Tag
Academia
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Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA 2025 or MLA 2026?
This edition of Shoptalk asks: Can you guess which of the following was overheard at ASA 2025 and which was overheard at MLA 2026?
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Can You Predict What You’ll Need? Talking Time, Space, and Disability with Margaret Price
“The experience of disability has this curious hard-to-see quality, even while also being weirdly out in the open, garishly apparent.”
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“Parallel Tracks”: Sophie Ratcliffe on Academia, Memoirs, and Motherhood
“I used to want to experience everything. I don’t anymore.”
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Frivolity Is Not Unserious
“When we try to write about trauma, no matter what the trauma we wish to explore, it’s the poet’s job to do their homework.”
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Public Thinker: Jonathan Kramnick on the Craft of Criticism amid Institutional Decline
“Arguments stand or fall to the degree to which the practice is done well.”
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Interpret or Judge?: John Guillory on the Future of Literary Criticism
“‘Professing criticism’ is a contradiction and maybe even an impossibility. I’d like to hope that it’s not, that it’s just an innovation, historically.”
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“The Joke’s Ultimately on Me”: “Diabetic of Enlightenment” on Academic Twitter
When it comes to academia, we live in a moment of heightened contradictions. And yet, graduate students and junior professors are frequently told we mustn’t rock the boat even as it sinks farther and farther into the neoliberal abyss. The weight of this disconnect was bound to break eventually. Twitter, now regrettably known as X,…
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Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA 2023 or MLA 2024?
This edition of Shoptalk asks: Can you guess which of the following was overheard at ASA 2023 and which was overheard at MLA 2024?
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A #MeToo Novel That Must Be Read #WithYou
A South Korean novel critiques violent misogyny within a literature department. Remarkably, it does so by addressing the reader directly.
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Publishers and Scholars, Unite!
Universities have disinvested from their presses just as much as their humanities departments and libraries. Will working together stop it?
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Let Them Eat Pedagogy
Changing myself and my classroom might help me renew my one-year contract, but it cannot prepare me to demand an alternative.
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Queer Leadership, Stronger Universities
It is powerful and affirming to consider the unique qualities that queerness brings to leadership.
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Public Thinker: Ruha Benjamin on Uprooting Oppression and Seeding Justice
“Keep your cosmetic change, if you’re making no attempt to deal with the underlying practices that perpetuate harm.”
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Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA and ASTR 2022
In this special mega edition of Shoptalk, guess which performative utterance was said at which conference.
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Reading after the University
If you want to support readers, the best hope will always be helping do away with economic compulsion and the division of labor.
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The Dawn of Scientific Racism
In the 1740s, Bordeaux developed some of the first modern theories of racial difference, even as the city profited from the slave trade.
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“At the End of Everything”: Talking with Shannon Mattern
“My first book was used by actual librarians, planners, architects. I realized, wow I can do work that matters beyond the academy.”
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“Our Lives Are at Stake”: Elaine Hsieh Chou on the Necessity of Asian American Writers
“Somehow, we are so present, and yet not even there. That surreal juxtaposition really pissed me off and fascinated me.”
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Public Thinker: Lara Putnam Wants You to Knock on Your Neighbor’s Door
“Campaigns matter in part because of who meets whom, about the social networks that are shaped by that campaign as well as shaping it.”
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“Just Use the Telephone, Please”: Hannah Zeavin on the Power of Teletherapy
“You can have really intense intimacy over distance, sometimes only because distance is there.”
