Great to celebrate the launch of ‘The Verse of Charles Dickens’ and ‘The Plays of Charles Dickens’ with their respective editors - Lydia Craig and @emilyjlm.bsky.social - and - Joanna Hofer-Robinson and @peteorford.bsky.social - at the Charles Dickens Museum.👏

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell casts a huge shadow over the book world. I'm seeing a flood of books that borrow its genre-hopping, generation-spanning format. So in my latest newsletter, I wonder: is Cloud Atlas becoming a bit of a genre on its own? buttondown.com/charliejane/...

"i dont know what id do widdout my chatgpt 🥺👉👈" Oh my god go back to Baby School you fucking failure

Saw this in Edinburgh a few years ago and have carried the thought with me since 🩷

Very excited about the two new books I picked up at #SCMS2025! Love @robinmeanscoleman.bsky.social so I'm especially thrilled to have snagged Horror Noire. Overall a lovely conference - it was so fun to present on creepy little kids in horror games, and the papers I saw on cozy games were super! 👾

Rest in Power Linda Williams. 💔 (1946-2025) This loss hangs heavy on my heart. Linda was a legend--inspiring feminist scholar, warm interlocutor always generous to students & newbies, and fierce/indomitable presence whose commitment made us all care more. I'm grateful to have known her!! ❤️😢

A chairde, as they say, "every wishlist helps!" Our gothic horror game, set in #Ireland - specifically set in the Hellfire Club in #Dublin 😱 - will be going into Early Access this year :)) Find out more below, & wishlist us today. Míle baochas 🙇‍♀️

Just listened to a wonderful talk from @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social about her very interesting (and very beautiful) book! Excited to display it on my bookshelf 🧟‍♀️

I was recently subject to a talk about how to use generative AI for my DISSERTATION. A talk led BY a faculty member, to all English grads currently dissertating. I can understand an individual choosing to be lazy and immoral, but why do the AI-obsessed try to rope everyone else into this junk!

How is the top University in the Bluest state in the US reacting to Trump’s attacks on Academic Freedom in the form of the “Anti-DEI order? The answer is: NOT good. A thread 🧵 about how the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa is responding to these attacks.

Devastating read. "'You would have thought at some point you escape the poverty trap,' said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and an author of the study. Black boys — even rich black boys — can seemingly never assume that." www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Saw this in Edinburgh a few years ago and have carried the thought with me since 🩷

Interesting. Here's my alternative take: Kill it with fire.

My hometown!

Yesterday, I discovered a(n apparently v famous) theatre tradition 'Grand-Guignol' that was both unbelievably gross, but also cool af. I'm kind of ashamed I hadn't heard of it before... Massive props (no pun intended) to @alexiamandla.bsky.social for her enthusiastic/detailed gore descriptions.

Every clothing website is now an endless battle. 10% OFF IF YOU SIGN UP FOR TEXTS! ACCEPT COOKIES, EVEN IF YOU'VE BEEN TO THIS WEBSITE 100 TIMES! SPIN OUR WHEEL TO GET 15% OFF IF YOU SIGN UP FOR TEXTS! FREE SHIPPING IF YOU SPEND $300! GIVE US YOUR PHONE NUMBER SO WE CAN TEXT YOU! I'm exhausted.

Ann Radcliffe tries to joke They wound through black woods of pine as even the last tints of stars died in the savage foliage, seeking safety in the wretched inn; if Misery ever had local habitation, this may have been "her dearest place of seclusion," where even the moon declined to shed her rays.

Now here's an attractive CFP: Railway Aesthetics: Experiencing Locomotion across Media and Cultures. Takes place ON THE TRAIN Vienna-Bucharest-Istanbul, 10-13 September 2025. Deadline for submissions: May 2, 2025 call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/02/...

Does anyone have experience writing on an ereader? I'm thinking about getting one of those nifty "ereader + keyboard + Microsoft word" devices, but I haven't ever owned an ereader so I'm not sure how people feel about them for long-term writing. I just really need something lightweight for my diss!

How I think I look when I teach / How I actually look when I teach

During the Vietnam war, my grandfather was a "conscientious objector" and misfiled copious amounts of paperwork at his government job. They didn't notice for months. Misfile! Object! Don't give in!

I'll be giving the class on horror theatre! 🦇🎭

Well, if we're all going to be waking up in a cold sweat at 4:00am for the rest of this presidency, someone's going to need to open a ~very~ early morning coffee shop so we can at least be productive!

Should universities double down on DEI? If excellence is the goal, the answer is simple: 100% yes. A synopsis of the science explaining why 👇🏼 www.freep.com/story/opinio...

Montgomery County Public Schools comes out and tells Trump to pound sand with his EO telling schools that they have to discriminate against transgender students. This is how you refuse to comply.

What's that And Justice for All quote? "You're supposed to stand for something... you're supposed to protect people." But instead...

When the Patriot Act was passed, libraries got requests for patrons’ borrowing history. We were prohibited from disclosing those requests. We deleted and shredded those records and stopped tracking reading history for that reason. ALSO.

I have been waiting for news about this game for at least a year and I am SO excited to see this trailer and have a release date!

Another highlight of my day was the Moby Dick book arts exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum. My favorite was this binding by Susan and Chaim Ebanks.

“In the eighteenth century, people believed cheese could cure leprosy.” I suspect I’m not going to change a lot of minds on this one, but one thing I’ve thought about a lot is how we discuss historical ‘beliefs’ like this more carefully. (1/n)

At least we still have cute cats

This is how you do it...

Woke up panicked in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. I wonder how many days that will happen over the next four years 🙃

AOC: I don’t care what Elon Musk is doing behind the presidential seal, but in this country we hate Nazis. Kind of like a foundational defining thing. Two of the foundational things about American history is that we beat the confederates and we beat the Nazis.

Earth Explodes theonion.com/earth-e...

Guess it's important to reiterate that millions of left, liberal, and progressive American Jews do not consider themselves/ourselves to be represented by the ADL and have not for a very long time.

🚨BREAKING🚨 Leonard Peltier Granted Executive Clemency After 50 years of unjust incarceration and the tireless efforts of intergenerational grassroots organizing and advocacy, our elder and relative Leonard Peltier has been granted executive clemency.

i’m actually stunned joe biden did this. good on him for this one, genuinely. there were people who supported obama in 2007 asking him to do this and he never did

personally i think one should just ignore anti-anti-trump academics who have done nothing but obscure the reality of the situation facing the nation in favor of grinding axes against people they don’t like

This multi-year, multi-country analysis shows that right-wing populist politicians spread more online misinfo than their mainstream counterparts and explains how “the rise of political misinformation is associated to the recent wave of radical-right populism.” journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Every once in a while I return to this video for a little touch of calm in my day.

UnitedHealth found to have overcharged some cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

In #mla25 #s584 on generative AI, Rita Raley posits that the risk we’re collectively facing is not to the humanities but to the concept of research itself. (Standing room only in here, btw)

I think part of the problem is that too many people feel forced into college right out of high school. When you make college the main path to jobs that previously had vocational/technical training programs to prepare students instead, the GE requirements become obstacles instead of stepping stones.

Academic guilt season starts today, winter edition. Feel guilty if working, feel guilty if not.

Had to watch Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead this morning. So many good lines, but toward the end: Guildenstern : I don't believe in it anyway. Rosencrantz : What? Guildenstern : England. Rosencrantz : Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?

Consistently shocked every time a new version of ask.fm seems to make the rounds. Surely we've advanced as a species!

Missing Gambier, Ohio today (and most days)

Perhaps an embarrassing question for me to ask: what are the best archives for gothic studies folks, especially in the US? I'm not super well-versed on how to do archival research, but I've been itching for a chance to hold some chapbooks.

Enraged every time I hear about ChatGPT inventing citations. And here is a prof getting caught with that. It’s completely deplorable, he should be fired.