"When scholars from historically excluded groups entered the academy in significant numbers they did not simply add new faces to existing conversations. They expanded the conversations themselves. They introduced new questions new archives new methods and new frameworks for understanding the world."

wow, just…wow This reminds me of that scene in The Big Short when Steve Eisman asks, “Why are they confessing?” and Vinny Daniel says, “They’re not. They’re bragging.”

english lit and culture studies people from the last 10 years, favorite standalone articles, or book intros/chapters, that open new ways of reading / new areas of study / new paradigms and thus usefully show new grads range in the field?

My response to that "Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences" is up. tinyurl.com/y39crkzp As I say on Facebook, I back-loaded the good stuff, like showing that the authors' account of the 2017 Hypatia controversy reveals them to be unreliable reporters.

“In essence, the report proposes giving a heckler’s veto to any syllabus or research project…[It is] a pseudo-intellectual pretext for administrators to remove faculty power to govern our own departments based on the standards of our disciplines.“

W. Benjamin is actually quite funny. “Teaching Aid: Principles of the Weighty Tome, or How to Write Fat Books,” from One-Way Street.

remember when the Gaza protests @ Columbia also showed us that university deans & admins & trustees all circulate things to each other via groupchats & digital back channels, & by these means establish ideas that come to stand as the reality they then act upon together? this is how it happens!

Just a reminder: the Carroll Report is the most important humanities report of our time

everyone, I have produced a report on how to remedy the decline of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. here it is: Executive Summary: Fund the Humanities and Social Sciences. Body: Fund the Humanities and Social Sciences a hell of a lot more. Please cite this as the Carroll report.

It’s not too extreme to say that they make this point categorically at its conclusion, even though they repeatedly concede that in the past the university claimed to do this even while advancing incredibly noxious ideas.

This is somehow worse than the criticisms of it that popped up on my feed. Centrally it wants to assert as a matter of fact—“settled” in their language—that universities must be about “disinterested inquiry” and any deviation from this consensus is a problem.

I hope that people are aware that one of the primary political objectives of this ascending right-wing effort to remake higher education through things like the Vanderbilt Report, the Chicago Principles, and the AEI Future of the American University project is to crush the academic labor movement.

One of the authors of the humanities report sat across a table and said, through a smile, that me & my writing instructor colleagues are not teachers. Still, he is welcome in my seminars on evidence, reasoning & warrant since he seems to not understand those basic aspects of academic argument.

have I mentioned that I teach first year writing here and that I am being laid off

This thread is incredible — huge thanks to everyone who contributed (plz jump in if you haven’t already!) — and reminds me of old Twitter, RIP.

Percolating on my fall theory course & would love to hear: what single essay (or chapter of a book) makes theory (interpreted however you like) or intellectual / aesthetic infrastructures concrete in ways that have stuck with you & / or you really admire? Example: Barbara Johnson, “Muteness Envy.”

"This is what it looks like when workers hold the line – it sends a message to every media company in the country that AI cannot be used to circumvent union contracts or undermine journalistic integrity." Academics please take note!

Amazing news--congrats UPTE!!!

This special issue of @differences.bsky.social invites literary theorists and historians to engage with a question raised by this reader: For whom do we read? View the TOC and read the editor's introduction, made freely available: buff.ly/FYRFI0L

This thread is super interesting on how LLMs work by using familiar structures/patterns/genre conventions to produce something that appears meaningful (b/c it resembles other, actually meaningful text) but in fact is totally empty.

We need to permanently bar from our profession anyone who outsources peer review to AI

We already have the answer to this: the public research university. The Ivy League was never the answer and is not the relevant site for thinking about the future of American higher education. We need to invest in and democratize public higher education.

this would go so hard as an album cover

Thanks to this fire I’ve learned about the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, site of a nuclear meltdown among the worst in the US. Fire has exploded and is now encroaching on it. Cleanup has been spotty at best. Really worrisome. insideclimatenews.org/news/1905202...

Very grateful for the opportunity to write about two new Octavia Butler biographies in @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social that draw upon her remarkable archive at the Huntington.

“Mr. Rosenbaum said that if the episode ‘serves as a warning about the risks of A.I.-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book…These A.I. errors do not, in fact, diminish the larger questions that the book raises’.” 🤡🤡🤡

Please consider making a donation to the Islamic Center of San Diego Victim and Family Support Fund if you are able. goodbricks.org/campaign/ics...

Spending lunch breaks reading Reddit threads on Tatis’s swing, somehow I have become a baseball person.

Please encourage any early career & NTT scholars doing fantastic work on Victorian poetries to submit to @victorianpoetry.bsky.social ‘s 2026 Early Career Prize — more info in the thread (have not had enough coffee, text of the call is embedded in a reply to the post linked below)!

Oh hai 🔥

Seeking jellyfish texts (esp poems) — published in any time or place, expressly about jellyfish or making only errant reference to them. Suggestions?

NEW: I've been shocked by some of the numbers I've been seeing on behind-the-meter power plants for data centers, so I did a little math. less than a dozen gas plants being built to power data centers for big tech companies could emit a maximum of nearly 130 million tons of CO2e each year (!)

Two copy editors high-fiving so hard right now

Loving the incessant invitations to complete surveys on the use of gen AI and to join gen AI “symposia” that are engineered to shut down even so much as a whiff of critique.

FYI @erinspampinato.bsky.social’s gorgeous conclusion for the Barbara Johnson book evokes the gutting, seething sense of abusive waste that is the emotional weather of austerity academia. Solidarity to all enduring this & please god, if do you have job security, find out how you can put it to use

The most daring & imaginative rising scholars are being cast aside systematically, abandoned by the very system that needs their ideas the most: the loss is profound, for everyone. And as in other cases of underinvestment the scale of damage will only become visible after it’s too late to fix.

My book, Probable Exhaustion, posits that literary texts of the long 19th c help us trace how a conception of progress welded to infinite growth and development is unthinkable outside of the threat of exhaustion. Will be out with @cornellupress.bsky.social Jan 15, 2027

There is something perverse & darkly significant in the fact that a widely published scholar whose *forthcoming book* traces a prehistory of the ideologies now disfiguring academia will likely have to leave the profession b/c there are no stable jobs for him. Infinitely sad, at so many levels.

CFP for VISAWUS 2026 online series on teaching. Please apply and share! TIME FOE TEACHING! A roundtable series to address the crisis in teaching Victorian Studies. Literary scholars, historians, art historians please join us! #VictorianStudies #19thCentury #AcademicSky

if you want to preorder this bad boy & set some of its very, very good essays on your fall syllabi, you can use NUP2026 to get 25% off —and I bet some of us would love to Zoom into your classes to talk?! 💗 @devingarofalo.bsky.social @nupress.bsky.social

And you need to read Lauren's whole essay (link in quoteskeet), but here's a little context on Rize.

(202) 224-3121 is the capitol switchboard for connecting to any senate or house office; even if you've never called; even though the lot of them are useless. no abominable war crimes, no war, no.

“During one conversation, we asked Altman whether running an A.I. company came with ‘an elevated requirement of integrity.’ This was supposed to be an easy question.”

What if we just went back to reading a bunch of books and thinking about them together, and that was the class? With syllabi no longer than three pages.

Resharing, for the Friday crowd, the news of this crucial special issue, in which I'm honored to appear alongside scholars and humans I deeply admire and to share the article I wrote when I thought it might be my last. Solidarity with all who have wondered the same. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

I cannot WAIT for my copy of @johannawinant.bsky.social's first monograph to arrive! I've just ordered LYRIC LOGIC from Columbia UP with the code CUP20. This review from Oren Izenberg tells you what you need to know. We all need pleasure, thought, & both buoyancy and precision, right now & always:

BRILLIANCE ALERT!

Fantastic job by @devingarofalo.bsky.social and the authors in this issue. Already scheming about how to make space for this on my undergrad intro to literary studies syllabus (required course for majors). These kinds of issues need to be center stage in our classrooms.

ICYMI yesterday afternoon, a new, currently ~open access issue of Victorian Poetry—abt VP & so much more—dropped ft a stellar intro by @devingarofalo.bsky.social, essays by @carolinelevine.bsky.social, @lerikscline.bsky.social, Ruth McAdams, & me, and a keywords essay by @ryancarroll.bsky.social.