I'm a graduate of Punk Rock University. (I'm the airborne guy with the bass) As kids we organized our own shows, put out records, toured by sleeping in punk squats. We sang about fighting fascism and racism. Now it is here. This is what Joe Strummer trained us for. I'm ready.

Thanks so much for your reporting on this, Ben. I just got an email from my campus's IT office triumphantly advertising free student access to four different AI models -- at the same time as we have a hiring freeze, caps on grad enrollment, and a 7% budget cut -- and wanted to scream.

R.I.P. Tony Harrison (1937-2025): from my mum's generation. It gave me a shiver to reread V just now, especially the lines in which Harrison imagines his own grave. And another shiver when I remembered his not-quite-sonnet "On Not Being Milton" from 1978: that second octet!

Bostonian Austenians ...2 Sunday afternoons from now, I and 2 smart Austenians (Tara Menon, Sonia Hofkosh), will be in Newton, for a roundtable on Austen's influence & a screening of the charming film "Jane Austen Wrecked My Life." www.westnewtoncinema.com/movie/behind... Please join us!

Today in the Boston area is a very good day to import into the language the Canadianism “soaker.” As in , I just got a soaker 🇨🇦

Are you a grad student, untenured faculty member, or an independent scholar doing research in Romantic-era literature and culture? There's still time to apply for a Pforzheimer Award! Apply by Nov. 1 to be considered. Find more information here: www.k-saa.org/pforzheimera...

Are you a humanities faculty member who has worked with your campus government realtions office? If so, let me know--I could use you on a panel at #mla26

Everyone in academia should read this piece about our dear, brilliant colleague @durba.bsky.social www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Ouija boards are now available to all staff and students, as part of the University's expanding ouija offer

MEN! (more precisely Heterosexual Men!) When, in a coffee shop near a college campus, a young woman is evidently having a conversation with her mentor (talking about her writing, job interviews, &c.), it really is not helpful for you, a rando, to interrupt the chat so as to leave her your phone #.

#18thc (I'm also pleased to know that my own difficulties deciding on titles have a centuries-long pre-history.)

My book, The Future That Was, is about the extraordinary rise of global research on women. It also about the attacks on & starvation of gender research today by universities who leave only the shell intact, dismantling entire fields of knowledge built by women press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Amazing poem for our moment, from Terrance Hayes's 3rd collection _Wind in a Box_: "Harryette Mullen Lecture on the American Dream." (In our class on the contemporary we are teaching Mullen this week, Hayes next.) I am so privileged to get paid to read and think and talk about writers.

Happy Caturday from Mr Bean, paragon of fluffiness, whose gifts for relaxation should inspire us all.

boycott Sinclair advertisers Menard's, Lebeda Mattress Factory, Wendy's, Liberty Mutual and let them know

Only 3 more days to submit to the roundtable on Olga Tokarczuk's 18th Century that @kasiaiskasia.bsky.social and I are organizing for the 2026 ASECS. Your abstracts have to go through the ASECS portal, but please reach out to us individually if you're thinking of submitting & have any questions.

Is now the time to start cancelling subscriptions and services? Yes it is. You can do without Disney+ even if you've got young kids. Make it conditional, like any boycott should be. Do the right thing, stop knuckling under, defend your freedom and ours? Then we'll be back as your customers.

this episode of wednesday sucks

Feels like a good historical juncture for Bluesky to allow users to make their content “private.”

The good thing about supervising multiple senior theses and ph d student qualifying exams this semester is that I have days where I don’t look at the news for hours. Like from 9 until now The bad thing is that I just looked

#tinyjoys #abstraction Is this, in miniature, the most Henry Jamesian exchange EVER? "But isn't he tremendously deep in ---." He hesitated. "Deep in what?" "Well, in what's going on, beneath the surface. Doesn't he belong to things?" "I'm sure I don't know what he belongs to" (Princess Casamassima)

Next week kicks off the East Coast Patchwork tour featuring @drbibliomane.bsky.social and @gideonjacobs.bsky.social . See you soon, New York and Boston friends! @coffeehousepress.bsky.social

Hello #academicsky! I'm sharing a cfp for an edited collection on "Naming & Classifying," pulled together by me, Kristin Girten, & @aaronrhanlon.com . We'd love to see your work! Please also circulate to anyone you think might be interested. Deadline 10/31. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

My university’s Office of Teaching and Learning is offering a workshop on how to “leverage” Generative AI to develop lecture content. The thought of it makes me ill and I am tired of being quiet on social media about how this insidious, environmentally-destructive cult is being so blindly embraced.

Time lapse photography of Mr Bean’s increasing sleepiness — to wish you all good night. Lets hope the week to come is better than the one we’re now finishing.

Tag yourself? I’m gearing up for a unit on vampires in class this coming week, so please may I have dibs on Batty Bertha?

Frankenstein's Monster - Mary Shelley's #gothic novel abridged and retold. SOURCE: Endless Entertainment, Or, Comic, Terrific, and Legendary Tales 7 (17 June 1825)

It has been deeply heartening to see Ukraine, a nation fighting for its very survival, to turn to art and literature for solace. It has also raised the profile of other Eastern European writers and artists from the 20th century - operating under similar circumstances: platformraam.nl/artikelen/28...

You can use ChatGPT instead of your own brain to write your paper if I can talk about ChatGPT instead of you in your letter of reference

Still not as bad as the friend (who shall remain nameless) who, writing in haste about his graduate student's "forthcoming article." inadvertently abbreviated the phrase to "farticle."

Caught, just in time, a ridiculous typo in a letter of recommendation I have to send in today. Lordy Byron. Not totally inappropriate, in fact.

The @bibsocamer.bsky.social [Bibliographical Society of America] is hiring our next executive director! Is it you? The ED coordinates & manages the varied activities of this active scholarly society that focuses on the study of books & other textual artifacts. Please circulate widely! Due: 10/10/25.

Something that made me smile today: these mid-September roses, some still in bud, leaning across a rather ugly chain link fence, encountered daily on my walk to campus.

The landscape in higher ed is bleak right now, but here's a bright light at my institution: there's a new tenure track position at @davidsoncollege.bsky.social in Gender & Sexuality Studies. Please share widely!

Hey, Bostonians & more far-flung friends, the Novel Theory seminar I co-convene at Harvard has a cool line-up for the fall: a roundtable on the Novel in the Age of AI, Margaret Cohen on Claire de Duras, JC Cloutier on Nick Drnaso. You are so welcome to join us! (occasionally even on Zoom)

Proofs! I hope that novel people and #19thc people will like this essay on Ali Smith & her remaking of Victorian serial fiction (hey, I hope that people like and read Ali Smith!). Many thanks to @ceyingst.bsky.social for their help in the final stages of the essay's preparation.

Amazing sentence from a Zadie Smith essay we're teaching. She quotes Seneca 1st: "We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us ..." Here she is: "Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel."

#18thc pals, pls RT: @kasiaiskasia.bsky.social & I are assembling a roundtable for the American Society for 18th-C Studies mting in Philly in April, on Olga Tokarczuk's 18th Century. Abstracts due 9/22. Pls help us think together about this fabulous novelist's wayward ways with our period & its 📚.

American Gothic Studies seeks "EXHUMATIONS" contributions presenting new editions of lost, forgotten, or overlooked Gothic texts (max 12K words) by both well-known and obscure American authors. Inquiries to Tom Hillard and Matthew Sivils at [email protected] and [email protected].

So... The Beggar's Opera redux? Because that's what a musical about #18thCentury Jack Sheppard screams to me. If anyone at the David Bowie Centre wants to get in touch with people who know more about that context, I've got some ideas...

This local election for cat mayor of the bike path was covered tonight on the national news in Canada , the CBC. It’s apparently too close to call .

my colleagues in C18 literary and cultural studies didn't need David Bowie's endorsement to know that they are the coolest, sexiest group of scholars, and I'm sure they're all taking the news that he was planning "18th Century Musical" completely in stride

The catalogues of university presses are the Scholastic Book Fair for academics in the humanities–we always circle more entries than we can afford and hope our libraries will buy the rest. Support your university press. Buy its books. Defend it. aupresses.org/news/aupress...

Preparing, with delight, to teach Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market later this term and seriously wondering why there is no soft drink called "Goblin Dew" (line 470). Waiting now for the marketers to beat down my door. (An advertising slogan is ready to go: "Eat me, drink me, love me." (l. 471).

From an editorial in today's Harvard Crimson .... I hope the administration will listen to our undergraduates, who are totally right to call out the authoritarian bent of recent changes on campus.

It’s not just that the President of the United States posted a video of eleven people being murdered in international waters it’s that the President of the United States ordered the murder of eleven people in international waters so he could post a video of it.

Sadly, I can't link to the story b/c of Globe & Mail paywalls. But I feel that I have to share big news from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. It has bought at auction the plaid shirt & the Mountie costumes used in the Monty Python skit in which all sing "I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay." 👀

Ok, hear me out. A Lord of the Rings re-make, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor:

#19thc friends, do you know whether the British Library has ever digitized C Bronte's "The Scrap Book. A Mingling of Many Things"? The BL website remains so unnavigable. The "book" is printed in Christine Alexander's coll of the "early writings" but I need to 2ble-check CB's handwriting. Thank you!