Marjane Satrapi RIP

"I am happy to report that after 33 years of working in English departments, I have been completely cured of my Anglophilia." A lot of great stuff in this UC-Berkeley commencement address from @vietthanhnguyen.bsky.social, published in @pghreviewofbooks.bsky.social pghrev.com/address-to-t...

The main reason I dread looking at LinkedIn is that my entire feed looks like this: "I am delighted to announce ... !" (amazing grant/ job etc) "I published a thing!" (pic of author holding their new book) I just want someone to be like, "I got a new pair of shoes and now I have a blister, ugh"

Several years ago, @tedunderwood.com @dbamman.bsky.social and Sabrina Lee published "The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction" in @culturalanalytics.bsky.social I wanted to query their ideas w/a mixed genre corpus of early 20th century fiction (1900-1930) I've been making. 1/

Awesome! The first issue of "Digital Humanities Intersections" has been published! https://dhi.iiti.ac.in/index.php/dhjournal/index DHI is a new "open-access, peer-reviewed journal committed to advancing multilingual and interdisciplinary research in Digital Humanities." Check it out!

This is a pretty good top 10. I was sad not to see Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy anywhere on their top 100 though.

Excited to see @whitfrazier.bsky.social's book is now out! Modernist studies, Black print / periodical culture, and the 1960s-70s Black Arts movement. Great array of topics!

Right up my alley! Happy to see that this is also open access.

One challenge to learning quantitative methods in #DH is that there are endless prerequisies. You can't just read the latest thing in Journal of Cultural Analytics and expect to do it yourself (even with "vibe coding"!) This spring, I have been reading some old & new books to strengthen basics:

Hey academic friends, if you're planning some writing over the summer and could use some support, I offer coaching and editing services for non-fiction writers. halperta.com/categories/e...

The Indian photographer Raghu Rai has died at 83. He's best known for his black and white photography from the 1970s-80s, much of it showing street life and transit in modernizing India. Motion and stillness. Some stunning images at the retrospective below: raghuraifoundation.org/retrospectiv...

The W. H. Auden interactive poetry piece in the NYT this morning is interesting. By A.O. Scott and Aliza Aufrichtig. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Nice to be quoted here! Though technically, they're quoting me quoting Toni Morrison, so I'm more like the transmitter... And thanks as always to @samcohen.bsky.social for fighting the good fight and pushing back against book bans & censorship.

For people writing about digital media stuff, how are you spelling these words in your formal copy: * E-book, ebook, eBook, or e-book? * Ereader, ereader, eReader, or e-reader? Chicago Style appears to prefer "E-book." But... a little dated? MS Word prefers "eBook" Which are you all using?

My project, African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology is nominated here. If you’ve found the project helpful, consider voting for it? Deadline April 17. (And while you’re there, check out the many great projects on the list!)

For those looking to be distracted from our current and ongoing news hellscape, I thought I should mention: there is a new Tana French novel out.

A few years ago I spent the better part of a summer working on a small #DH project called "Asian American Little Magazines, 1968-1974." The idea was to trace the emergence of the pan-ethnic idea of "Asian American" identity in a group of magazines. scalar.lehigh.edu/asian-americ... 1/2

Recommended: a new piece by @whitfrazier.bsky.social in _Public Humanities_ journal (open access). The piece compares the 2 versions of Countee Cullen's "Heritage." I believe it's the first to read it alongside the African sculptures in Locke's "Survey Graphic." www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Looking forward to delivering a keynote for Lehigh University English's Literature and Social Justice grad conference, which is centered on health, illness, and disability this year.

Irish postcolonial studies in effect…

Looking forward to presenting on this panel on Colonial Archives + South Asian #DH this weekend.

Sober and necessary analysis of a completely unnecessary, unfolding catastrophe.

As Black History Month winds down, seeing a new high in monthly traffic for the digital collection I edit on Af-Am Poetry: 37,000 users in February. Writings by Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay are the most in demand. Some new additions to the site this month:

This is a pretty fierce piece of writing: observing the strange overbuilding & underfunding, bandwagon-hopping, donation-seeking, corporate remaking of elite universities. The case study here is Hopkins, but almost the same could be written about some others. www.publicbooks.org/the-misuses-...

Woohoo! I am happy to be in this, with a short essay on “Banning Toni Morrison.” (This book perplexes fascists.)

My new colleague overcame a lot to make it to academia. Also, he is doing cool stuff in the classroom. thebrownandwhite.com/2026/02/10/a...

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/