my mouth just started watering looking at this, like a cartoon coyote!
English prof. 17th century stuff. Prairie son. Working on a cultural and material history of the birchbark canoe in the early modern Americas.
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my mouth just started watering looking at this, like a cartoon coyote!
7 pounds of Concord grapes off the vines in my garden. Am very sticky and covered in mosquito bites, but excited to make jam when I have time
(More to come, it just takes forever for job ads to get approved).
Second hire in Philosophy: an open-rank (!) search in Social and Political Philosophy, and/or Ethics, and/or Philosophy of Law. Our philosophy department rocks and--important detail--has very strong undergrad enrollment. careers.insidehighered.com/job/3393075/...
humanities hiring at SUNY Binghamton this fall: a thread. First, our Philosophy department is looking for a specialist in Continental Philosophy(note: I'm not on any of these searches, I'm just being a hype-man in my role as Humanities Center Director): careers.insidehighered.com/job/3393073/...
Another Herrick, "Upon a Flie". Perhaps unsurprising that he loved this trope; to quote Rosalie Colie, Herrick is "supremely a poet of the little"
Victoria Rimell**** getting my Latin poetry Victorias mixed up!
Compare "The Amber Bead" by Herrick I saw a fly within a bead Of amber cleanly burièd: The urn was little, but the room More rich than Cleopatra's tomb.
There's a great argument that I think....Victoria Moul (?) makes about this, which is that the bug tombs scattered across early modern lyric are a defense of the work that lyric poetry does by memorializing the everyday (in distinction to epic, with its obviously important, big national stories).
I've always loved Virgil's Gnat, which shares a wonderful trope with a lot of other short Renaissance lyric: the fancy bug tomb! It's a trope that celebrates the power of the small and the insignificant and suggests that building permanent memorials to such things is a worthy activity
In "Virgil's Gnat," like its (non-Virgilian) source material, a sleeping shepherd is threatened by a snake; a gnat awakes him and the shepherd thoughtlessly squashes it. Realizing and regretting his mistake, he then builds the gnat a tiny but noble tomb!!!!
("The Moretum")
thinking abt the pseudo-Virgiliana that circulated during the Renaissance (poems that people incorrectly thought Virgil wrote). Spenser fans may know Virgil's Gnat, an imitation of a (non-Virgil) poem "The Culex." But did you know one of the other examples of pseudo-Virgiliana is called THE PESTO?
Love this! 🐾
95% of political content on Bluesky fits this bill
everyone on this website to the right of me is a bot. everyone to the left is in an echo chamber. this place is dying.
There’s a cat in the peak window of this neighborhood house and I just love that it has such a lofty perch
wondering if it's somehow connected to this, presented without comment:
job! pre-1700 British Lit at Denison. Interestingly they are looking for Assistant or Associate.... careers.insidehighered.com/job/3390155/...
#1 should be coster!!!!!!!!
next time I get rejected from a fellowship I'm going to write them a response that says only "I've had haters since Red Lobster!!!!!!!"
So I used to lie on the applications until they would find me out. People would notice me and then they would go and tell the manager. I had haters back then. I've had haters since Red Lobster."
But what was so crazy is that [in order to get hired] you had to lie and say you had never worked at Red Lobster before. And I swear to God I'm not trying to be funny. +
I got fired from, like, every Red Lobster you could think of: The Bronx, Long Island, Queens, everywhere. I don't know why, but they thought I had [an] attitude. +
sometimes when I'm facing a setback at work, I think about this interview Nicki Minaj did with a radio station where she talked about her time as a waitress at Red Lobster: "...I got fired from, like, five different Red Lobsters....+
"All our beefs is from the past"!!!!!!!! Amen
this is so rad, I love Friedrich
1. I love this idea. 2. are you familiar with Death in a Tenured Position?! No boat, alas... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_i...
It has been a psychic balm. The stuff people are showing is useful, yes, but also just being in a room together explicitly talking about shared teaching challenges is wonderful and I doesn't happen often enough. Anyway, if you're feeling blue, get a couple ppl together at your campus and do it!
It's faculty organized and faculty led, about 25 people from different humanities depts come. Meets every two weeks for an hour, I bring donuts. Each time two ppl do show-and-tell of something they are trying in their classes. Last 10-15 minutes are freeform venting / discussion in small groups.
I think everyone teaching in the humanities is feeling a bit in crisis, and I have a recommendation for folks in the US. We are trying something on my campus that has been really great: a pedagogy group.
oh ho ho!!! Can't wait to read. Thanks for the tip
I am doing a screen ban and so far it’s great. Can report from our multi dept campus humanities pedagogy group that a LOT of people across disciplines are trying this.
TEXTILE SHAKESPEARE has a COVER👀 (this is a late C16 embroidered coif - never in fact assembled - in the V&A. All the crazy scale with added big cats, like an acid trip As You Like It. I love that it is a bit stained and messy.) global.oup.com/academic/pro...
(I also think it is particularly important for Ivy PhDs who are looking for TT R1 jobs to get a taste of frontline high-volume comp teaching, even its nicer incarnation at Columbia, just so they remember what it’s like later in their careers, even if they aren’t the ones in their depts doing it)
Also: grad students should teach! I know that places like Princeton and NYU a model where there’s not much teaching beyond TAing. But it’s really important in the formation of future faculty!!!
So, you know. Maybe 16 was too many. But with smaller cohorts students lose the ability to learn from peers in the same subfield—it was such a huge part of my training. And I wonder if some subfields might drop grad training altogether (18th c?)
I have mixed feelings about the cohort reduction. The dept was not able to place many people after the 2008 hiring crash. My year of 16 people, 15 years on, eventually generated only four people in TT positions after all the dust settled. The year below me was 18? And I believe three have TT jobs
It’s just depressing watching a whole series of chances that made my life/career possible get chipped away at, from parts of the social safety net in Kansas (food stamps), to the Pell Grant, to Mellon money for the humanities, to the doctoral infrastructure in the English department at Columbia.
I was really annoyed by teaching that comp class over and over again as a grad student, but in retrospect it was so valuable. It made me a better teacher of writing in a lot of ways, and that’s where I learned to manage a classroom. And teaching Lit Hum (Homer to Toni Morrison) was transcendent.
Also, as a union busting tactic, grad students are no longer teaching in the writing program or the Core Curriculum. The English dept had six years of guaranteed funding bc we taught composition thru our whole PhDs. Now they’ll use adjuncts/lecturers and English loses that extra year of $
too many higher ed cuts to keep up with, but heard from an old advisor that they’ve halved the number of PhD spots in Columbia’s English dept (now it’s 8; administrators tried to pressure them to go to FOUR but they refused). My cohort, back in the day, was 16. Makes it hard to run grad seminars
….now I want a tweetch
How’s your day been, this is how I am
Catch this livestream while you can. It is a Fancy Dress contest for Alpacas at the Minnesota state fair. www.waltonwebcasting.com/event/2025-m...
this could be us if we got off the internet and started writing
Part of a re-consolidation trend (ad suggests you should be an early modernist and an 18th centuryist and also an early Americanist!) + continuing preference for ethnic studies work (if the listed order of desired specializations is meaningful)
JOB! Williams English dept. looking for an Asst Professor, 1600-1800.
Dreamsnake adaptation when?!?!
happy birthday to Vonda McIntyre, whose Nebula-Award winning novel Dreamsnake (1978) dared to ask: what if all medicine was just snakes?!
for some reason today I am thinking about this line in Working Girl (which Joan Cusack delivers in an exaggerated Staten Island accent while examining an expensive dress)
Also just thought it was really interesting and refreshing to hear from someone who tried something that didn't work and who was really open about it.
She said that she tried it because she was hoping it would solve her AI paranoia and it absolutely did not do that; she felt she was still in an arms race situation with them rather than sidestepping it or finding another path.
Some students very clearly auto-generated an essay and then just typed it in slowly...essays appearing in the document one word at a time from beginning to end, with no deletions or revisions lol
Really interesting (and useful) presentation; tldr she basically thinks it doesn't solve the problem and is going to stop doing it.
faculty presentation in pedagogy group today: my dept colleague Jessie Reeder talking about her experience using the tracking feature in Google docs to try to head off AI issues. +
You want something done right? Get someone who wrote two books while teaching a 3-3.
first dept meeting of the year today. I really respect our current chair for a variety of reasons, but especially because she has little patience for R1 faculty diva whining (because the first 15 years of her career were at more teaching-heavy place). Refreshing.
I think the second ear cutting was 1637 and this is 1638, so it MUST be. (and thank you! it is a giant mess which is why I never post wider-angle shots lol)
it's a little Cooking in the Archives! But with estranged alcoholic uncle instead of 17th Century Ladies lol
@nicosiamarissa.bsky.social I predict you are going to be into this
sample www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJDe...
if you are not familiar with the Youtube channel Dead Greg's Recipes, I highly recommend it. It has given me a lot of joy recently and it's just such a sweet and funny project
historians of early modern England: how common was ear amputation as a criminal punishment? A text from the late 1630s is making a joke about it, and I'm wondering if it's necessarily a Prynne-specific reference or if there were other cases.
things I did not know: the British Library has a decent-sized notebook full of Abraham Cowley's handwritten notes on medicinal plants/herbs
"Your Schollers they are madde to break their braines, Out-watch the Moone, and looke more pale than shee, That so when all the Arts call him their Master, Hee may perhaps get some small Vicaridge, Or be the Vsher of a Schoole....." - from today's editing work on Abraham Cowley "Love's Riddle"
my beloved medieval historian colleague Liz Casteen is having extra out of class “monastic hours” for her students in an empty conference room. Two hours, no screens, reading quietly.
August 26, 34 CE: At Theogonis in Roman Egypt, a man named Herakleides leases his bath & chaff collection bin (as heating fuel) to two Roman men. The lease is for 3 years & the men agree to let H. have free admission to the bath for 10 male friends a year—because perks 🛁 papyri.info/ddbdp/p.mich...
But the only other route is winning hearts/ minds & getting legal/policy change. But this also seems impossible!
[this has been university strategy for the last 15 years, with institutions banking on the fact that white academics generally support these efforts (or at least see it in their best interests to appear to support them) and are thus unlikely to sue over discrimination. It is now falling apart]
If you think federal non-discrimination laws are wrong(and I think many academics would say flat non-discrimination frameworks are, in their application, not just wrong but white supremacist!), then the answer cannot just be "well let's ignore them" and then act aggrieved/surprised when you get sued
My gut is that courts aren't the place where you will win these fights. I think in many cases universities have, actually, broken/defied the law in their pursuit of racially representative faculty bodies. The answer is not to go in a courtroom & say "a diversity postdoc?! whaaat? never heard of it!"
I have wondered if this consideration has been a factor in some of the total 'we surrender' behavior of i.e. Brown
This is all just to say: I don't know anything about GMU's hiring practices / whether they violated Title 7 by considering race in hiring (as the feds claim), but even if they didn't / are exonerated, a lengthy, invasive investigatory process will *itself* be a form of institutional punishment.
Imagine how annoying and shitty it would be for non-white faculty members to have themselves AND everyone involved in their hire dragged over the coals by DOJ lawyers asking 50 different ways "was race considered as a factor in your decision to hire this person?" Just really, really unpleasant.
Imagine lawyers going through every single email sent by anyone about job applicants (of any race) and making some of them public(including, probably, critical emails about people who ended up getting hired and now work at GMU with the critical-email-senders). Bad bad bad bad bad for morale.
me saving everyone time by writing one-word email replies
my mom, one of her sisters, and four of my seven siblings have preauricular sinuses! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preauri...
up in the rafters! the kayak is on its side
don't know but we do have some visual evidence attesting to canoe display in wunderkammer (but I doubt it was standardized): frontispiece to Musei Wormiani Historia (Leiden, 1655) www.britishmuseum.org/collection/o...
Finally: I feel like I should do more about internal Roman politics / political culture (inheritance vs. election, those boring speeches from Sat. and Bas. at the beginning). Sigh.
Related: I don't talk much about the Revenge stuff toward the end other than as another example of violent intertextual imitation. And so I often kind of skim past Tamora dressed as Revenge etc. Maybe if I taught Hamlet(which I typically don't), I'd do more with Kyd and vigilantism etc?
Other misc things: my least favorite trope in all of Renaissance drama is fool speech / mad speech. The performance tradition around it is uninteresting. The scholarly arguments about it are mostly stupid. Close reading it is aggravating. Result: I pretty much skip Mad Titus.
But teaching with film clips is really self-obviously valuable (also good for student engagement) and I need to work on this. I know and like the Julie Taymor Titus movie from 1999--maybe should use a bit of it?
2. I feel like my post-1900 film-and-theater adaptations game is weak across my Shax lectures. Part of this is me being lazy/fearful abt embedding video clips(so much potential for tech disaster in lecture context), part of this is that my training/own scholarly qs are very, well, early modern
Sometimes this results in bizarre situations where like, we do 10 minutes on Petrarchan poetry with examples, to help understand Marcus's speech. I feel like this can be useful but also it shrinks the amount of direct Shakespeare close-reading time and the balance is hard.
Things I struggle with when teaching Titus: 1. the best thing about this play is how it riffs on other literature. My students typically have read basically none of this other literature. How do you succinctly explain the Aeneid to someone who has no idea what it is, to make a pt about Tamora? Hard.
Anyway, I think I might kind of micro-blog what I'm doing in this lecture this semester, just because I'm trying to keep myself accountable for improving this class and thinking about / synopsizing why I do what I do is helpful.
I do this via some slides on Ira Aldridge's adaptation in the 19th c (w/ a heroic Aaron!) Great example of how people are always altering and remaking the plays to their own ends (something I want them to see as inevitable/normal/good or at least as not Automatically Bad Bc Not 'Authentic')
#5 Aaron pt 2: Theater history / the plays' history far beyond Shakespeare's control. Another big takeaway I hammer home across the semester: the plays didn't get frozen in amber when Shakespeare died, and they've been remade and understood differently 100s of times.
This is big theme of mine; plays as presenting contrasting, unresolved arguments (my Lear lectures are also structured around this). The play shows us Roman racism on display; it also shows us Aaron riposte it. It's not an essay! It's imagining a whole social world! There's not just one claim!
I also like Aaron bc he's such a good example of the plays' polyvocality. It gets students away from reductive 'is this racist? y/n' type reactions (often, in my experience, a way to avoid the work of thinking about detail).
#4 Race. Aaron is such a complicated figure. Interesting in terms of Shakespeare's development of the soliloquy, interesting as part of a longer trajectory in his writing of African characters (I also do Merchant of Venice, Othello, A&C).
#3 Rome! I also teach Antony & Cleopatra later in the semester, and I like to do a through-line on Shakespeare's Rome; both of those plays are medium-hostile about Rome, Roman culture, and especially Roman military expansion and I set that against early modern elites' interest in imitating Rome.
Gets students thinking about allusion beyond "this refers to Y"; a big repetitive theme in Titus is that stories from the past are mostly just instructions for hurting people in the present. I want them to see that Shax is a borrower, but also someone who thinks a lot about the act of borrowing.
Shakespeare's borrowing a lot of this stuff...but in a very meta-theatrical way, and characters are always parading around explicitly saying "I'm about to cut your hands off....just like they would in an Ovid poem!"
And then it's off to the intertextual races, beyond the plays of 1588-1592: Ovid (Philomela), Petrarchan poetry (in Marcus's horrible blazon of Lavinia's mutilated body), Roman history (Tarquins/Lucretia, Claudius/Verginia), the Aeneid (Tamara's sexy Dido/Aeneas role-play with Aaron in Act 2).
I do this by showing his connections to his contemporaries: in my first lecture we look at snippets from "triumph" scenes in Lodge and Marlowe and we talk about how Shax is (probably?) borrowing and riffing on these plays in Act 1 of Titus (dating them is hard!).
It's so fast-paced and gory and indecorous! #2 One of the main things I try to impart to them across the semester is that Shakespeare is not a lone genius, but a creature of the collaborative and plagiaristic theater industry: he's always looking around, stealing things, riffing on things
I always start my Shakespeare lecture with Titus Andronicus. I think (?) it's more conventional to start w/ one of the (v. slight) early comedies (Two Gentlemen of Verona/Comedy of Errors). But I like starting with Titus because #1 it jolts them out of their main assumption abt Shax: he's boring