can relate

Reading the Epic of Gilgamesh alongside one of my favorite children’s books

"For the PhD garnish, mix all the dry ingredients together, drown them in coffee, and tip them onto a diaper."

New post👇 alikulez.substack.com/p/ten-lesson...

New post! Join me for some serial fun in the Ottoman Empire.

I started a substack. Goal: to talk about literature (and stuff) with no jargon. Ideal reader: my father. Subscribe if you want low-key posts you can read at Costco. The first post is on worms. alikulez.substack.com

New pub, where I theorize a notion of “literary misencounter” to think about solidarities in the global South.

I’m always drawn to images of food: “Dice que ella escondía sus pies entre las piernas de él. Sus pies helados como piedras frías y que allí se calentaban como en un horno donde se dora el pan. Dice que él le mordía los pies diciéndole que eran como pan dorado en el horno.”

Pedro Páramo pairs well with this artisanal mezcal from Oaxaca. Side effect: I want to answer every question with “un rencor vivo.” Example: —How is grading going? —Un rencor vivo.

There was this couple at Costco with a black plastic sheet and electric candles on one of the dining tables, sharing a plate of hot chocolate cookies over champagne (or Gatorade who knows) in plastic glasses. I’m not sure if it’s a level of nof.csgiven to aspire for or be afraid of. #happyvalentines

Truly the gift most desired. Along with chocolate-dipped strawberries and a couple’s massage.

I had no idea Baldwin had a strict religious upbringing and had even become a preacher for the Pentecostal church when he was 14. It’s a novel full of heartbreak, racial violence, and familial dysphoria, but also of transcendence and religious ecstasy.

Cooking with my students—still the best pedagogical experience for me. While listening to the latest tunes of Bad Bunny, the students of #foodandidentity learned how to cook mofongo.

Already done. It’s being repatriated.

Just when I’m teaching a course on indigeneity in Latin America.

Happy Saturday, food history folks! Please share this call for the Global Food History Prize for an Emerging Food Historian, with a deadline of January 1: rachelbherrmann.com/global-food-...

Marcel Proust after eating a tiny little cake

Choose your fighter

What do you think is the bigger problem in higher ed? Woke indoctrination or half the profs making $3,000 per semester? Hard to say

Preparing a course on indigeneity in Latin American culture, and came across this fantastic game called Mulaka, developed through a collaboration with anthropologists and Tarahumara leaders. Can’t wait to play and “read” it with the students.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky #BookChallenge Day 6

chop from top chop from the cop chop from the coach

Sabbatical rental posts are the closest academia gets to MTV Cribs

🔊🔔🎤 Check out a sneak peek of my edited volume! www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/1...

This weekend marked the first Thinking Food colloquium, the materialization of a question I have been mulling over since I was a grad student. How can I, as a scholar of the early modern past, contribute to addressing the inequities in our food systems and cultures?

My book (February 2025) , Caribbean Inhospitality: The Poetics of Strangers at Home, is available for pre-order at Rutgers University Press. 😀 www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/caribbean-in...

Proofs are in! It’s a pleasure to publish an article on Aslı Erdoğan, an award-winning, exiled Turkish author still little known in the US. I can’t think of a better home for this essay than Comparative Literature Studies. #newpub #globalSouth

When your favorite artist reposts you on #bluesky. This made my day, and it was only 7am.

Jorge Amado: "The attitude of pious admiration for European and North American culture while continuing to close our eyes to the rest of the world keeps us in a narrow, provincial, and colonial position. Why should we know everything about France and nothing about Syria or Lebanon?" #globalSouth

how power pushes one into self-contradiction. Those two final adverbs do "interfere," big time: "From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department's decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted."

almost done with the semester #mood #cookiefail

Spirit animal => Spirit animal after the holidays

Check out this opportunity at BC

Tell me you’re Turkish without telling me you’re Turkish

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky #BookChallenge Day 6

'The Politics of Food & Hunger in Spanish Literature, 1945–2015', by Deborah Madden @Lancaster University In Franco's Spain, food & hunger were politicized and its ‘hunger years’ (1939–1952) pervade Spanish fiction... www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I’m thankful alright. I hate, though, what a cowardly affect it is on a political level. Thankfulness is an affirmation of *my* world, of what *I* have, despite—or more precisely, in the face of—the world’s dispossession at large.

Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA (Applications submitted by December 23, 2024 will receive full consideration): spanport.ucla.edu/recent-news/...

Word of the day is ‘sequaciousness’ (16th century): the slavish and reckless following of another person in matters of thought or opinion.

Damn.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky #BookChallenge Day 5

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky #BookChallenge Day 4

bracing myself for the turkey/Turkey jokes on Thanksgiving (luckily they happen mostly in my inner monologue)

It’s here, a *start* of an Islamic Studies Starter Pack. Please spread the word. This is a work in progress… Scholars of Islam in all regions and periods, let me know, and I’ll happily add you. go.bsky.app/EYU1bFe

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky #BookChallenge Day 3

Although trade between Cuba and Russia collapses after 1991, having been built on political logic instead of economic ones, surprised to learn that it partially boomerangs back around before the end of the 90s This means rebuilding of relations actually precedes Putin era

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky #BookChallenge Day 2

Marking out names old school. #mla2025

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #Books #BookSky #BookChallenge Day 1