Ok Montana

[hitting send on an essay about transfictionality and Craig's Bond] Ahhh yes, time to take a long sip of coffee and check the discourse...

Apparently I missed a real low point in the ongoing semantic drift of "performative."

A timely roundtable at #NAVSA2025: "Victorianist Work After the University as We Knew It." A great conversation with Sarah Allison, Gordon Bigelow, Ruth McAdams, Rachel Sagner Buurma, & Kyoko Takanashi.

Today in incredibly generous things, my colleagues at SUNY Press decided to highlight me (!!!) for UP Week. Have I mentioned that I have the BEST coworkers in the whole world?? This past yr has been the most difficult of my life & they supported me every step of the way. ❤️ you guys. #TeamUP

Class solidarity (derogatory)

Yes! The thing abt public libraries that is so beautiful & crucial is the idea that *anybody* could do this — you need no credential, there’s no gatekeeping, literally any person can be an intellectual. You can come from absolutely nothing & yet, by means of curiosity + work, create real knowledge

I wrote a significant chunk of my first book at a Chicago Public Library, an amazing public space where people could read books and newspapers, access the internet, or just keep warm for a while on a cold day. This is appalling.

It’s very much a prototype but I have to share a preview of the interface @djevans.bsky.social is working on for our Viral Texts data—it maps reprinting data back onto the newspaper page, allowing users to browse what reprints appeared together on each page—with links back to full reprint clusters

best ending of all time, let's be real

Chart from the Phrenological Journal (1838-1911), print from Dr. E. Clark www.jstor.org/stable/commu...

Get ready for this issue of @victorianpoetry.bsky.social — it’s coming soon and it’s fantastic. Featuring this incredible work by @rcolesworthy.bsky.social as well as equally extraordinary essays by @lerikscline.bsky.social @carolinelevine.bsky.social and Ruth McAdams.

Who has written about the time-period shift in del Toro’s Frankenstein? I’m fascinated by that choice.

Major in Africana Studies or any humanities course like English Literature! You could be mayor of New York City. You could do anything.

I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win

Joyscrolling

Hold up - they said this guy, Will Smith, is dangerous.... because he had some big hits?? Sounds like another Will Smi oh fuck he hit a home run as I was typing this goddamnit.

The children yearn for long baseball.

LinkedIn/privacy news you can use.

final project guidelines for both grad and undergrad seminars: 1. pick a topic you care about 2. don’t use ai 3. get smarter

so @matteowong.bsky.social & I wrote on data centers: arguably the most important buildings in the world & are, in a way, holding the economy hostage. Byzantine financial instruments, private equity, depreciating tech, hype, $trillion valuations. it’s all there. an ai crash prob starts here.

One of those days when the scale of suffering and injustice feels so unbearably immense. Sleep, tonight, and tomorrow we'll find something more to try.

updated schedule now posted on the @navsa2025.bsky.social website. the darker and more dangerous things get, the more it matters to think real thoughts, together. we are getting very excited to see many of you all here in DC soon. navsa.georgetown.edu

This essay began its life a long time ago, in conversation with an @elccprogramme.bsky.social Summer Scholar, Tuioleloto Laura Toailoa. It’s taken years to bring some of that early thinking to fruition. Thank you so much to the Defoe Society for this award

For readers interested in how Shakespeare is often considered both universal and “fundamental to a white American university education”, check out this Medium article on The King, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V: medium.com/the-sundial-...

Today’s Extra Credit focuses on Louise Geddes and Nora Williams’ Afterword of Shakespeare Bulletin Issue 43.1, “The Fantasy of Relevance on the Shakespearean Stage”. Check out these open-access resources to go along with this open-access article! 📰: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

“Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress truth.” -- Wole Soyinka, The Man Died

I wrote about public libraries as spaces of civic solidarity, common knowledge, and public infrastructure — all endangered by commercial and federal saboteurs

Would love to read a piece on the history of "nimble" in the context of mass layoffs.

Enormous news in literary arts philanthropy: Literary Arts Fund, initiated by the Mellon Foundation in collaboration with Poetry, Ford, Lannan, Hawthornden, & other foundations, will distribute $50 million to literary nonprofits & fiscally sponsored lit orgs & publishers over the next 5 years.

After 18 innings, each coach should have to pick a new team from people left in the stands and then start over.

Long overdue, "Criticism LTD" has a stand-alone webpage with working links to every episode bibliography, etc.

I made my students a little “book” (just using Google slides) to show them how you all answered my question about how you take notes for research. Just to show the variety.

BREAKING: economist discovers “second shift,” a concept coined by sociologists almost 50 years ago; gives it new, stupider, and less explicitly labor-oriented name

Good morning everyone. It's me again here to ask NYC residents to please send a letter to your City Council person in support of allocating 0.5% of the city expense budget to our local public libraries. Thank you. It will only take you 90 seconds. This time with the correct link:

This is one of our biggest arguments: that OpenAI is vampirizing universities for the cachet and legitimacy that affiliation with higher education affords

The conflation of academic freedom and free speech can seem ignorant, but it helps politically defined “viewpoint diversity” supplant protections for academic work as such, couching allegedly underrepresented right-wing opinion as akin to suppressed academic work, and substituting one for the other.

NEW ISSUE KLAXON: Shakespeare Bulletin 43.1 is now published! Now fully open access, this issue features a cluster of essays edited by Louise Geddes and Nora J. Williams reflecting on casting, race, community, and tragedy in productions performed on and off Broadway. 📰: muse.jhu.edu/issue/55715

Today’s Extra Credit focuses on Donovan Sherman’s article, “Whiteness and Witness: Fat Ham’s Classicism”. Check out these open-access resources to go along with this open-access article! All resources are included in the link in our bio. 📰: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

A Bard College student was kidnapped by ICE and Bard’s administration is advocating for his release and has created a website to assist the rest of the community in joining them. That’s what academic leaders should be doing for their students right now. www.instagram.com/p/DQKSTDJkeF...

Tlingit artist Nicholas Galanin, “Architecture of return, escape (The British Museum)”, a deerskin map a floor plan of the British Museum and possible escape routes for various Indigenous cultural belongings held there.

go, student newspaper of Notre Dame and Saint Mary "employ in-class essays, oral exams+ rigorous discussions — that are far more difficult to use AI tools to complete. a close reading of the text should constitute the bulk in any introductory humanities class." www.ndsmcobserver.com/article/2025...

Very grateful to the OHio Valley Shakespeare Conference for inviting me to present a plenary on my new work: “Arab Cleopatra: Conviviality and Queerness at Cleopatra’s Court.”

Polebridge, Montana, and the surrounding North Fork area only has around 100 full-time residents. On Saturday, the hamlet on the edge of Glacier National Park saw more than 60 people attend a No Kings Indivisible rally at the dirt road intersection.

This did make me cry.

An astonishingly large crowd! Chicago

Stand up, stand up for Jesus, / ye soldiers of the cross. ‘spose that’s what the Norbertines did by crying poverty and hiring a president to fire Humanities faculty. But now that we’re gone, these unspoiled servants of Christ have found the funds to donate $15 million to SNC’s endowment.

If I could offer students one bit of…advice: be brutally traditional about what is printed on your degree. If you are first-gen or in any way non traditional, this goes double. Let rich kids get degrees in AI. You get something called “English”.

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

Just received from a colleague: looks like Penn is going to join the universities refusing the extortionary Trump "compact". I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win