher ed. You can read more about our work here: academeblog.org/2025/07/22/f...

🤓 Starting the new project research in earnest now and thought I would keep a running thread of what I'm reading and rereading. 📚

The HathiTrust Research Center is pleased to announce a new release of our open-access Extracted Features dataset, a statistical snapshot of: 18,725,868 volumes 6,867,699,164 pages 3,255,304,293,468 tokens 450+ languages go.illinois.edu/EF25 for details & download cc:@hathitrust.bsky.social #DH2025

wait, you're telling me the prevailing democratic wisdom was *wrong*? you don't say!

Indiana. West Virginia. Same thing. How ya gonna keep 'em down on the (metaphorical) farm? Limit their opportunities to learn other languages and cultures, learn to think critically, learn to ask why.

Wanted to share here that I have accepted an endowed chair offer from my Alma mater, the University of Virginia, where (after 25 wonderful years at UMD) I will be starting in January as Commonwealth Professor of Artificial Intelligence and English.

If you want to read deeply researched accounts of what happened to novels in the last fifty or so years, may I recommend Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965–1999 by Evan Brier uipress.uiowa.edu/books/novel-...

Friends, please share! Proofs are ready for @skeuomorphpress.org's edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s "A Rant About Technology." I am so pleased with this book—in many ways our 1st real book project Details about how to get one through our fundraiser at skeuomorph.ischool.illinois.edu/le-guin-book...

Exciting news, Bluesky! I’m editing a new book series for Bloomsbury with Tom Mole and Lisa Gitelman: Book History for the Future! Do you focus on material textual artifacts and innovative methodologies? We’re actively soliciting proposals, so give us a shout! www.bloomsbury.com/media/cecjzl...

My current project is about the consequences of using algorithmically processed data to *select* what should be translated. This is another level of abdication of responsibility for cultural production. Is there such a thing as machine culture and are we living in it?

In the airport, headed to #SHARP2025. Can't wait to hang with my fellow SHARPists in Rochester! My talk on untranslatability and Amazon Crossing will be on Tuesday at 1:30.

This is such a generous post. I can commiserate with a lot of the conflicted feelings here, particularly the sense of loss and despair as the institutions around us stop serving almost everyone they are supposed to serve.

How now, how now, what say the citizens?

omg wut "Karl Marx said that men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. The same is true for presidents." www.economist.com/interactive/...

Alas paywalled, but here is my op-ed advocating for IMLS funding and Ohio state funding for public libraries. The state current budget cuts library funding and gives the Cleveland Browns 600 mil for a new stadium 🙄 www.cleveland.com/opinion/2025...

A glowing report from Jeff Lawrence on our conference last week ("every panel I heard addressed an urgent and fundamental question about the academic study of literature"): open.substack.com/pub/jefflawc...