“Downsizing higher education in the name of corporate efficiency squanders the collective expertise and experience in which immense public resources have been invested. This manufactured crisis, however, is far from inevitable.” Read more: moneyontheleft.org/2025/01/16/u...

Oh, wow!

Sharing is caring.

This reads like something out of an AS Byatt novel. www.the-tls.co.uk/literature/p...

Manifesting tackling enemies.

Meet Oberon. He is helping.

“I regard the report the MLA Executive Council published on Dec 16 to explain their suppression of the BDS resolution…as a betrayal of the professional class whom the MLA claims to serve and represent.” A must-read by @mattseybold.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/theameri...

I don't know who needs to know this, but @archive.org has thousands of knitting & crafting books you can "check out" & sometimes download. E.g., as a machine knitter (amongst other things), I have found an amazing trove of very helpful out-of-print books. 🙏 Check it out! 🧶

Day 21 without internet at home and it turns out I am not great at rationing my mobile data. Not when things are happening in the world, there are cat and house updates to send, teaching to prepare, scholarly admin to dispatch, and writing/research, etc.

Look, I’ve no doubt Trump wants to play hardball with Canada in trade negotiations and that we’re in for hurt. But the annexation talk is a negotiating tactic, same as him insisting that we have nothing the US needs. It is meant to rattle Canadian leadership, which is in flux right now.

We're pleased to announce a deadline extension for the 'Modernism and Data' Special Issue! The new deadline is January 20th. See below for the CFP: modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2024/09/27/m...

how does public health influence the creation of public landscapes? our latest blogpost recaps on the ideas and collections explored during the 2024 Friends of the Landscape Archive at Reading (FOLAR) conference, held here in November merl.reading.ac.uk/blog/2025/01...

I won’t have internet at my new place until 24 January and have somehow managed to use 80% of my monthly phone data (renews on the 2nd of each month) on *checks browser history* DIY videos. Send reinforcements.

Just in time for Christmas: news that my essay, “Reading (in) Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear”, published in the May 2024 issue of Novel is one the most-read of the year! Free to access until 31 January!

THIS is why we wrote this. archive.is/2024.10.31-1...

A companion to our history lists, here's a list of books, chapters, and articles published in 2024 in lit studies by scholars working off the tenure track. Compiled by @rcolesworthy.bsky.social and @hartmann-villalta.bsky.social.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! In other words, spending today’s classes doing reverse outlines with students.

For publishers' series, SUNY, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century.

Here's a list of journals, scholarly societies, and book series devoted to 19th-c. Britain. If you're aware of others that should be added, please let me know. www.victorianresearch.org/journals.htm...

Since I’ve reached 1K followers over here (quicker than I gathered my curated list of friends, colleagues, and strangers in the other place) I wanted to say a warm hello and welcome. I’m not ignoring you, but am treading lightly on all social platforms to focus on my writing academic projects.

One of our amazing Georgetown English students bringing heat in the New York Times: “to employers in business fields and beyond: if you want employees who excel at thinking, hire a humanities major.” 💜

Five writers of whom I’ve read 5+ books Ali Smith Virginia Woolf George Orwell Arnold Bennett Sara Ahmed

How are you all archiving and closing out your accounts at the other place?

Part “The Matter of Matter”, part “Reading Reading :)”.

This is a good article. Not a very profound take, but if there's one thing I learned from studying the C19 porn trade on and off for a decade, it's that ongoing non-compliance really fucks with zealots' plans. It's exhausting and demoralizing.

A reminder that @contingent-mag.bsky.social publishes lists of books and articles produced by contingent historians at the end of each year. If you wrote something, or know someone who did, submit the info here so I know to included it! contingentmagazine.org/yearly-pub-l...

I live this whole thread!

I've started a starter pack for academics and organizations focused on the #19th century! I'm sure I have missed many, many people (I was trying to get this started quickly) — comment below if you want to be added. go.bsky.app/6ZkJ592

👀👀👀

Here's a link to my piece, "Eighteenth-Century Longing," which contains, in the words of my partner, "a truly weird close reading around Adorno and sausages." openpub.udel.edu/read/unsettl...

I’m following you all now because Josh made a list. bsky.app/profile/wool...

years ago the V21 Collective & Jennifer Doyle started a database of funded MA programs in English. It's still a fantastic resource for helping students find chances to remove themselves, if just for a year or two, from the maelstrom of fully commodified life docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

I'm extremely grateful to @realmandeville.bsky.social for this generous review in the TLS! www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-feat...

For this afternoon’s #modwrote I’m tying up some loose threads for my BAMS conference paper on Mina Loy’s Feminist Modernist Illuminary Aesthetics. This follows on from work I presented at the Woolf, Modernities, Technologies conference in Fresno, California earlier this month.

It is finally here! My very very very long close reading (and many other types of readings) of Graham Greene’s novel The Ministry of Fear.

Starting the last day of 2023 with a breathtaking view and more condensation than usual.

Adding to my 2024 list.

The role of hydroelectricity in society should be examined more often.

A fave read of the year was Jillian Hess's chapter on scientific note-taking in her terrific _How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information_. My notes resemble Humphrey Davy's (spontaneous! messy!) more than Michael Faraday's, + I'd like to try organize them in 2024. Software recs?

Without downloading any new pics, what is your energy going into 2024?

#birdbot

After the incident—which involved a palpable inwards list to the living room floor, a front-heavy Christmas tree, and poor positioning of the tree tripod legs—our tree is finally in good nick. Featuring one of my favourite ornaments: the pink fish from Pieter Bruegel I’s Fall of the Rebel Angels.

To Carthage then I came Grading grading grading O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest grading

I missed posting about #WorldAIDSDay2023 because I was doing queer things online, but wanted to mark its passing with an anecdote about pitching a poetry and memoir of the AIDS crisis course in a job interview, in which I was asked if students would recognise any of the poets …

I was too busy to take many photos of yesterday’s ‘Imagining Queer Ecologies’ symposium, so this lichen (and fungi) doodle will have to do. My co-organisers @mostlyvoids.bsky.social and @woolfianjosh.bsky.social are thankful to The British Society for Literature and Science for funding us!

My husband’s great aunt Pam (a retired social worker, environmental activist, and artist) rushed to get a card in the mail as soon as she heard the news. Aunt Pam insisted years ago that her seal of approval should replace the official process, not least because it was more humane.

Yesterday, my friend @woolfianjosh.bsky.social & I discovered we have the most excellent intersection. He has a meme for every context, I have a context for every meme. This is quite honestly a delightful discovery, but watch this space as we work out what to do with what is a nascent superpower.