Jordan Alexander Stein
@jordanstein.bsky.social
Literature professor and book historian, except for one time I wrote a book about Nina Simone
Happy 10 year anniversary to the best and likely only piece of literary criticism about Henry James I will ever write! avidly.org/the-top-10-f...
The Top 10 Fag Hags of Henry James: A Definitive Ranking - Avidly
Henry James numbers among the nineteenth-century’s leading dinner party guests and, not coincidentally, its worst playwrights. Had he been born in the late
avidly.org
The time has come to learn more about eighteenth-century (pre-industrial) book binding — especially as a vocation (book binders, training, workshops, income, overlapping trades, etc). Any leads welcome! #bookhistory
I am at work on a bibliography of books and other materials printed in French colonial Saint Domingue and postcolonial Haiti 1764-1825, with a census of actually existing copies. Very rough at present, but
My new @hastac.bsky.social Intelligent Artifice post: "AI Ate My Homework"--for any level, any field. Inc Bonus Syllabus and Final by brilliant @fordham.edu Prof @jordanstein.bsky.social technology-networks-sciences.hastac.hcommons.org/2026/05/03/a... @hastac.bsky.social @futuresed.bsky.social
Hopefully her full story will be uncovered. www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/03/24/a...
Researchers at Art Gallery of Ontario identify painter and subject of 18th-century portrait of Black woman
Curators at the gallery are now piecing together the transatlantic journeys of Eleonora Susette, an enslaved woman who travelled from present-day Guyana to Amsterdam and back
theartnewspaper.com
William Wells Brown, on Henry Christophe of Haiti (from St. Domingo: Its Revolutions and Its Patriots (1855])
The John Hope Franklin Research Center is pleased to share that the archive of philosopher, scholar, and author Sylvia Wynter will be opened to the public beginning March 3 blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2...
Franklin Research Center Announces the Opening of the Sylvia Wynter Papers, Exhibition, and Symposium - The Devil's Tale
Post contributed by John B. Gartrell, director John Hope Franklin Research Center The John Hope Franklin Research Center is pleased to share that the archive of philosopher, scholar, and author Sylvi...
blogs.library.duke.edu
Will you be at MLA and/or can you get to Toronto a week from Saturday? Come launch, come party! Bring a friend.
The rumor is true! I used the publishing history of Grove Press’s 1960s French translations to think about the history of midcentury gay male sexuality and the idioms it created, and how those shaped queer theory in the 1990s
The Melville Society@melville-society.bsky.social · 8mo ago@jordanstein.bsky.social aims to historicize “outing” in queer Melville scholarship, the better to understand how and why that idiom appeared as it did in "Sex in Translation: Melville, Mayoux, Ashbery" muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...
The special issue I co-edited on "Melville's Queer Afterlives" is here and it's queer. This issue has EVERYTHING: gay pirates, dirty pictures, racist internet fanfic, Gilbert Gottfried, original poetry, and just so many French people. Available at your library, but LMK if you're paywalled...
Project MUSE - Leviathan-Volume 27, Number 3, October 2025
muse.jhu.edu
"A miniature book published by St. Onge was the only book taken on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, and was thus the first book on the moon"
For many of the years that Raymond Weaver taught at Columbia University, he lived at 200 W 108th Street, and maybe, just maybe, this now defunct mailbox in the building’s lobby was the one at which he posted his first letters to Elizabeth Melville Metcalf
Take your watermark questions to The Grolier Club, they said. (They were totally right!)
Dictionnaire de bibliographie Haitienne (1951) by Max Bissainthe is the first modern and still most comprehensive bibliography of Haiti printing. His typescript drafts at NYPL reveal his process, with note cards, paperclips, and typewriter errors corrected with scissors and now very yellowed tape
Honestly thought I was just doing some due diligence at the American Antiquarian Society, but found truly amazing unique and under-cataloged Haiti items, plus some surprising interactions between print and manuscript
There comes a time in every man’s life where he must face up to how little he knows about the stamps on French Revolutionary documents. (No, but seriously, please recommend some readings.)
It becomes clear that this item’s excellent catalog record must have been a bit hard won.
I’m an English professor in the US in 1967. I bought a house in town my first year on the job and earned tenure with two articles. My wife cooks my meals and my secretary does my typing. I have to read all the books published this year about the one author I study. There were two of them.
"i asked grok" "i asked chagpt" yeah well I asked a rare books librarian and they found things I didn’t even know I was looking for, while answering questions about provenance
Little known fact: Mary, the character played by Parker Posey in the 1995 indie film "Party Girl," was actually based on me in college
