absolute power corrupts absolutely. moderating a panel, only a little ✨

It was very great to talk w/ the amazing SEL managing editor Kelly McKisson about institutions & pandemic-time in dialogue w work by @marymullen.bsky.social, @annakornbluh.bsky.social @mltondre.bsky.social, @devingarofalo.bsky.social, Liz Miller, Barbara Leckie, & others @sel1500to1900.bsky.social

it helps me, as a reader, to imagine the words SPONSORED CONTENT written across the masthead of every major newspaper and tv news outlet now

And who is the author of this op-ed? The billionaire CEO of an asset management firm who helped author the compact.

Accepting this as an argument means accepting that, as an educator, your primary commitment is not to educating your students, or to propagating knowledge of your subject, but to finding and securing new markets for products in whose success your employers (or their bosses) have some kind of stake.

Out of the Archives: a 1992 letter from Judith Butler in the papers of Hortense J. Spillers. Butler is giving the Pembroke Center Publics Lecture Wednesday, November 5. Tickets have sold out, but the lecture will be recorded and available on our YouTube playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis....

The 11th annual Post45 Graduate Symposium will be hosted by Duke University's Department of English, February 20-21, 2026! Check out the CFP (post45.org/graduate/202...) and please share with anyone who might be interested. Abstracts are due November 14.

(i find that contact with difficult and real ideas can be weirdly stabilizing in the maelstrom of serially-worsening late-imperial news cycles)

Just saw that you can read this for free online and — well, if you haven’t read it before, you should ctheory.indiana.edu/resources/fa...

We could hear them laughing

Obviously signing Trump’s compact is the death knell for a university, but the fact that any of them are even *considering* it exposes something deeply rotten at the heart of their leadership. It should disqualify them forever.

I’m shilling CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY hard because I’m so proud of it —specifically because it, like every close reading, is the product of a community and an offering to a community. @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I collaborated with each other and also 22 brilliant contributors.

I loved collaborating with my academic sibling @nathankhensley.bsky.social (along with some of my very favorite Victorianists) to recognize the work of our fantastic advisor and mentor Kathy Psomiades. Read her book!

"Caring about thought in time means caring about scholarship." Please allow yourself the pleasure of reading Kathy Psomiades, reading a bunch of other people, reading her award-winning book, *Primitive Marriage* (cluster of response-essays now out in VLC) www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The chairman of COP28 was the managing director of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC)!

hey a few days ago we did a walkthrough of the @navsa2025.bsky.social hotel —the Omni Shoreham, in Woodley Park— and it really is a gorgeous, art deco monument (built 1930). Can’t wait to see a bunch of smart Victorianists here in November 🤩 navsa.georgetown.edu

Auckland university is hiring a Lecturer (that’s Assistant Prof for all you Americans) in English, specialising in the long nineteenth century, to a permanent position commencing before Semester 1, 2026 (or by negotiation). Focus is nineteenth century fiction - details below!

it's nice to think of the genre of the gothic generally -- that we live among ruins because of state divestment, except now everything and not just abbeys -- as actually a possibly a home improvement show

A beautiful but flawed thing that burns down and seems almost irredeemably damaged can be rebuilt, maybe even improved—useful allegory for our times!

Look, I don’t have anything witty to say about this. It’s a tragedy that our society is so sick that schools feel they have to try to this stuff to stay open because it isn’t enough that education makes you less ignorant.

yet another way that the war on academic knowledge is a war on the past & a violent thinning out of historical experience — you’re taking years & often decades of slow-building expertise (& the investments that made it possible) and just tossing it in the bin

Want to attend NAVSA 2025: Aftermaths but can't make it to DC? Want MORE brilliant Victorianist scholarship than you can get at the in-person event? The NAVSA 2025 DIGITAL PRESESSION is free and open to all —registration required for security (thread of papers below)

the day-to-day demoralizations of working in a regional public in a red state in the age of AI hype are too much today, even when I know they're by design, even when (most) colleagues and (basically all) students are fantastic

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart…you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…you’ve got to make it stop.” stay safe @emanabdelhadi.bsky.social

Issue 50.2 of Victorian Review is out on Project Muse! First up in this issue is a forum edited by Doreen Thierauf, "Thinking Reproductive and Sexual Justice with the Victorians after Dobbs: Future Paths Previously Trod" muse.jhu.edu/issue/55679

this great point about the social character of knowledge —how knowing real things relies on others signaling when you’re wrong—is another way of highlighting the political importance of social shame. It also clarifies the fundamental nihilism of the AI-industrial complex

You tell her, Jane!

nancy picked me up off the floor when others walked around me — that set the standard for how i mentor

I got to go back to duke to give a talk named after Nancy Armstrong & Len Tennenhouse, and I could barely keep it together trying to explain how @zugenia.bsky.social @profchander.bsky.social & so many others are a kind of extended kinship network of ppl who’ve benefited from Nancy’s partisan backing

Question for Marxists: We're reading Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in our reading circle next week. What's one companion text you'd recommend to make sense of Althusser's work on ideology?

I’m often saying we need to keep our eyes on Vanderbilt. proteanmag.com/2024/04/29/d...

Took about 20 years. And I never thought a book about enslavers using deputization to give themselves policing power would be relevant to our times. But we are where we are. My book, White Power: Policing American Slavery, is now available for preorder. a.co/d/29c7EIP

Counterpoint: whatever this app may be, it is not social

Not a single one of our institutions has any intention of protecting its faculty or defending the integrity of intellectual inquiry at this moment. This is of the most disturbing versions of that story I’ve read: it keeps getting worse and worse as you go

Amazing archive of mid-20th century extraction and resource colonialism in Canada ⬇️

long live the flight from capture

solidarity with all those standing up for the rights and dignity of our neighbors

It's here!

Morning walk

This is true, but if you primarily see colleges as diploma mills, expertise doesn’t matter because college is just a series of hoops to jump through.

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

This is going to be amazing!! ✨🎉

20 minutes from my house, what the actual fuck @vanhollen.senate.gov @raskin.house.gov

This is such a great practice and as a person who has written a book, it is always amazing on the rare occasion when I have received these types of notes and never a burden.

I've done this many times. And I actually started it before we had email. I'd write letters to authors and send them c/o of the publishers. I got so many lovely replies. And started an ongoing correspondence with one beloved Canadian author (obviously not planned or expected!).

I started doing this thing where when I read a book I admire I try to find the author’s email & send a quick message saying I appreciated it. No big deal, not trying to be weird, but like: thank you for helping me think something new. It’s hard writing books. It matters when people read them.

pressure works; principled refusal works; organized insubordination works. small victories, keep it going.

just beginning to savor this now—a whole world dawning to the realization that it is now stupider. One boss "judge[s] the people who send her workslop. “Why did they do this?” she’d wonder. “Can they not complete the job themselves? I don’t trust them. I don’t want to work with them again.”"