The most commonly taught full books in US High Schools, 1963/2024. 1963: Huck Finn, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Dickens, "Silas Marner" 2024: Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, "The Great Gatsby" Surprisingly static! Also: Students read fewer whole books now. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/u...

Solid NPR take on this cover of "Nothing Compares 2 U" by Chris Cornell on #xpncountdown: "Cornell could wail better than the best of them, and he unleashes a fair bit of intensity... But he also knew restraint ... a vibrant singer, capable of channeling hurt, worry and warmth in any given breath."

Friends, watch out for phishing emails that look like they're important correspondence from a higher-up at your institution. They use login pages that look like your organization (using Iframe spoof). Embarrassed to say I fell for one yesterday. www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/ghostfr...

U Minnesota Press's Spring 26 catalog, listing our new Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities (in Debates in DH series), eds. Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, @jamessmithies.bsky.social): z.umn.edu/spring26. Table of contents: www.upress.umn.edu/978151791608... @uminnpress.bsky.social

True and maybe even obvious-- but we need to keep saying things like this to protect our sanity. "Inflicting collective punishment based on the heinous and isolated crimes of one person is not a rational, appropriate or moral policy response." www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/o...

Yes, this. And: journal articles can go through the peer-review system faster, reach more people, and sometimes have long-term greater impact. I myself needed to hear this before I went up for tenure (2008). Still, as a book-focused young scholar I'm not 100% sure I would have been open to it.

Are you a grad student working on post-1945 culture? Could your research benefit from incorporating some data, even minimally? Want feedback from journal editors? This Post45 Data Collective virtual workshop may be for you! Applications are due DECEMBER 1: data.post45.org/news/grad-wo...

I have a new #DH essay out in a German journal called Archiv, as part of a special issue on "Archives and the Global Turn." The title is: "Anthology, Archive, Corpus: the Design and Implications of _African American Poetry: a Digital Anthology_." Here's a thread about it in plain English: 1/

Phew! Glad to see this — I was going to need more time …

Awesome story about a literally ‘marginalized’ woman doctor in a medieval manuscript, recovered via a close look at previously overlooked abbreviations at the edge of the page.

Great topic -- looking forward to checking this out.

Harlem Renaissance trivia: Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Bennett were born a year apart. Both came from messy families w/feuding, separated parents; both had lonely, peripatetic upbringings. Both studied at Columbia in 1921. Hughes didn't stay; Bennett got a degree in art at Pratt Institute 1/3

"AI slop demonstrates not just the technological flexibility of Trump’s fascist aesthetics — it is the ultimate example of it, the culmination of the hateful dream of eliminating the human entirely." -Ed Simon in Hyperallergic hyperallergic.com/1050277/the-...

For folks interested in DH and #CriticalAI, I'd recommend a new independent film from India called "Humans in the Loop." It's the story of an indigenous (Adivasi) woman who gets hired to do data annotation. Raises questions of embodied labor, gender, and cultural bias in AI. Available on Netflix.

ICYMI, my piece in @pghreviewofbooks.bsky.social on what Zohran Mamdani learned from his mother's films. I published a book on Mira Nair's films in 2018.. Here I focus on "Mississippi Masala" (-->immigration/ refugees) and "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" (-->Palestine). pghrev.com/what-mamdani...

It's election day in NYC. Rooting for Zohran! Check out my piece in @pghreviewofbooks.bsky.social called "What Mamdani Learned From His Mother's Films." It's reading Zohran's ethics & politics through films like "Mississippi Masala" and "The Reluctant Fundamentalist." pghrev.com/what-mamdani...

"Computational Humanities is far more than a collection of essays; it is a meticulously curated critical tool kit." This is exactly what we were going for! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...

As DH grows, it’s increasingly important to publish conference papers, but there hasn’t been a clear venue for that. So I’m thrilled to share this new home for DH proceedings, which will include CHR papers & more. Thanks to @taylor-arnold.bsky.social for leading this effort! bit.ly/ach-anthology

A bit of Modernist trivia: James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were both born and both died on the same years (1882-1941). They were born about a week apart (1/25 for Woolf vs. 2/2 for Joyce), and they died about two and a half months apart (1/13 for Joyce, 3/28 for Woolf).

This by Matt Erlin, Douglas Knox, Claudia Carroll, @jeysushil.bsky.social, Tumaini Ussiri & Sadahisa Watanabe is excellent: postcolonial corpus comparison, using quantitative proxies for 'literariness' and 'cosmopolitanism'

Today's Versedle was a challenge for me. First time in awhile when I really had no idea...

Lehigh English is having a Graduate Open House: Tuesday October 28 @ noon ET. Please forward to students interested in fully-funded M.A. or Ph.D. programs. Prospective applicants can register at the link below; feel free to DM me with questions. lehigh.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Perfect timing for my Harlem Ren class (in the UK)

A few notes and highlights from my MSA 2025. The Baroness and Djuna Barnes; Marianne Moore; H.D. and Bryher; Anticolonial manifestoes; South Asian modernism. And: remembering Sejal Sutaria. @moderniststudies.bsky.social @ria4983.bsky.social www.electrostani.com/2025/10/note...

Every day there's some new absurd overreach.

There's a nice multimedia, link-rich piece in the NYT about the new production of Hurston's never-produced play "Spunk" at Yale Rep. You can find plain text versions of Zora Neale Hurston's early works, including the short story version of "Spunk" (1925) here: scalar.lehigh.edu/african-amer...

Yes to this. And I would add: Nuance Context Complexity Uncertainty Point of View Alterity (other ways of being, other ways of living) Heterogeneity Care Compassion Alternatives to violence Empathy & Sympathy

Looking forward to the MSA @moderniststudies.bsky.social later this week in Boston! I'll be giving a talk on one panel, chairing another, and participating in a really cool workshop. My talk is on Wallace Thurman and Richard Bruce Nugent, two amazing authors I'm writing about for the first time.

My blog post reporting on testing the use of agentic AI (the Fellou.ai browser) to start a research project on gathering definitions of the humanities: “Humanities Definitions Research Project: An Experiment with Agentic AI” (liu.english.ucsb.edu/humanities-d...).

I just tried this and it's fun and beautifully designed (and maybe not *that* hard for someone who teaches English lit.!).

With all the depressing news this week, seems good to take a minute to enjoy the Alaskan Fat Bear competition story, which I translate as "middle age life goals," as I eat an extra slice of my kid's birthday cake for second breakfast. www.usatoday.com/story/pets-a...

"Poetry’s worth within commercial publishing comes from its literariness, an abstract matrix of style and taste that operates to demarcate books, authors, and genres as artistic. The oldest and most artful of genres, poetry is the apotheosis of literariness. It has cachet."

"If President Trump wants to highlight the greatness of America, he should be doing more to teach us about men like John Brown ... He should be praising the more than 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors—many of whom were enslaved when the war began—who fought to preserve the nation and end slavery."

A birthday present for Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s 200th: you can now read Chapter 1 of my new book Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Civil War and Reconstruction online for free for a limited time! Please share widely. Book info in the comments. Check out: academic.oup.com/book/60645/c...

Was at Cornell this past weekend -- giving a talk on Toni Morrison in the new *Toni Morrison Hall*. Pretty cool & a nice conference overall. I also drove down to Penn State for the Frances Harper 200 conference. A few highlights from both conferences here: www.electrostani.com/2025/09/two-...

Creative writing job in my department. TT, 2/2 teaching load. Looking for emphasis on creative nonfiction. Feel free to reach out if interested / curious! careers.insidehighered.com/job/3401532/...

Daisy Rockwell: "The University of Chicago administration... refuses to be outdone by the likes of Harvard, Columbia, and Brown. It has decided to drop its wrecking ball on itself since the Trump administration has not yet gotten around to it." chicagomaroon.com/48353/viewpo...

An excerpt from my new novel, Alice Sees Ghosts in @scroll.in.web.brid.gy ! scroll.in/article/1085...

A student in my Digital Humanities grad class this past spring took her final project on Patrice Lumumba and Global poetry and turned it into a legit publication... Well done, Maya! thecontrapuntal.com/patrice-lumu...

Soft-launching: a new digital project on Indigenous Writers (Adivasi writers) from South Asia. I've been working on it this summer with a graduate student collaborator, Srishti Raj. Adivasi literature is another glaring gap in the archive, with a lot of materials untranslated and inaccessible. 1/3

Very good article and thread about open alternatives to google scholar, which clearly will go away when its founder retires. The @barcelonadori.bsky.social movement is getting a lot if attention and OpenAlex.org a lot of support. The Lens currently looking for new home about.lens.org/expressions-...

"One might say that her [Jamaica Kincaid] work is self-consciously modest, that her fiction never grandstands. It gets to the marrow of how motherhood, childhood, and femininity are dented by colonialism, certainly, but it does so by illuminating the struggle simply to become a human being."

Another semester, another moment to thank that guy from Rice University who made that syllabus maker thing. I love you wcaleb.rice.edu/syllabusmake...

Roopika Risam's keynote at the #DH2025 conference. "Many of us came to [DH] because we believed in the liberatory promise of information, in a relationship between access and equality. Or that digital platforms might redistribute power, offer possibilities for new voices and stories to emerge."

This is pretty stunning. Wow.

Are you on research leave or sabbatical this fall? I've got a space for you - the Out of Office Gang! Structure & accountability for those out of their normal routines. All gentle; personal goals require accountability too! Optional workshopping. $175 for the term! Mondays buff.ly/tZCQ3MK

The HathiTrust Research Center is pleased to announce a new release of our open-access Extracted Features dataset, a statistical snapshot of: 18,725,868 volumes 6,867,699,164 pages 3,255,304,293,468 tokens 450+ languages go.illinois.edu/EF25 for details & download cc:@hathitrust.bsky.social #DH2025

My book Teenage Time comes out August 21st from Bloomsbury: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/teenage-t... Here it is!

For the @puddingviz.bsky.social, I explored which animals we gender, and why. Come for the extremely cute interactive viz of animals, stay for the extremely nerdy etymology of the ladybug. Story: pudding.cool/2025/07/kids...

Thrilled for Zohran, for New York City, and for some new voices and ideas in American politics! Some may know I wrote a book on Mira Nair's films (2018). In honor of Zohran's victory, I've posted an excerpt of my chapter on "Mississippi Masala" here: www.electrostani.com/2025/06/mira... 1/3