My author's copy is here! Please go get your hands on this fantastic book. Took me 10 years to research my chapter, "Rape Culture: A Literary History from Ovid to Shakespeare," and I'm so very proud of it. Thank you, Doreen, Erin, Michael, @rcolesworthy.bsky.social, and @sunypress.bsky.social!

Update: @allgrim.bsky.social’s students are incredible. Such good Qs that left me like dang! I need to think abt that for a minute. I’d tweak some things in my essay now but I stand by my core claim: terves suck. So grateful to @debraraecohen.bsky.social for the opp to make it via modernist studies.

A detail I didn’t know: “The Herald entered the Epstein series for a Pulitzer Prize that year, but it was not a finalist. Alan Dershowitz … who helped broker Epstein’s original deal, wrote a letter to the Pulitzer committee that year, urging them not to honor Brown’s work.” share.inquirer.com/THMiUZ

The thing about this insistence that rape victims have some terrifying moral power that ruins men’s lives and compels the public to do anything to avenge them is that it has never once happened. What actually happens is that victims who disclose are ruined and men who are accused gain.

Liberal Currents has quietly become one of the few outlets taking male supremacy seriously, either as a foundation of Trumpist fascism or as a system of oppression in its own right.

Thrilled that *Victorian Gaslighting* AND *New Rape Studies* made this list.

OMG

What if gaslighting didn’t start in modern psychology, but in the Victorian Empire? VICTORIAN GASLIGHTING traces how power, “madness,” and false narratives were used to control women and colonized subjects, and why it still matters. #SCMS26 #ReadUP tinyurl.com/26pr7kyn

This is really extraordinary. I've never seen anything like this from a government official.

My favorite thing I learned this week is that “Bozo” actually used to be a regular old proper name, and even a slang term like “dude” or “guy” before Bozo the clown became super famous and ruined it forever. He was truly the Karen of his day, and that’s my favorite thing I learned this week.

Too often I think we view misogyny through the lens of women’s responsibility—do women cause misogyny, how can women avoid misogyny, how can we blame women, always—instead of recognizing that there is literally no way to opt out of or avoid misogyny entirely, because our whole society is built on it

It's officially OUT! Please ask your library to order #VictorianGaslighting. In honor of Women's History Month, you can purchase the hardcover at a 30% discount using the code SWHM26. Happy (belated) Book Birthday, @noragilbert.bsky.social and @tara-macdonald.bsky.social! @sunypress.bsky.social

"Over $400 million in U.S. foreign aid was cut this past year from grants that explicitly mention gender-based violence in their title or description."

American publishing regularly punishes women in their 50s by simply not interviewing them for new jobs in the way @saribotton.bsky.social describes here. So it’s great revenge that she launched Oldster magazine on her own, now with 70k subscribers.

Big moment for me: first time I’ve ever received a set of author copies! #VictorianGaslighting @tara-macdonald.bsky.social @noragilbert.bsky.social @sunypress.bsky.social

Remember when the only cup of healthy masculinity we had to drink from was Ted Lasso? And it was just Ted, not Jason. Well now that we have Bad Bunny, Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov AND Benito Ocasio, Hudson Williams, and Connor Storrie, I'm drunk and never quitting these overflowing goblets of joy.

Quotations by this badass professor appear on the back of my co-edited book #VictorianGaslighting AND in Variety mag! Yes, you should read both

I‘ve mentioned that thanks to the Epstein tranche I learned that one of my PhD advisors, Lee Smolin, continued to have contact with Epstein after 2007, which is not the impression I had It’s weird to say the least for my professional past to become a public story that demands feminist analysis

"The suppression of gender studies is not only an attempt to suppress a critical analytical tool, but also knowledge itself."

It's alive! Editor copies of "Victorian Gaslighting" arrived yesterday, and the book is now available for order at sunypress.edu/Books/V/Vict.... Go get (or go ask your library to get) yours! #gaslighting #Gaslight @dbellonby.bsky.social @tara-macdonald.bsky.social @sunypress.bsky.social

God bless Bad Bunny. To be clear, I'm not a believer, but if God is real, I'd like her to know how fucking grateful I am for this beautiful man during this ugly time.

Reading a lot lately about the early women's rights activists who emerged out of the abolition movement in the 1840s and 1850s, and these women seem so modern and familiar in so many ways that it's really galling to then learn how dramatically constrained their legal rights were.

Bad Bunny’s performance began in the plantation, featured broken electric poles, and ended by centering a hemispheric understanding of “América”—among many other things—and some Anglo journalists are like “his performance wasn’t political.” This is why we need to be telling our stories.

"Feminist theorizing feels both as urgent and as under threat as it was during the dawning of women’s studies as an academic enterprise." Yep. Aptly themed special issue CFP from Signs.

100% this

How much like Pottersville is the fascist hell we're living in under Trump 2.0?

He’s really putting the rest into resting dick face.

Mamdani went to a small college similar to the one where I work and majored in Africana Studies. From now on my answer to the microaggressive question of “what can one (even) do with a Black Studies degree from a liberal arts college?” is “You can run New York.”

Socialism starts with me curled up under a blanket on my couch feeling joy for half a second

Today is the official publication day for POETRY IN GENERAL: How a Literary From Became Public. ✨ Now available wherever books are sold ✨ Use CUP20 for a discount from the press cup.columbia.edu/book/poetry-...

A reminder that we're collecting books, chapters, and journal articles by non-TT historians for publication in our year-end lists. Anything with a 2025 pub date is eligible and you can submit for your friends/colleagues! contingentmagazine.org/yearly-pub-l...

Think you're an expert on all things #gaslighting? Check out what my co-editor has to say about the lost ending of *Gaslight*, which I suspect you've never heard about before! @noragilbert.bsky.social

I couldn’t listen to the survivors of Epstein’s abuse without thinking about my own rape - questions unanswered by his enablers, reports unreleased by Stanford. But I’m glad I did listen, and I’m grateful for their astounding courage, eloquence, and generosity. Solidarity and #MeToo

I can’t believe my life is being affected by the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment newrepublic.com/article/2013...

Happy Pub Day, @donikakelly.bsky.social! This book, like its author, is gorgeous. Go treat yourself to a copy.

Look what has a website now! If you teach at a university, please tell your library to order a copy. I promise you'll enjoy teaching this book!

It is, far and away, the most challenging thing I’ve encountered since entering the academy. And that is saying a lot. I might be working on this but I keep putting it aside because I’m not medicated enough to describe how demoralizing it all is.

Reading books is becoming an act of resistance.

One double bind of anti-rape feminism: women’s experiences of sexual violence are no guarantee of their feminist solidarity, and women’s loyalty to men or tolerance for their violence against other women is no guarantee of their personal safety.

My 8-year-old calls cell phones "skinny rectangles of doom." I mean. He's not wrong.

Cover design is in! Nobody has a better "fuck you" face than Ingrid Bergman. #coverdesign #bookcover #gaslighting @sunypress.bsky.social @tara-macdonald.bsky.social @noragilbert.bsky.social

This Shakespeare-to-Millais-to-Swift gem is the unexpected literary allusion I needed today! Yes, there's a bathtub story behind Millais's 1852 painting AND Swift's album cover. Can't WAIT to hear "The Fate of Ophelia." (Images by Wikimedia Commons) #thelifeofashowgirl #taylorswift #lizziesiddal

If you like this fabulous essay, check out Grace's chapter in the forthcoming collection on Victorian Gaslighting (out March 2026, available for preorder Sept 2025), coedited by @tara-macdonald.bsky.social, @noragilbert.bsky.social, and me!

"One reason this violence is so unacknowledged is that it is in the most literal sense not news – there are tides of hatred and violence against other groups that ebb and flow, but violence against women is global and enduring, a constant rather than an event."

As Epstein is back up in the news, reminder: -1 in 9 girls* & -1 in 20 boys* under the age of 18 experience SA -Female ppl* aged 16-19 are 4x more likely than the general population to be victims of SA or attempted SA Some of those survivors read your skeets. *& presumably nonbinary & gnc ppl

Summer highlight: partying w Jacques Pépin, who has a new book coming out in Sept. As we perused his memoir, he joked that it'd make me fall asleep. We chatted about Victorian Gaslighting and my memoir. He issued judgments on food and wine gently, never imperiously. This man is a national treasure.

This is #BookHistory too. Of a heartbreaking kind. Tho' I imagine they haven't succeeded in accessing ICE detention facilities, this seems a good time to remind people to support the Prison Book Program (prisonbookprogram.org), which does amazing work compensating for the cruelties Öztürk describes

My textbook is finally available! 'Writing on Fire: A Fierce Yet Friendly Guide to Writing Humanities Essays in College.' There are chapters on close reading, thesis statements, all the good stuff. If you teach writing via a humanities subject, check it out! broadviewpress.com/product/writ...

I wrote about Adriana Smith, the Georgia woman whose corpse was used to incubate a fetus, and the moral horror of seeing a human body treated as a instrument for the agendas of people more powerful than the woman who inhabited it. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Jamie Hood is coming to Philly Aug 26th! #traumaplot