“Researchers that have attempted to make the university’s connections –and potential obligations– to the Caribbean explicit say their efforts have been stymied. …“The conversation is not happening,” said Carla Martin, a Harvard professor of African and African American Studies. “We all have tried.””
What a joy + honor to work w @walshbr.bsky.social to develop a new virtual #DigitalHumanities workshop track for #ACH2026! We'll be offering 3 fab classes (I wish I could take them all!). Whether you're new to the field or a seasoned DHer, we've got something for you, rooted in care + community
Chris--my co-author, my buddy, and a paragon in many ways for me--has written a gorgeous and moving thread about his book, which is now out. Having been in conversation with him throughout this last turbulent year, I am awed not only by his scholarship but also by his humanity.
Book cover: SETTLER FICTION FROM THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE, 1820-1890
The first book in the Race in Nineteenth Century Literatures and Cultures series (Oxford University Press) is out in June!
Porscha Fermanis’ Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1890
Get your library to order copies!
global.oup.com/academic/pro...
Here at Metro’s annual gathering re: our collective NYC digital culture repository. Illuminating to hear abt orgs that licensed some of their popular material with commercial rsch services (EBSCO) w/ the hope of making some 💰; turns out they made a pittance, and now their stuff is paywalled 🙁
Let high school Honors teachers teach what they know and love rather than strapping advanced high school courses to an outside company that harvests $1 billion a year in testing fees to grade students with AI
Can you read English cursive? Ever wanted to volunteer from the comfort of home for a useful cause? Have I got an offer for you...
The Newberry Library in Chicago is always in need of transcribers to help decipher historical handwritten documents. If this is you, learn more about it below:
The danger to my job from AI isn't that AI can do my job, it's that my job is made even more precarious by the way AI is shaping ideas of the value of work. It can't do my job, but it can be part of convincing people (incorrectly) that my job isn't necessary.
I was so struck by how callously this sentence followed one about people losing their jobs. Devastating for thee but fun for me.
it is the oldest ideological trick in the book, one played by bosses and books alike, to take a realist investigation of real estate, race, and class mobility and neuter it into smut and THAT rather than “faithfulness” is the problem we experts have
I teach a lot of working class first generation students at Nicholls in South Louisiana. I will never give up my conviction that my students deserve Homer and Sappho and Sophocles and Ovid and Dante too. It's not too good for them.
It’s finally done. Absolutely thrilled to have submitted THE SHAH'S GREAT TOUR – my global microhistory of the epic royal journeys of Persia's monarchs to Imperial Europe – for production. May it reshape our understanding of monarchy and the world order in the imperial age.
I'd like at add a few things to this. (1) humanists have not been able to convince any political party that curiosity-driven humanities research is a public good that should be funded using tax dollars. Republicans don't believe this, but neither do Democrats.
reupping this -- if you are a historian who works on any aspect of Indigenous-European relations in the French Americas, please consider about submitting!
We are starting an AI literacy effort at UA libraries and yours truly, who has been doing this for a long time, is working on some foundational basics. I revived the old blog to share this snippet from a larger training I'm putting together: hfroehli.ch/2026/02/11/w...
Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.
CALL FOR PITCHES
@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.
We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.
Details below!
MLN Comparative Literature issue. A soldier holding a baby in one arm. He has a rifle on the other soldier and two children next to him. MLN vol. 140, no. 5
New issue muse.jhu.edu/issue/56303! open access @hopkinspress.bsky.social
This issue includes an archival find: a typescript of a lecture Erich Auerbach gave in 1941, during his exile in Turkey. The subject is literature and war (who gets to write about war? Who feels they have agency? etc.) +..
An extraordinary number of banger lines in this masterpiece of the genre of critical academic book review, but this in particular is straight up🔥: doi.org/10.1215/2834...
This is a great question. I think for me it is about teaching them to handle experiences of boredom, frustration, and confusion. Sitting with uncertainty, finding your way through an opaque image, letting go of your need to be better than the film, etc., are all skills that can be taught.
One of my most cherished classes is my 18th century novels course where the primary learning objective is "learn how read long novels." We did a "couch to 5k" approach to attention span and note-taking.
Sometimes I forget that the greatest gift we give our students is the example of passionately loving our own curiosity
When using Microsoft Word or Google Docs, don't just make text bigger and bolder to make it a heading. That will work for sighted users, but screen reader users will miss that and just hear it as normal paragraph text. Use actual heading styles, like level 1 through 6.
How does DH travel outside the academy? What impact and what careers do DH skills enable? CFP for our next excellent (and necessary) book in the DDH series, edited by Jeanelle Horcasitas, @lisaironcutter.bsky.social, and @kallewesterling.bsky.social
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/cfp-dh-...
For all of us worried about gAI in higher ed, there is an entire journal issue dedicated to critical perspectives on this topic, which Im sure has been shared before but I missed it, so for others like me, here is @criticalai-journal.bsky.social's special Issue:
read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/...
NCFS Unbound returns 1/23 with @srocher.bsky.social Susan Hiner in convo with @addressingart.bsky.social Justine De Young about her fab new book The Art of Parisian Chic 🔥
Register here!
southalabama.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
The Academic Work Tracker spreadsheet is now updated with 2026 dates! If you don't already, 2026 is a great time to start treating your academic work like the wage job where you are paid to work a certain amount of hours that it actually is: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...
If you are a resident of California, the state now has a portal where you can demand deletion of your personal data from 500+ registered data brokers with a single request form, for free.
consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov