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

Whoa University at Buffalo Poetry Collection is hiring a James Joyce curator specifically for that collection. This is someone’s dream job (I would love it but I can’t leave AL yet). Salary range is respectable, $65-80k (Buffalo is not an expensive city). www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/postings/56217

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.

With everyone focused on AI, it was easy to miss that net neutrality was struck down yesterday. Internet access will get even more expensive as we move ever farther away from treating it like a public utility. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Happy #PublicDomainDay 2025!⁠ It's the day at the start of each year on which works enter the #publicdomain. See our highlights — featuring Frida Kahlo, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and others — here: publicdomainreview.org/blog/2025/01...

A full-draft of my second book finally exists!!!! Let the revisions begin (but not today).

I am thrilled to be participating in this conference for the first time!

We are now on BlueSky! The 2025 Conference of the Society for Novel Studies will be held at Duke in late May. Check out our website to find more about this year's theme. Program will be live shortly sites.duke.edu/sns2025/cfps...

My course “Data Stories: Theory & Practice of Data-driven Narratives in the Digital Age”--a humanities course for my campus’s proposed data science major. It’s crucial for the humanities to teach in this area when not a day goes by without a data-driven story in the news alanyliu.org/course/engli...

In case you didn't see this - now with the actual cover: networkcultures.org/blog/publica...

Great thread for social media researchers and people who care about the ethics of data collection or their likelihood of being “trained on”

I know what I will be reading over Thanksgiving (even if my table will not be this gorgeous or, upon closer inspection, this weird). Endlessly surprised and impressed by how Vauhini Vara threads the needle in her bwriting about and with new technologies!

Hosted a great conversation between critic Kalyan Nadiminti and novelist Jamil Jan Kochai on the podcast Novel Dialogue. We talk about writing in the second-person, the post-9/11 novel as literary category, and why playing Final Fantasy VII is good for craft! noveldialogue.org/2024/11/21/8...

looking for more people to follow? you can search for starter packs here: blueskydirectory.com/starter-pack... you can look for people your friends are following here: bsky-follow-finder.theo.io

I'm happy to say that the special issue of Modern Fiction Studies that Catherine Keyser and I edited is now out! The theme is Women Thinking in Public (which feels even more important now than it did when we put the issue together). Hooray for feminist collaboration!

Next Wednesday 11/20, join the UMD Department of English for a virtual book launch for OUTPUT, edited by my colleague Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort. RSVP here: english.umd.edu/events/book-...

I think I got everyone who requested an add to the Novel Studies Starter Pack - welcome and let me know if you want in! Also, the submission deadline for the Society of Novel Studies conference at Duke is Nov. 15 (this Friday!) Submit paper or panel abstracts here: sites.duke.edu/sns2025/cfps...

Ok, I started a starter pack for novel scholars and the people who love them. Long live long forms! Happy to add anyone I missed. go.bsky.app/FcvMAmd

I love how all the new people showing up on Bluesky is encouraging everyone to create useful starter packs. It's almost like immigration enriches a community.