But “elite” refers to people who have power and status, not people who know what they’re talking about. And the kind of cumulative, focused training that builds academic expertise produces understanding that is qualitatively different from what a random person can learn from the internet or chatGPT.

The thing regular people don’t often grasp about ‘academic freedom’ is that if you don’t allow experts to research & teach in their fields of expertise, guided by their professional judgment & decades of training, you have effectively given up on the concept of knowledge & shut down your university

I'm over the moon that my book, Relatability: Sharing and Oversharing with the New York School Poets, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in the not too distant future.

With a lot of gratitude to NHC for the safe space to incubate this lecture, CITAP for supporting my Fellowship application, and the Thomas Wolfe Prize committee and UNC English & Creative Writing Department for the honor.

I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win (h/t @miriamposner.com) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

"More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

"We are again confronting a massive attack on the very foundations of democratic education + the stakes feel even higher. In the 50s the targets were individual teachers—communists progressives liberals +their leftwing unions. Now the target is the system itself" www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-g...

unions are for everybody

'broken things' is a year old today! I've been making music for most of my life in one way or another, but this is the thing I've made that I love the most. ameliacourthouse.bandcamp.com/album/broken...

Some of you asked if I would make a playlist for my Hip Hop history class. Here it is! It's pretty long because I basically condensed all of my Spotify playlists and added more notable tracks. youtube.com/playlist?lis...

"the real violence in Chicago - like across america - is not the violence of the streets but the violence of policy: underfunded schools, disappearing jobs, healthcare deserts, food apartheid, and a criminal justice system that treats poverty like a capital offense." spiritual leadership 9-2-25

Side note: I look forward to Chicago and any other schools suspending PhD admissions and hiring also suspending publication requirements for current faculty in those fields since such reqs presuppose the existence of an adequate pool of peer reviewers

I'm thinking of teaching a class on "The Work of Art in the Age of Slop" and am wondering if anyone has ideas abut what to include?

IT’S HERE!!!!!! My new book, *Sweet Taste of Empire* spotted in the wild!

Having children dress as characters for book week teaches them to embrace naive mimesis. They should be encouraged to personify formal categories like omniscient naration, free indirect discourse, etc

one last thing, hopefully not for you, but nevertheless: keep doing the work, humanists. keep writing the stuff that pisses all the right people off, keep teaching your students to imagine better futures, keep learning all kinds of nerdy stuff. we’ll need that knowledge. and that heart. 💜

Behind paywalled version, if anybody is keeping track of the SNC / broader neo-liberal SLAC trend: archive.ph/MugSb

12 months, 24 episodes, 53 voices, 2387 minutes of produced content, 150,000+ downloads. It’s been my pleasure & my pain. Ends tomorrow.

I'm excited to announce that Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work! This is such an honor, and I appreciate everyone who helped me along the way.

very much saddened to learn that bucknell university press will be closing. they took a chance on my first book when other presses said it was too short or too narrowly focused on minor authors. www.chronicle.com/blogs/letter...

U Chicago AAUP fights back docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Join me for a VIRTUAL BOOK LAUNCH on WEDNESDAY at 11am CDT to celebrate a new book by Lara Dodds and Michelle Dowd! The book offers a terrific state-of-the-field assessment of scholarship on early modern women writers and important ideas for the future. Register at tinyurl.com/DoddsandDowd

For those of you going to Denver’s SAA, please consider joining @roaringgirle.bsky.social and me to talk about the importance of public libraries, Shakespeare, and other early modern literature. There’s so much to consider in our current political climate:

what is your favorite short work on pedagogy from the last few years that ISN'T about AI?

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

Heartbreaking: Palestinian journalists Anas Al Sharif and Mohammed Quraiqa were killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted the tent of Al Jazeera correspondents near Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. May God have mercy on them and grant them paradise.

I’m heartened to see this.

The federal government’s $1B dollar demand is designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to devastate UCLA and its critical mission. #StandUpForUC to defend America’s greatest public university system and support this life-saving work. ucal.us/standupforuc

I wasn’t sure I’d have the chance to be back in a literature classroom, and I feel absurdly lucky to have gotten one. Thank you to so, so many for your encouragement and support. I’m very grateful to share the work with you.

The admin is already telling us we need to make sacrifices because of our funding situation. We’re already cut to the bone. What happens when they return with more demands for sacrifice, to make up for a budget shortfall they cause with a settlement everyone is pleading with them not to make?

“This and other executive orders eliminating federal funding and forcing faculty to end legally permissible work will deprive students of opportunities for educational advancement and economic flourishing.” —Todd Wolfson, AAUP President Read full press release and response to Trump’s directive👇

The way these guys talk about PhDs is like the tv shows where a character is said to have three PhDs to show you they're smart. Every time they talk about it they just keep showing they have no idea what expertise is

arrived back in Philly to a box full of copies of my book: the very best welcome-home present 💗 Official release date is later this month, but you can buy for 20% off with the code CUP20: bit.ly/4opXLp8 -#modernistlatitudes @columbiaup.bsky.social @philipleventhal.bsky.social

carolyneryan.my.canva.site#home-page I've just launched a website for my historical consulting services. I offer services in research, writing, developmental editing, public history work, and instructional design. Please share!

Folks who have moved away from their institutional LMS: how have you handled assignment submission?

NEW! 1st of 2 installments contextualizing Jameson's lectures at the 1977 Institute On Culture & Society, discusses "Marxism & Historicism," historicizing the lectures, recovering them, the commodity as its own ideology, long arc of Jameson's influence theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/the-jameso...

FWIW, I’ve got an archive of self-created, self-hosted, open-source, non-extractive, non-surveillant class websites going back 22 years! wordsinspace.net/classes/

Love to spend an increasing amount of my precious, finite time on this planet figuring out how to disengage from the multitudinous extraction bots being shoved into every platform, device, and service in the name of ease and efficiency.

*taps sign*

Halfway through my six-week grad summer class, "Novel Theory." We've been reading classics as well as recent work by @dorazhang.bsky.social, @teaganbradway.bsky.social, & @ehayot.bsky.social. Up next: @drbibliomane.bsky.social, @sinsleyh.bsky.social, @annakornbluh.bsky.social, & more!

Rümeysa Öztürk describes the library in the prison where she was held for 45 days for co-authoring an op-ed

I've seen some talk about how we are witnessing the end of the professoriate as we know it and this may be true, but I think it's bigger: it's the decimation of the mission-oriented profession. Want to make a middle-class living serving the public good? Capitalism doesn't want that for you.

“It’s not that traditional liberal arts is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities values desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, an administrative class.” www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/o...

The lineation on this bag of flour is so intense

Here you go! I'll write some new ones for this semester too. They loved them. The "read without your phone or screens in the room" was a revelation, and many of them decided to keep doing it. They had NO IDEA (& were horrified) how often they interrupt themselves to look at a phone for no reason.

It was a joy to see two of the first reviews I commissioned appear in the most recent issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film: Yasser Shams Khan on The Visual Life of Romantic Theatre and Marlis Schweitzer on Kellen Hoxworth's Transoceanic Blackface. journals.sagepub.com/toc/NCT/curr...

I listened to this episode during our cross-country drive and became so engrossed I almost ran out of gas. 14/10 would risk needing roadside assistance again.

Any NYC-based folks interested in organizing a craft fair fundraiser to support people in Gaza in September? I'm thinking September 6 or 7. I don't have a space or any logistics but I figure we might be able to raise some significant $$ if we can get lots of crafters to donate or sell their wares.

Yesterday, one of our union leaders was arrested during an ICE raid in Camarillo, CA, while he was lawfully observing immigration enforcement activities. www.calfac.org/statement-condemning-the-abduction-and-disappearance-of-cfa-members-in-camarillo/