Hello non-fiction writers of the internet! If you or someone you know is feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or could use an outside reader, I still have some availability this spring for writing coaching and editing. ✨ You can learn more about working with me here: halperta.com/categories/e...

Read this excellent @uwnews.uw.edu story about research by @mellymeldubs.bsky.social, @neel2112.bsky.social, and students using @spl.org data - and check out this fun interactive website where you can explore the data! melaniewalsh.github.io/whats-seattl...

My hot take about the “students cannot read whole novels / watch whole films / etc.” is that they can learn to do it. None of us are born with attention spans suited for long media. It is a learned skill and can be developed with practice.

My favorite bit from this important stock-taking of what's happened at the Smithsonian over the past year. A lot of folks are trying to keep their head down and stay out of trouble... Cancel the exhibition with a portrait of a Black trans woman, erase the word "diversity"...

"Hamnet" is probably not for everybody... While it is sad, it is not only that. I personally found it to be deeply engrossing and cathartic. Incredible performances from the child actors and from Jessie Buckley (Agnes Shakespeare). Also a fresh take on feminist critical fabulation w/Shakespeare.

"I am now left to raise our son and to continue teaching him, as Renee believed, that there are people building a better world for him. That the people who did this had fear and anger in their hearts, and we need to show them a better way." -Rebecca Brown Good

This Ursula K. Le Guin quote seems apropos (again): "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words."

Oh hey, we won an award! Cool.

Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social and co-collaborators Sylvia Fernandez, Miriam Posner, Anna Preus, & Amardeep Singh’s project titled “Responsible Datasets in Context” received a Digital Project Award (Newcomer) from the American Studies Association. www.responsible-datasets-in-context.com

There’s a great and reporting-driven opinion essay by Lydia Polgreen in the NYT about how Indian Americans have found themselves flat-footed after the surge in anti-Indian rhetoric and policy from the right. Here's a few thoughts on how South Asian Americans can toughen up to survive this new era 1/

A round up of a few books I read and enjoyed from this past year. Academic books as well as general interest. Includes references to some Bluesky folks: @aearhart.bsky.social, @danicasavonick.bsky.social, @eve.gd, @annakornbluh.bsky.social... www.electrostani.com/2025/12/2025...

“Every archive … is at once institutive and conservative. Revolutionary and traditional.” —Derrida, Archive Fever

There have been a number of stories like this in recent months... I don't know how to articulate how demoralizing and frightening it is, especially for those of us with foreign-sounding names and brown skin. Hoping (not optimistically) for some new pathways for resisting totalitarianism in 2026.

Nice deep dive into the Rhinelander v. Rhinelander case in the Times by Laura Wexler. I was surprised the author didn't mention Nella Larsen's "Passing" in connection with the case; some scholars have suggested Larsen was inspired by it in her novel. #race #passing www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/m...

We used to have a Canon; now we have an Algorithm, suggesting books to us and shaping what we see and know. The Canon was exclusive and biased. It overwhelmingly consisted of white male authors. The Algorithm can be more inclusive, but by definition critics can't control it. We're subject to it.

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...

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/...