An open letter, to readers, about Charity and Sylvia. I am very pained to feel the need to write this. #queerhistory #pride

New on the Diacritics blog: "Postcolonial Literature’s Generative Capacities: A Conversation with Rose Casey and Ryan Topper" about their recent monographs, "Aesthetic Impropriety" & "Animist Poetics." Read here: www.diacriticsjournal.com/postcolonial...

Interesting discussion between Rose Casey & Ryan Topper drawing on their recent books. I have been slowly reading through some African fiction, mostly 60s/70s, working out from SA, & look out for what researchers are saying. #AfricanLiterature

I loved talking with @ryantopper.bsky.social about our recent books. Interested in the structures and possibilities that literature builds? In literary criticism and critical theory? In African studies, postcolonial anglophone literature, psychoanalysis, or the law? We have all this and more!

This! Teaching and researching are entwined and equally essential. The best college teachers research and the best researchers teach. Overworked and underresourced public schools matter and their students deserve the best education.

During my bookstore shift yesterday, this precious little 8th grader came to me holding a book. She wanted to know if she could somehow hide the rainbow cover. She could barely get the words out & didn't buy it, but you should've seen her joy when I whispered #HappyPride & pointed to my #LGBTQ pin.

It seems to me that the US could do with a little more of this version of democracy, tbh (speaking as someone who can vote in both countries)

It's amazing what you can do when you remember that schools have a primary responsibility to the children they teach and nurture -- not to the ed-tech industry or gen AI profit margins.

"Is it any wonder, then, that these institutions would collaborate on a report whose aim is to discredit the very possibility that those disciplines that are at the forefront of the critical study of AI could produce accurate knowledge?" asheeshksi.substack.com/p/producing-...

The gratitude I feel for the chance to study with brilliant people while at Cornell is, once again, counterbalanced by the deep shame I frequently feel in response to leadership actions

Here are the photos of Hew Locke's Hinterland! And a pile of my books which features this wonderful work of art. You can see the exhibition, Passages, at OSU's W*xner Center until 5/24.

I saw my book's cover art in person for the first time! And WOW. Hinterland by Hew Locke is stunning. It's on display at the Wex/OSU until May 24. If you want more to read about Locke and postcolonial aesthetics, please read my book: fordhampress.com/aesthetic-im... @fordhampress.bsky.social

I doubt I know more about reconstruction than Trevon. What I do know is that Reconstruction wasn’t some shadowy, back room event. It was then as it is now — plain as day, obvious to all, boastful and unrepentant.

“Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, & into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate," [Jollimore] said. "Both in the literal sense & in the sense of being historically illiterate & having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”

It’s not about declining humanities majors or declining humanities enrollments (which are respectively overblown and not a thing). It’s about structural disinvestment.

Remember when academic Tw*tter was a thing and you could make silly jokes and wonderful puns, vaguepost about crappy people doing crappy things, share book or teaching ideas or reading recs, cheer on people you knew through the internet that then became IRL friends? I miss those days!

Looking up Blind alleys, going down rabbit holes, experiencing archive fever … all the figures for research tell you that the direct route is the wrong route. I once planned a book about this called “False Starts” to show how inefficiency, irrelevance, & indirection are (lost) keys to new thinking

It's not getting much coverage in the U.S. but the news from the UK elections is in and it is DIRE. The entire country has shifted to the far right. Entrenched racism is being legitimized under Reform. I keep thinking: Brexit was a bellwether for Trump 1.0. And: this is so depressing.

Grateful to reporter Matt Hartman for telling this story about changes in leadership at NEH. The firing of 22 out of 26 board members, including all members appointed by past presidents, is nothing short of a coup at an agency where the board reviews and votes on every single grant application.

Posting again for the daytime crowd! I'm particularly looking for readings on best grad advising practices, but comments on your personal or program recs are also welcome! Thanks!

Best practice for grad advising? Best sources or resources? I'm not new to advising (I saw several PhD advisees graduate before I even had tenure) but am wanting to spruce up my sense of best practice & norms. How often do you meet? Meet their needs while recognizing your own (eg workload!) etc.!

When it gets to the end of the semester, and I have no energy, any more, to exert substantial emotional labor toward easing other people's feelings, and am instead merely the direct but polite and considerate person I actually am, I realize: What BS to feel compelled, always, to perform gentleness.

TEACHING TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LITERATURE: ESSAYS FROM THE CLASSROOM Officially under contract and coming in 2028! It's a monster volume: 33 teacher-scholars from around the world writing provocative, shortform essays in the service of pedagogy

"I've found that a lot of AI is kind of slide-showy" My 14 year old nails it.

No luck so far with my quest to set up my sister with fellow vegan nature-loving northerner Jack from @theguardian.com's First Dates. Not to be all Austen but I'm *this close* to emailing the Guardian with her contact details and a note to send to Jack. He does actually sound perfect for her!

The couple in this week's Guardian Blind Dates didn't work out but Jack sounds *perfect* for my sister. She's a vegan geography teacher who lives just outside Manchester, spends a lot of time outdoors, & is basically his age. Can the internet do its thing?! www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Our PhD student Kennedy Orwa, who studies applications of AI to health care, was hastily deported today to Kenya along with his 13-year-old son without opportunity to speak to legal counsel. King 5 reports that he held a valid visa that was rescinded without explanation.

Ngl, this is basically how I teach. (And, bc the context is necessary on this occasion, it's also basically why I've won multiple teaching awards and most of my students massively exceed their expectations of what they can do, write, think, and know.)

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:

Sending a quick Friday evening note to Norton to say omg, are you seriously encouraging professors of literature and languages to adopt generative-AI bots "to support your students and course goals." I'm so sick of the uncritical adoption of this tool!!

Castor Semenya: "I have carried this weight. So have other women of colour who deserved better from sport. Reintroducing genetic screening is not progress — it is walking backwards. Women’s sport does not need this. It needs to be abuse-free... This is just exclusion with a new name."

Here is my pride flag everybody! I hung one up yesterday in my office at Boston University, as they seek to enforce and defend a policy of removing them (along with other banners in public view, they say). This is a small act of love for my corner of the world, in a dark time. This flag goes deep.

Happy St Patrick's Day to the Irish-American tradition that's about solidarity with oppressed peoples and opposition to imperialism, and *NOT* to the part that's about integration into American whiteness via exercises in domineering racism.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York.

I've heard a lot about LYRIC LOGIC over the years. It's now finally about to come out, so I can read the whole thing. Congratulations to @johannawinant.bsky.social, my brilliant friend and much-missed former colleague!

The doge bros are specifically cutting humanities programs because they believe understanding history and culture is a threat to fascism and white supremacy. They are right.

I recast Trump's next alleged girl victim's testimony first-personally based on four formal FBI interviews that were just released in the Epstein files (having been previously mysteriously missing). It's time for anyone who can afford to do so to listen katemanne.substack.com/p/the-story-...

Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too “DEI” for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below

Contemporary literature that stages the act of reading, and/or desire, and/or pleasure: i.e. fit the course title "Reading for Pleasure"? I'm revising my intro. to literary studies course! English majors love reading and deserve a course that helps validate and theorize this passion!

I haven't said anything about this before, bc in the grand scheme of horrors this only rates as an inconvenience, but since others are experiencing it: Just three days after CBP arrested me for filming them outside Broadview on 9/27, my TSA Pre & Global Entry were suspended—and so were my wife's.

👀The federal judges in West Virginia, where ICE has been pulling over and detaining people on the freeway, are literally screaming about ICE's tactics. "It is an assault on the constitutional order," Judge Goodwin says. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

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I highly recommend Ryan Topper's new book Animist Poetics! It's a must for anyone working in African lit. and/or psychoanalysis and lit, among many other things! And the pb edition is currently heavily discounted!

Working on @juliehoo.bsky.social's index for her brilliant forthcoming book was such a privilege. Read Mary Wollstonecraft Against Modernity, out in July from Stanford! In it, Julie Murray upends feminist intellectual history by rereading MW, exposing western feminism's developmentalist impulses.

I get tired of saying it, but I’ll say it again: the nature of oppression in America is that they workshop it first on Black, Latino, Asian & Native people. But it is always, in the end, coming for everyone.

Ian Austin, an Army veteran, was arrested for protesting ICE in Minneapolis. But he’s continued protesting. Senior reporter @julialurie.bsky.social spoke to him. “When they say, ‘Why would you be out here?’ How the fuck could I not be out here?” he says. “My nation is under attack."

Sharing because we need joy and creativity in the face of hate and destruction--and these guys know this. Celebrating joy and love is what will get us through this.

It’s time for labor to stand up around the country against ICE’s racism and violence - just as unions and working people are doing in Minnesota. www.aaup.org/news/aaup-pr...

Pretti Good reason for a national strike. #NationalStrike