UIP is looking for a new publicist -- could it be you⁉️ illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

I'm sure many of you have already seen this newish preprint on the deleterious cognitive effects of using AI for writing tasks, but just in case: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088.... If you've been paying attention, you know/can intuit a lot of it, but it's something tangible w/ which to counter enthusiasts.

Are they, like, holding out for E. Gordon Gee, or what?

Speaking of which: We at Fortress Press are eager to read (with human eyes 👀) proposals including but not limited to: late antique and medieval Christian history; Jewish Studies; Islamic Studies; and Religious Studies broadly conceived. Please reach out if you’re working on a project!

OUP, btw, was the first of the large UK UPs to cut its in-house copy editors. This was and remains a strong signal of its general attitude to quality assurance, imo. People need to understand that as publishing labour goes, so go their own publishing processes, and choose their options accordingly.

Really, seriously: Please do shop around for presses committed to using human hands in book and journal production (there are lots like MHRA still holding that necessary line). You're going to have a *much* better publishing experience that way.

When I say "please don't publish with the big British houses if you can help it, because they're going hard for LLM nonsense that disrespects everyone's labour and expertise," this is the kind of nonsense I mean (h/t @shannanclark.bsky.social): www.alpsp.org/news-publica...

Co-signing! That people commonly make this claim is, of course, partly the fault of institutions that pressure scholars to frame every bit of writing they do as high stakes, a novel "intervention," instead of treating scholarship as the accretive process it is. But it's still a silly tack to take.

Among other things, this thread is useful for dispelling the persistent assumption that university presses are out here making a killing because they're pricing paperbacks ten dollars higher than folks might like. . . . Please do read for a view of the actual economics.

It's rough being a humanities editor rn. At a conference last weekend, someone asked if, that being so, I was thinking of diversifying into business. I said no: for one thing I'd spent 10 yrs on it. For another, it feels vital now to support humanist scholarship people can teach & read & learn from.

The hist and lit depts at my alma mater have retained unfashionable bib & methods course requirements at honours undergrad and MA levels partly for this reason. As Dr. Gower says downthread, that doesn't solve the AI problem, but it does mean those depts deal w/ fewer AI misconduct cases than others

One reason the "oh, but we need to make our work accessible to the public" line often taken by institutional humanists annoys me is that it presumes "the public" needs things streamlined when in fact there are plenty like Mom who actually enjoy meeting this work in its original form & terminology.*

Trying to find a suitably gentle way of explaining to an author that they might be able to fight me on suggested stylistic adjustments, but they cannot really fight The Chicago Manual of Style.

Early reviews of @nathankhensley.bsky.social's latest are in: my mother calls it "brain-straining" (complimentary) on a level w/ A Thousand Plateaus

It's time for me to embarrass myself by putting this out there: if your college or university in the greater Los Angeles area needs an instructor for anything to do with music history or medieval studies, I'm available to teach this fall.

The annual University of Illinois Press Summer Sale starts now! 🎉 Enjoy 50% off *ALL* books until June 16 when you use code SUMMER25 on our website! www.press.uillinois.edu

The face of a little criminal who hooked a paw into the savoury pastry I was eating *as it was on its way to my mouth* and swallowed a chunk before I could get it away from her. She had just had her own breakfast, natch. (I: Maisie, no! Onions are bad for your liver. She: [insolent snarfling])

Interested in writing for American Gothic Studies journal? See the following call for Provocations pieces. We're looking for essays that revisit and update terms/concepts pertinent to the field of study! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Not watching the video from your "go ahead and croak, peasants" senator no matter how many times you all angrily QT it, sorry. I encounter enough eugenicist bs as it is. (You don't have to give these people added airtime.)

One could argue that by promoting incel ideology through its platform, OpenAI is openly recruiting domestic terrorists.

ok ok ok real talk TRADE HISTORY is when your book is called ‘the untold story of [a subject that is absolutely very much a story lots of people have already told’

A collection of the Letterform Archive's ephemera — from chopstick wrappers to transit tickets to product labels to punk flyers to calendars

Okay: if you have a quantity of something with countable components (apples, dollars), you have a *number *of those components. If you have a quantity that is not countable (love, guilt), you have an *amount* of it. You can have more or fewer countable things, more or less of an uncountable thing.

The thing about Zoom conference is that they don't seem entirely real, so a person can easily do things like agree to present at one, then book a trip to the US, for which she will, on the advice of her government, not be bringing her laptop, during the same period.

Haunted by a chat I had w/ a publisher of scholarly editions this past weekend in which he mentioned that, where he might once have sold 2,000 copies of Jane Eyre in an AY, he now sells about 500, b/c profs are finding students struggle too much with it. JE is not difficult, as 19th c. novels go!

Though in many individual cases one could argue they've done it to themselves, I'm increasingly sorry for/offended on behalf of men that they get marketed to like this. Such a sad, limited, fundamentally stupid conception of what masculinity and manhood are about. Like a GI Joe cartoon.

Well, I guess now I really will have to see if I can get across the border in November without being delayed or detained! Fun times to be a non-US member of the North American Victorian Studies Association, let me tell you

It sounds very "naïve humanist" of me, I know, but: Why is the notion that a healthy society needs philosophers *and* plumbers, historians *and* home care workers, so difficult for so many to grasp? There's such a wide range of human skills and talents, and almost every one of them has a place.

This is an incredible collection, truly amazing design work on display here

*Obviously*.

We can & should shame presses for indulging in (or permitting) AI use. But before we do that, we need to shame some for their increasing reliance on packagers, which pay their overburdened contractors shit rates (ask me how I know!). Overburdened workers making shit rates won't do top-notch work.

Colleagues in-house: If your press *doesn't* go in for AI nonsense or the use of packager slop in prod, advertise that! Authors, prospective authors, and freelancers all want to know. It will help your employers' business and reputations to be loud about your quality controls, trust me.

So many dimensions to this. But among them a failure to acknowledge the importance of highly skilled labor that is in fact a feature of the high costs of scholarly publishing. The collaborative work to produce scholarship requires expert/ paid editing, developmental and copyediting.

This is horrifying and I find it offensive on professional and ethical levels, but I want to stress that *not* all academic publishers do this. Most have strict quality controls. It's important to ensure you choose one of those, and avoid ones that don't (Cambridge, Routledge, Palgrave . . .)

This is horrifying but/and/also @illinoispress.bsky.social and (most?) other legit academic publishers have pretty strict policies around the use of AI in our work. We would never use AI for copy editing. Maybe I'm naive but I'd caution against extrapolating from this to the whole industry.

Trying to bribe myself to get through some work with the promise of another chapter of Action Without Hope when it's finished, but I've hit the stage of this project where everything is, to quote Archer, so boring and forever-taking

Among other things I'm exhausted by legacy media's weaselly tendency to use "controversial" in place of "destructive" or "oppressive."

Do you ever forget having written things you've published? If you remember them, do you retain attachments to them once they're out in the world? My own tendency is toward recall but indifference—once a thing is in print, it's in some way inert to me—but I'm curious about others'.

Not that junior scholars don't often have good and compelling arguments/additions to make, but I will never cease being surprised by the readiness of some PhD candidates to brawl with people who've thought longer and more carefully about the things they're brawling about than they have.

Few things make me more annoyed at a potential employer than having to enter, line by line, info in a "profile builder" that I am already providing in a cover note and CV. This is esp. annoying when the employer is a university or UP, presumably staffed by people who can read prepped documents.

There are many more and more lamented holes in my life due to the early pandemic than there are holes in my CV, but I do sometimes think about the projects that got derailed, the intellectual momentum that dissipated.

All I can say to this is that being the person even *multiple Trump regime officials* find too annoying and incompetent for words is certainly a feat. newrepublic.com/post/195599/...

As someone who charges no more than median rates in my sector, I'm slightly amused when writers tell me my services are outside their budgets in tones that imply it should be my problem. Skill & experience cost money, & humanities editors aren't asking much for what we offer, comparatively speaking.

Pay humans enough for good work

[taps microphone] [feedback] I wish people would stop saying “based off of” when they mean “based on”. [loud •sssnick• as mic is cut off]

Shout out to the peer reviewers who are getting thoughtful, helpful reports in despite end-of semester grading, tornados, catatonia-inducing political conditions, etc. Appreciate y'all.

Four days left to apply to these great summer seminars, designed to help you set a writing goal you'll actually stick to. Seminars meet in early September, and you can bring up to 30pp of writing on any Victorian studies topic for discussion. Link to app and details here. Please apply! Pass it on...

There is a teenage girl standing in the middle of my street just shrieking "Fuuuuuuck," and tbh I feel her on that

This is the first time I've seen a number that gets across the FEELING of the job market right now. It's the fucking Hunger Games www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of...