Modernism/modernity seeks a Book Reviews Editor (3-year term, 2026–2029). The role involves commissioning and editing reviews for both the print journal and Print+. Deadline to apply: March 16, 2026 Please share widely.

Novel 58.2 is now live!

Happy public domain day to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Hughes’ Not Without Laughter, the first four Nancy Drew novels, Betty Boop, and more! web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicd...

Very pleased that New York City will have an inaugural poet and such a fine one in the great Cornelius Eady. Poet Elizabeth Alexander of the Mamdani arts and culture transition committee doing good work: “Poets and artists…can say things that politicians can’t say.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/n...

Here are the top 10 most popular post-1945 American authors at the Seattle Public Library over the last 20 years.

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Major conference on the legacy of Fredric Jameson happening at Duke April 10-12, 2026. Grad students should submit! CFP linked: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Shadow libraries have complex histories, but AI companies using them instead of getting consent and offering authors and publishers compensation is simply wrong. www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/bus...

Well, I’ll be giving thanks to Andrea Bartz and the other authors who brought this class action against Anthropic, gave up huge amounts of their time, and won on our behalves.

I devoured @lbmcgrath.bsky.social’s Middlemen over the weekend! This is such a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the marketplace of contemporary literature (and reminded me of all the lunches I heard about but never attended as a summer intern at Carlisle and Company (now Inkwell)

Assistant Professor of 20th-21st Century British Literature (with an emphasis on literatures of the diaspora) at UMass Amherst. careers.umass.edu/amherst/en-u...

ICYMI, my piece in @pghreviewofbooks.bsky.social on what Zohran Mamdani learned from his mother's films. I published a book on Mira Nair's films in 2018.. Here I focus on "Mississippi Masala" (-->immigration/ refugees) and "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" (-->Palestine). pghrev.com/what-mamdani...

a helpful starter pack to find stuff you may be interested in and/or is local to you go.bsky.app/2Fq4P6e

Well this is going on my required reading list! Congrats to @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and @johannawinant.bsky.social on an incredible lineup and on elegantly breaking down a practice that, at its best, feels (but never is) effortless.

This rare skeet is dedicated to my husband’s coworker, who will be heading to a bookstore at midnight, to buy the new Pynchon book. Such commitment still exists!

Boston-area friends, if you're in the vicinity of Harvard tomorrow, please come to @harvardbookstore.bsky.social for a conversation about novels, LLMs, public opinion polls, collages, cut-ups, and patchwork with me and @tomcomitta.bsky.social. It will be a wild ride--hope you can join us for it!

Trying to keep my professional chill but I’m SO excited Carnegie Mellon is launching a cluster hire in computational humanities—MULTIPLE JOBS! 1. Asst Teaching Track Prof in Computational Humanities - apply.interfolio.com/173622 2. Asst Tenure Track Prof in CH - apply.interfolio.com/173626

Modern Fiction Studies is sponsoring a conference on “Cultural AI” at Purdue, to be followed by a special issue. @aarthivadde.bsky.social, @richardjeanso.bsky.social, N Katherine Hayles, @mattwilkens.bsky.social , @mellymeldubs.bsky.social, and I will be there later this week.

Want to read something interesting? Stop doomscrolling & check out this amazing special issue!

Sally Rooney putting her money where her mouth is (figuratively of course). Bravo. www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...

You can now read most of the introduction (co-written by me and @johannawinant.bsky.social) to CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, out in October from Princeton UP press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

SNS registration starting at 8am! Pick up your program and name tags!

Ngugi should have won the Nobel. An incredible body of work dedicated to the promotion and institutionalization of African languages as literary languages. Devil on the Cross was my personal favorite of his novels.

Amid fears about AI, @aarthivadde.bsky.social‬ chats with @vauhinivara.bsky.social‬ about what it really means to put ChatGPT on the printed page and whether generative AI will steal writers’ paychecks.

I loved talking to @aarthivadde.bsky.social and Sarah Wasserman about how “language is the main tool we have to bridge the divide" among us — it's why I'm a writer — and how big tech companies have been colonizing language, most recently with AI, but starting long before that.

It was a true pleasure to discuss Searches with @vauhinivara.bsky.social and Sarah Wasserman for the Novel Dialogue podcast! We ranged through the fic/nonfic binary, pushing the boundaries of form with human writing and machine outputs, and AI as a labor issue. noveldialogue.org/2025/05/22/9...

Full program for SNS 2025: Novel Languages now available! So happy to see this event come together and to have so many good people descend on Durham, NC! Come for the terrific panels and seminars and stay for signature novel-inspired cocktails and bookish swag!

The press shared a 50% discount code for preorders, May 1-31! SPRING25 press.umich.edu/Books/A/Arti...

So many great books coming down the pike!

Available for preorder, Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style is out from Fordham on 7/1/25. I analyze property law expansively, across Nigeria, India, South Africa, and the English Atlantic, to argue that both legal and literary innovations are undoing law's colonial legacies.

Today's the day! I invite close readers to see if they can find the places where I channeled the most rage into this project. It is supposed to make you uncomfortable. You are supposed to try to dismiss it as "praxis" vs. "theory" and then you are supposed to be convinced otherwise.

Taught Eve Sedgwick&Adam Frank alongside Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun in my Novel after the Internet course and found their engagement with Silvan Tomkins to be a helpful reminder that emotion and child development was quite central to early AI discourse. Here's the quote on "humanoid machines":

UPCOMING: Join us in-person or virtually for a conversation about Building the Indigenous Internet, with Ashley Cordes, Majerle Lister, and @lnakamura.bsky.social 🗓️ Monday, April 14, 2 - 3:30 PM ET 📍 Weiser Hall 10th Floor, UMich & Zoom More info and register: events.umich.edu/event/130932

In the trailer for Season 9 of our partner podcast Novel Dialogue, @aarthivadde.bsky.social looks at the web as the predominant platform of cultural life, and one that needs to be understood in light of literary history. Hosted by Chris Holmes and Emily Hyde. buff.ly/lJVTBMC

Novel Dialogue (the official podcast of SNS) is back with Season 9: TECH. We have a great lineup of novelists and critics ready to help you make sense of these senseless times. @sarahlwasserman.bsky.social, @rosecasey.bsky.social, @lizmiller.bsky.social, @vauhinivara.bsky.social, and more!

OK, every year I try to explain to my students how LLMs work, and every year I have to do a big trawl for good resources and activities. Here's this year's haul of *introductory* materials. (In-class activities + visualizations, not so much readings.)

Beautiful exhibit of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s archive premiered today at the Rubenstein. Enjoy pics of her book art, drawings, and proustian squid!

Had a great class on Art is Everything by Yxta Maya Murray, an experimental work that novelizes the "low genres" of the internet from the yelp review to the youtube comment. Murray treats the web as "the existential vape of our age" (176) and provides an under-read alternative to Lockwood

thanks @publicbooks.bsky.social for publishing this short piece I wrote about autofiction, class, real estate, creative careers, social media, and "immediacy" 💘

Taught R.F. Kuang's Yellowface yesterday and was struck by how well it captures the impact of social media discourse on autofiction's distrust of narrative (in addition to the already much discussed distrust of fictional devices). The power to narrate is portrayed in such Machiavellian terms:

Positions open at UC Berkeley for a summer lecturer in the Digital Humanities... someone I know definitely fits this description! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF04780

Ayad Akhtar on Trump's appeal in 2016 still fits: "Most Americans couldn't cobble together a week's expenses in case of an emergency. They had good reason to be scared and angry. They felt betrayed and wanted to destroy something. The national mood was Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, nihilistic -

A rare and wonderful sight of a great UK philosophy job. Please spread widely to colleagues worldwide. Area of Specialization: Ethics and/or Political Philosophy Would be an advantage to be able to teach Ethics of AI Tenure-track Application deadline: 10th March 2025 #philsky

Kris Cohen's use of "lamination" here is really admirable: "Far from optional or something that one could oppose in thought or action, the lamination of data and life is all but ineluctable. This points to a unique feature of the web, and especially Web 2.0:

Weird to reread Zuboff on nomenclature in light of Gen AI: "Machine intelligence is referred to as 'cognitive' computing at IBM, presumably to avoid the uneasy connotations of inscrutable power associated with words like 'machine' and 'artificial'." (Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 210)

I've been thinking about whether I want to continue to post on social media platforms, and the answer is yes for a mix of reasons (professionally, I think it's necessary for drawing attention to work). I've also learned about papers, experiments, books, and artists I wouldn't know otherwise.

Absolutely fantastic panel on “Rereading Generative AI” at #MLA2025. One of the best conversations I’ve heard about AI, copyright, language, & the future of the humanities and university. Highly recommend you check out all their essays in this PMLA special issue: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

For those celebrating #MLA2025, this is a thing that will be happening.