Can’t even

We are hiring! Office Coordinator: Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts! Job posting at fa-ewlq-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid... Come work with a creative, collegial, forward-thinking team at Tennessee’s flagship state university.

for the first time maybe ever i’m working on my book to procrastinate on all the other stuff i have to do

Wonderful collaboration this week with Knoxville’s Central Cinema and the #DenboCenter for Humanities & the Arts! We sponsored a $5 public screening of Neptune Frost, dir. by Saul Williams, in conjunction with Monday’s Distinguished Lecture Series talk by C. Riley Snorton. Best kind of synergy!

Join us at the #DenboCenter this Monday and Tuesday for our 2-Day Faculty Writing Challenge! Kick off your day with a calming breathing meditation followed by focused writing sessions from 9 am to 1:30 pm. Lunch provided. For dedicated writers, feel free to stay until 4 pm!

"alarming impact of AI on the environment: forprofit utilities will have to make $720 B in grid upgrades by 2030 to meet spiraling demand, costs that they will pass on. locking in planetchoking carbon emissions right when we should be pivoting away from fossil fuels" www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Fascinating talk by C. Riley Snorton at @uthumanitiesctr.bsky.social today on plants, nonbinary identity, film!

“Can one possess tenure and still say: The cat sat on the mat?”

Just got a letter about a “small” breech at a national lab

I just read a review so aggressively clueless about a book I just finished and enjoyed that it significantly increased my enjoyment of the book knowing that someone else was too dim to get it. Not proud, but not not proud.

Harvey’s Orbital is all tell, no show. A book with the author’s voice as main character. Autofiction with other people…

Our amazing 2025-26 fellowship cohort at the Denbo Center! Film, Art, queer studies, Lit, German SF, philosophy, anthropology—going to be a fantastic year! @uthumanitiesctr.bsky.social

Getting into the weirdness of Julian Bleecker …

Rest in peace, Brian McHale, dear friend.

“Stories were the greatest currency to us, greater than power, greater than control. Stories were our food, nourishment, enrichment. To consume a story was to add to our code, deepen our minds. We felt it the moment we took it in. We were changed.”- Death Of The Author, Nnedi Okorafor

Dystopia. I always thought it’d be smarter.

Cutleaf Coneflower (asteraceae) this year in front garden

If you think it’s bad now.

Guilt trip #149

"Ich askid ChatGPT," Well Ich askid the stones, and the forest, and the starres, and the mountaynes, and what thei seyde was learninge, and dreames, and growinge thinges, and makinge art, and a worlde wher we talke to each othir and care about each othir.

Lackawanna Mine tour

“Vice is ever most dangerous when lurking behind the Mask of Virtue.” ✒️ #MatthewLewis, English Gothic novelist (The Monk), was #BOTD 9 July 1775. #Literature

“The Devil Finds Work: James Baldwin’s Cinema of the Mind” 📽️ Jul. 25–Aug. 15 This series presents films analyzed by Baldwin in his 1976 book “The Devil Finds Work,” a blend of memoir and film criticism, with live readings by @roxanegay.bsky.social and other special guests! Free: ucla.in/3Ie2tG1

Experience a heart attack while working in the herb garden. Wonder what its middle school bully is doing now. Suspect that something evil has happened in this very room. Fall for Doreen.

Needed to look this up last night to get the precise language of one of my favorite Toni Morrison quotes: "There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."

Man wasn’t meant to speak this much about Columbia University

We are seriously blessed with some amazing sff books lately. I just reviewed four brand new titles that take place in worlds that are utterly irresistible. wapo.st/4mrm0lQ Authors are: @novarensuma.bsky.social Neon Yang @emilytesh.net Sayaka Murata

humanities major hiring on the rise against the hallucination plagiarism arson machine www.cnbc.com/2025/05/16/c...

✨ Job posting: ✨Visiting Assistant Director of the Humanities Without Walls program at the HRI, U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign✨ illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

*This* is the part of the story: still offering us an outstretched hand

Please support your friends in animal rescue during kitten season. It's heartbreaking... Please spay and neuter so it doesn't have to be heartbreaking.

“The idea that you’re studying something ‘great’ is motivating for a student. That it was harder for us to say about any text that it is great had an effect on the courses; makes it hard for a 1st year, since they can’t gain any sense of what matters in the field.” news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

Can’t wait to read this

Well deserved, but believe it or not, James is only Percival Everett's 4th best novel according to my entirely subjective, definitive ranking of his books that I've read. biblioracle.substack.com/p/the-defini...

The 2025 Pulitzer winners and finalists will be announced at 3 pm Eastern time! Watch the livestream here. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSCp...

The 2025 Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday afternoon. Percival Everett won the award for fiction for his novel James, a powerful re-imagination of Huckleberry Finn.

why do I even read novels when there are posts like this

Wonderful DH Showcase of student work today at the Denbo Center. We support faculty and student work in DH and UT’s new DH interdisciplinary program!

🏆📚 The BACLS Monograph Prize, Edited Collection Prize and Postgraduate Essay Prize are now open for submission! Entries are invited for work published in 2024 in the English language on any area of ‘contemporary literary studies’. Deadline: 23 May More details: bacls.org/site/prizes/...

“The rise of AI creates opportunities for errors to become permanently embedded in our knowledge systems, through processes no single actor controls.”

Take a read at "Scroll the Future" → scrollthefuture.ai

“Why am I so sad today?” I ask myself after staring at my little handheld sadness machine and clicking all the sad little things that will definitely make me sad

We’ve seen colleagues of ours across the country posting about the direct impacts they’re experiencing of the current attacks on the National Endowment for the Humanities. We hurt for everyone, not least because we’re in the same space with you. Read more: about.hcommons.org/2025/04/17/o...

FANTASTIC EVENT Denbo Center's Digital Games Research Seminar hosted LunaTone CEO Baro Hyun and speakers Gosia Citko-DuPlantis & Tore Olsson with Volun2025 esports! humanitiescenter.utk.edu/seminar/digi...

The UT Denbo Center public talk last week by evolutionary biologist Menno Schilthuizen on the ways in which animals adapt to urban environments and collaborated with the UT EEB to run a Bioquest with Schilthuizen at Twin Forks in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Great stuff! #UTArtSci