It's Spring Break at the Denbo Center! Spotted on Steamtown National Historic Site's live cam in PA: DCHA Director Amy Elias visiting to do research for an upcoming project.

Join us March 19 for the DCHA Conversations & Cocktails virtual talk "How Cormac Works" with Bill Hardwig.

Join here: tiny.utk.edu/ConversationsCocktailsHardwig

Photo of Distinguished Lecture Series speaker Edward Ayers and text details about his talk "Digital History and Democratic History."

As part of Denbo Center's Distinguished Lecture Series, celebrated author and educator Edward Ayers will give his talk “Digital History and Democratic History” on Monday, February 2, 2026 at 3:30pm. This event is virtual. Register at: tennessee.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Large pink orchid in center of book cover with text: How Flowers Made Our World. The story of nature's revolutionaries. David George Haskell

Coming in March 2026: Flowers! When flowers appeared, nothing was ever the same. They are the world’s great collaborators and creators. Writing this book transformed how I see life’s history and future. Cooperation, beauty, and illusion transform the world. Can't wait to share these stories

Congrats David! Looks terrific!

That was a good LARB piece

Cory Doctorow - Rescuing the Internet From “Enshittification” | The Daily Show YouTube video by The Daily Show

So good.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-...

Citation chains are positioned as stuffy pedantry, but they can be the gift economy at work, a virtual open community, a generous pedagogy and a honest dialogue with readers. Here’s who’s in the room with us right now; here’s who I am compelled to speak with; here’s work that will blow your mind…

Am I the only one who gets a real kick out of citation chains? Reading people's writing and footnotes, and making assessments and notes, finding the sources in the footnotes and reading them yourself, and making more notes?
I...love it?

This, for the record, is what goes into a footnote. It’s the key part of the research process where I examine the practical, methodological, ethical implications of my sources before I join the stream of interpretation. It cannot be outsourced to an LLM.

_Speculative Light_ makes a great holiday gift! 32 color plates of Beauford Delaney’s work—a great read but also a great coffee table book.

What are you reading on New Year's Eve? (image of Frank Millet's A Cosey Corner (1884) public domain CC0 via the Metropolitan Museum of Art, edit Lakshmi Rivera Amin/Hyperallergic)

Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury by Jordan Troeller | MIT Press, May 2025

Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin, edited by Amy J. Elias | Duke University Press, February 2025

Women Artists in Denmark 1880-1910: In Search of the Modern, edited by Inge Lise Mogensen Bech and Lene Bøgh Rønberg | Aarhus University Press, April 2025

#booksky highly recommended for #ArtBooks #art #booklovers 📚💙

@hyperallergic.com's Favorite Art Books of 2025
— among them, Marsha P. Johnson, Mary Cassatt in Paris, Ruth Asawa and mothering.

hyperallergic.com/our-favorite...

Thank you Sarah!

Our Favorite Art Books of 2025 This year, we read too many incredible books to count — here are a few that stuck with us, including tomes on Marsha P. Johnson, Mary Cassatt in Paris, and Ruth Asawa and mothering.

Grateful and excited to share that "Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin" (#DukeUP, 2025) has been selected by Hyperallergic as one of their "Favorite Books of 2025"!

hyperallergic.com/our-favorite...

Nice lineup for spring. All hybrid with webinar livestream—see QR codes for registration or at calendar.utk.edu

‼️

Should note that I taught Is a River Alive and it generated *great* discussion

Finally reading Robert Macfarlane and Underland is so good

GREAT title btw

I thought they were all about brevity these days. No notes but loooong titles…

Mad respect for your effort.

A rough stucco box with a wall and another box. There's a yellow Porssche in front. It probably hasn't even chimed 1970 yet.

Quote from "Gehry Talks" in an article on gehry by the great Jean-Louis Cohen: Gehry has described the process: “Whatever was in my consciousness, I loved raw rough stucco. No buildings were being done with that. They call it ‘tunnel mix.’ It was underneath the freeways. Under the freeways they’d spray it on. So I asked the plastering contractor to do it, and they said they couldn’t; they didn’t know how. An artist friend was building a little studio in Venice. I told him what I was looking for. He said it sounded great, and if I wanted to use his garage to experiment on, he wouldn’t mind. I found out what the equipment for tunnel mix was. I went to the U-Haul and rented it, mixed the plaster, and did it myself. I sprayed it on the garage, and it was beautiful! Then I brought the contractor down, showed him the equipment, showed him the walls, and that’s how the Danziger building was made.”

RIP Frank Gehry. Here's the Danziger Studio and Gehry talking about the material (article: www.domusweb.it/en/from-the-...)

Really sick of article titles using a colon. When did we get so lemming-like about this?

No offense but I think we underestimate how many of our current problems, both cultural and political, are downstream of the decline in reading, the decline in learning and the loss of interest in the humanities.

Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard obituary: playful and prolific playwright A popular and exotic figure, Stoppard was known for his dandyish appearance as well as his wit and eloquence

‘I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown’
RIP Tom Stoppard who amongst many other things was an Honorary Fellow of @britishacademy.bsky.social
www.thetimes.com/article/89b0...

“Imagine if we truly understand complex whale communication & can extend our term ‘language’ to them. Such breakthroughs would not only rewrite biology textbooks but also fundamentally redefine what it means to be human & pave the way to instituting new protections for whales, the ocean & beyond”🧪

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
- Doris Lessing

Can’t even

We are hiring!
Office Coordinator:
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts!
Job posting at
fa-ewlq-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Come work with a creative, collegial, forward-thinking team at Tennessee’s flagship state university.

Chris is great.