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Devin Garofalo

@devingarofalo.bsky.social

Writing and teaching about C19 literature, empire, race, and climate collapse. Editor of Victorian Poetry (JHUP). Lover of all things goth. She / her.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 21h ago

Excellent thread here on the (superb!) PMLA cluster, tracking the itineraries of “the Victorian” in the Anglo-American academy esp. under permanent-austerity conditions post-c.2008

Sarah Bull@sarahebull.bsky.social · 22h ago

Sometimes people with shared interests speak different languages. Last week I read the new Theory & Methodologies section on Victorian studies in PMLA with huge interest, especially @emilysteinlight.bsky.social and Josephine McDonagh's pieces on on US and UK scholars' ambitions for the field at +

Sarah Bull @sarahebull.bsky.social · 22h ago

cambridge.org

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 2w ago

proofs! 💖💖💖 @devingarofalo.bsky.social

Page proofs title page for The Barbara Johnson Collective, Edited by Devin M. Garofalo and Nathan K. Hensley
Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois, line numbers running down right side

Devin Garofalo@devingarofalo.bsky.social · 4mo ago

THE BARBARA JOHNSON COLLECTIVE has a cover, a website, and is available for preorder! (Use code NUP2026 for a discount.) See the full contents at the link below — lucky to be part of this extraordinary project and excited to see it in print this fall! ✨🔥 nupress.northwestern.edu/979889948066...

Book cover: THE BARBARA JOHNSON COLLECTIVE, edited by Devin M. Garofalo & Nathan K. Hensley — in black font, against a Barbie pink background, design inspired by 80s literary theory book series.

Jill Galvan @jillgal.bsky.social · 2w ago

For those following CCCC news: rapid response to the NCTE moves to eliminate it.

Dan Libertz@dlib24.bsky.social · 2w ago

From Kathleen Blake Yancey with clearest info about possible actions: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Deidre Lynch @drbibliomane.bsky.social · 2w ago

More from Wollstonecraft's Scandinavian letters & their reports on the dawning of a modern extractivist economy ... outside Oslo the "view was almost spoilt by the depredations committed on the rocks to make alum." Alum? For dyeing? paper sizing? Environmental historians, what do you think? THANKS!

Deidre Lynch@drbibliomane.bsky.social · 2w ago

Wollstonecraft on forest fires & climate grief, from 1796: "The devastation must, indeed, be terrible, when this, literally speaking, wild fire, runs along the forest, flying from top to top, & crackling amongst the branches. . . the country, despoiled of beauty & riches, is left to mourn for ages."

Brian Glavey @glavey.bsky.social · 2w ago

OK, if you were waiting to find out what kind of fox I am before you pre-ordered Relatability, wait no more. These generous blurbs (or blurps, as O'Hara called them) just posted and I am seriously verklempt. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

A blurb from Jonathan Flatley of the University of Chicago reads: "This is a major book by a brilliant critic at the height of his powers. By way of a revelatory argument about the New York School poets and the importance of queer sharing to the aesthetic experiences they offer and promote, Glavey here develops a thrillingly original theory of oversharing and relatability. I know of no book that speaks so insightfully and movingly about how we read, teach, think and feel today." A second blurb, from Anna Kornblugh of the University of Illinois Chicago reads: "In Brian Glaey's charming and piercing readings, poetry is an aspiration to mutuality as much as it is a representation, and anything like the singularity of a queer poem flutters fortuitously towards the generality of utopian expanse. A smart and lovely book."

A burb from Stephanie Burt at Harvard reads: "The academic world is full of hedgehogs and people with hammers, but Brian Glavey is a friendly fox. I learned a ton from this book and loved the process of learning." A second blurb, from Andrew Epstein at FSU, reads: "This brilliant book provides a crucial new paradigm for understanding the preoccupations of our age, tracing the contemporary compulsion to share, and overshare, back to an unexpected source: The New York School pets, who anticipated the relational logic of our social media age decades before it arrived. Brian Glavey turns 'relatability' itself--a concept often mocked or derided--into a rigorous, illuminating category of aesthetic experience, offer a bracing revisionary reading of queer theory along the way. Wonderfully written, witty, and refreshingly personal, with dazzling close readings and provocative insights on every page, this is a major book."

Emma Davenport @emmadavenport.bsky.social · 4w ago

Title and abstract:

Article title: "Crediting Toru Dutt's Poetic Labor: 'Our Casuarina Tree' and Paradise Lost." Author: Emma Davenport. Abstract: "Calls to decolonize the Victorian canon have contributed to increased critical interest in Indian poet Toru Dutt. Our current scholarly approaches have proffered nuanced evaluations of the relationship between colony and metropole in Dutt’s English-language poetry. But admirable efforts to center Dutt’s voice in scholarly readings of her work have deprioritized close reading of the English texts with which Dutt was in conversation. The effect of this approach has been to obscure the complexity of Dutt’s poetic engagement with her English referents. This essay offers a Miltonic reading of Dutt’s most anthologized poem, “Our Casuarina Tree,” to show how attending to Paradise Lost as closely as Dutt did makes available new readings of her work. While a conventional interpretation of “Our Casuarina Tree” posits the poem as a meditation on the poet’s fraught dual identity, I read the poem’s deployment of Miltonic form, imagery, and thematics as a reflection on feminine labor and the work of the woman poet. Training a close eye on Milton’s epic, I argue, helps us more fully credit Dutt’s own poetic labor. Ultimately, I suggest that decolonizing our analytic frames requires enabling colonial poetry itself to direct our readerly attention."

Emma Davenport @emmadavenport.bsky.social · 4w ago

Victorian poetry stans! Excited to say that my article on Toru Dutt and Paradise Lost is now out in Victorian Poetry, and available open access for your reading pleasure and/or heckling. 🌳🐍🌱 @victorianpoetry.bsky.social doi.org/10.1353/vp.2...

Project MUSE -- Verification required!

doi.org

Devin Garofalo @devingarofalo.bsky.social · 2w ago

This issue is stellar, & @emmadavenport.bsky.social ‘s essay is a true banger! And plz remind folks about the early career essay prize (deadline approaching) — more info below!

Victorian Poetry@victorianpoetry.bsky.social · 2w ago

A new issue of VP is live, featuring @emmadavenport.bsky.social prize-winning essay on Toru Dutt! Issue contents previewed in the image & alt-text, + a reminder abt the upcoming submission deadline for the journal’s annual early career essay prize. Please share far and wide! muse.jhu.edu/issue/57126

Issue 63.2 of Victorian Poetry is live! The full issue is open access. Its contents are as follows:

EMMA DAVENPORT, "Crediting Toru Dutt's Poetic Labor: 'Our Casuarina Tree' and Paradise Lost -- winner of VP's inaugural early career essay prize

MONICA DAVID, "'Your Harlot Roofs': Women, Individualism, and the Towers of Idylls of the King"

JAMES QUINNELL, "'The Burden of the Strain': Self and World in the Poetry of Emily Brontë and Gerard Manley Hopkins"

ELIZABETH K. HELSINGER, "Writing Toward and Against Death: Tennyson and the Rossettis"

BENJAMIN O'DELL, "Verse Novel" -- a Poetry's Parts keyword essay

In other news, Victorian Poetry invites submissions for its 2026 Early Career Prize, which recognizes exemplary essays by untenured scholars of all ranks and affiliations (including NTT and graduate student colleagues). Conferred on an annual basis, the prize carries an award of $500 and publication in Victorian Poetry. Strong essays that do not win the award may also be considered for publication as recommended by the prize committee. Submissions are due 3 August 2026. Scholars wishing to be considered should submit anonymized MS Word essays and brief CVs to victorianpoetryjournal [at] gmail [dot] com with "Early Career Essay Prize" in the subject line. Prior to submission, consult our guidelines for authors. Essays conceived and / or written with the assistance of generative AI are ineligible for the prize.

Winning articles will be selected according to three criteria: (1) significance of contribution; (2) excellence of research, interpretation, and method; and (3) efficacy of presentation. The journal continues to expand its purview to a wider compass of archives and approaches. We welcome work that capaciously (re)interprets the field's originary contexts and reconsiders Victorian poetry (broadly construed) in new, innovative, cross-disciplinary, theoretical, and / or experimental ways.

Amardeep Singh @electrostani.bsky.social · 2w ago

Woohoo! We have an advance book contract: "THE ARCHIVE WRITES BACK: Minoritized Literatures & the Digital Textual Paradigm" Happy to be working with series editor @roopikarisam.bsky.social and publishing in the same series w/ @aearhart.bsky.social @elikaortega.bsky.social @eve.gd & many others.

Text of the opening section of an advanced contract between Stanford University Press and Amardeep Singh for a book called "The Archive Writes Back..."

Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"When scholars from historically excluded groups entered the academy in significant numbers they did not simply add new faces to existing conversations. They expanded the conversations themselves. They introduced new questions new archives new methods and new frameworks for understanding the world."

Lisa Siraganian@lsiraganian.bsky.social · 2mo ago

www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 2mo ago

wow, just…wow This reminds me of that scene in The Big Short when Steve Eisman asks, “Why are they confessing?” and Vinny Daniel says, “They’re not. They’re bragging.”

Is a New Report About the Humanities ‘Diabolically Evil’? We Questioned Its Authors.

K. Anthony Appiah, Paul Boghossian, Katherine Fleming, and Sean Wilentz on what’s gone wrong in the humanities.

chronicle.com

Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 2mo ago

english lit and culture studies people from the last 10 years, favorite standalone articles, or book intros/chapters, that open new ways of reading / new areas of study / new paradigms and thus usefully show new grads range in the field?

Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 2mo ago

My response to that "Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences" is up. tinyurl.com/y39crkzp As I say on Facebook, I back-loaded the good stuff, like showing that the authors' account of the 2017 Hypatia controversy reveals them to be unreliable reporters.

Report on the State of a Report (on the Humanities) - Pittsburgh Review of Books

On June 5, 2026, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article in a genre that has unfortunately become all too familiar in that venue titled “Has

pghrev.com

Devin Garofalo @devingarofalo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

“In essence, the report proposes giving a heckler’s veto to any syllabus or research project…[It is] a pseudo-intellectual pretext for administrators to remove faculty power to govern our own departments based on the standards of our disciplines.“

Phillip Maciak@pjmaciak.bsky.social · 2mo ago

WashU and Vanderbilt AAUP chapters have issued a *joint* statement on the "State of Scholarship in the Humanities" report commissioned by our university leadership. bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/sites.wustl....

All Grim Prints @allgrim.bsky.social · 2mo ago

W. Benjamin is actually quite funny. “Teaching Aid: Principles of the Weighty Tome, or How to Write Fat Books,” from One-Way Street.

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 2mo ago

remember when the Gaza protests @ Columbia also showed us that university deans & admins & trustees all circulate things to each other via groupchats & digital back channels, & by these means establish ideas that come to stand as the reality they then act upon together? this is how it happens!

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · 2mo ago

When something appears in the CHE, it gains a certain 'industry imprimatur' that then gets picked up by PMC-friendly outlets like the Atlantic & The New York Times, where it gets repackaged as 'common sense about higher education'

Chris Newfield @cnewf.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Just a reminder: the Carroll Report is the most important humanities report of our time

Jordan S. Carroll 🌹@jordanscarroll.bsky.social · 2mo ago

everyone, I have produced a report on how to remedy the decline of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. here it is: Executive Summary: Fund the Humanities and Social Sciences. Body: Fund the Humanities and Social Sciences a hell of a lot more. Please cite this as the Carroll report.

Jordan S. Carroll 🌹@jordanscarroll.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 2mo ago

It’s not too extreme to say that they make this point categorically at its conclusion, even though they repeatedly concede that in the past the university claimed to do this even while advancing incredibly noxious ideas.

Part of the raison d’être of a university is that it should engage in disinterested inquiry — inquiry aimed at knowledge and understanding, both for their own sake and for the sake of further goods that require genuine knowledge and understanding, rather than ideologically informed opinion, for their promotion. This, at least in part, is what universities are for. Indeed, it might well be thought that one of the greatest contributions a university can make to society is to provide a model of what disinterested inquiry can be and how it might thereby be of value. If the pursuit of disinterested inquiry is compromised, it strikes at the very foundation on which a university should be based, just as the corrupt administration of justice strikes at the foundation upon which a system of justice should be based.

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This is somehow worse than the criticisms of it that popped up on my feed. Centrally it wants to assert as a matter of fact—“settled” in their language—that universities must be about “disinterested inquiry” and any deviation from this consensus is a problem.

Josh Shepperd@joshshepperd.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I got through a bit of this already notorious report, written by very prominent philosophers about the “decline of the humanities.” Everyone on this report is smarter than I am, yet none of them seems to understand what it’s been like to navigate the academy since the late 1990s.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 2mo ago

I hope that people are aware that one of the primary political objectives of this ascending right-wing effort to remake higher education through things like the Vanderbilt Report, the Chicago Principles, and the AEI Future of the American University project is to crush the academic labor movement.

Sarah Osment@smosment.bsky.social · 2mo ago

One of the authors of the humanities report sat across a table and said, through a smile, that me & my writing instructor colleagues are not teachers. Still, he is welcome in my seminars on evidence, reasoning & warrant since he seems to not understand those basic aspects of academic argument.

Sarah Osment @smosment.bsky.social · 2mo ago

have I mentioned that I teach first year writing here and that I am being laid off

Sarah Osment@smosment.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Hahahahahahahhahahahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Devin Garofalo @devingarofalo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This thread is incredible — huge thanks to everyone who contributed (plz jump in if you haven’t already!) — and reminds me of old Twitter, RIP.

Devin Garofalo@devingarofalo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Percolating on my fall theory course & would love to hear: what single essay (or chapter of a book) makes theory (interpreted however you like) or intellectual / aesthetic infrastructures concrete in ways that have stuck with you & / or you really admire? Example: Barbara Johnson, “Muteness Envy.”

Devin Garofalo @devingarofalo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"This is what it looks like when workers hold the line – it sends a message to every media company in the country that AI cannot be used to circumvent union contracts or undermine journalistic integrity." Academics please take note!

Washington-Baltimore News Guild@wbng.org · 3mo ago

🚨🚨🚨🚨 VICTORY! Following months of negotiations between @pen-guild.bsky.social leadership, WBNG, and POLITICO management, the company has agreed to shut down both AI products at the heart of last November’s landmark arbitration ruling! wbng.org/2026/05/22/p...

Annie McClanahan @anniemcc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Amazing news--congrats UPTE!!!

Sarah T Roberts, PhD@ubiquity75.xyz · 3mo ago

Bravo! (Archive ph for paywall-free)

Duke University Press @dukepress.bsky.social · 3mo ago

This special issue of @differences.bsky.social invites literary theorists and historians to engage with a question raised by this reader: For whom do we read? View the TOC and read the editor's introduction, made freely available: buff.ly/FYRFI0L

Differences cover with bold yellow background and centered text asking For Whom Do We Read

Annie McClanahan @anniemcc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

This thread is super interesting on how LLMs work by using familiar structures/patterns/genre conventions to produce something that appears meaningful (b/c it resembles other, actually meaningful text) but in fact is totally empty.

Jill Walker Rettberg@jilltxt.bsky.social · 3mo ago

New dataset published: this is the audio + transcripts of AI-generated podcasts using NotebookLM to analyse how it "translated" source documents from different times and cultures. My favourites are the 20 podcasts generated from an empty PDF. The paper about it is in press. doi.org/10.18710/RNT...