Adrienne Ghaly

Staff at Cambridge University Botanic Garden said: "Due to this summer's drought, the apple harvests have been so low that we have been unable to source enough quantities of heritage apples to make the event viable." www.bbc.com/news/article...

Can LLMs help us identify an aesthetics of biodiversity in the novel? Excited to share what @aghaly.bsky.social and I have been finding, and how we’ve gone about it. Join us at UVA’s Digital Humanities Center on 6 November at 10am. Coffee, pastries and plenty to discuss!

On Reading -Anne Carson, “Short Talks”

Scholar/artist Subhankar Banerjee (University of New Mexico) explores how environmental creative practices and scholarly writing can come together under one roof. Mon. Sept. 28, 5:30–7 pm at Brown. buff.ly/ZNnEi7k #EnvironmentalHumanities #EnvironmentalArts #Borderlands

More than any higher ed development in recent memory, institutional subsidies for AI at R1 universities prove that austerity is a choice. It is not “too expensive” to invest in a humanities research infrastructure; rather, it is a choice that R1 universities make not to & subsidize AI instead.

FEATURED JOB: Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship 2027-2028: Humanities Plural, Emory University - Georgia, United States networks.h-net.org/jobs/70286/e... #humanities #postdoctoral #fellowship #phd

This is a big one: Brown University is searching for the next director of the Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Please help us identify excellent candidates to lead this signature program into the future. Please write me with ideas; please share in your networks; please apply.

The US President's new proposal to tax international students has been approved by the White House for release this week. It's an unprecedented $100,000 tax on int'l grads who stay to work after graduation on Optional Practical Training (most grads do), a crucial bridge to remaining by any channel.

"The private sector's only priority is growth and profit. The system they're caught up in means that governments are unable to make the changes needed to fight the climate crisis. We need to declare an emergency that changes everything." An interview with David Suzuki.

Pausing from harvest labor on a hot summer afternoon, Pieter Bruegel’s Harvesters, in 1565. Today is his day.

"By a close study of Lukacs' key concepts - reification, totality, historicism - Feenberg argues for the path-breaking importance of History and Class Consciousness, and its relevance for today's social movements." --Michael Löwy Available for pre-order now!

The New Lukács!

New one today for @defector.com: in the wake of the most recent declaration of reading's demise, I was curious what booksellers, almost always ignored by the post-literate prognosticators, made of such claims. Here's what they told me:

Great essay: “end times fascists tap into deep feelings of insecurity and unease, including the uncanniness of [the]world…They tell us the reason we no longer recognise our hometowns is…the immigrants…— and not…the unrecognisable weather patterns, or the tech execs racing to replace…us w/robots.”

This article succeeds where most on the same topic fail (most notably Heller's infamous New Yorker piece on the 'end of the English major') bc it shows the relationship between 'declining majors' and 𝘴𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘤, 𝘥𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦 defunding and disinvestment in programs administrators want to diminish or end.

“This…opens up the door to the weaponization of tax-exempt status,” Roger Colinvaux (Law, Catholic Univ) “It potentially gives the I.R.S. a weapon to use to chill speech or..leverage behavior.” Trump Administration Renews Push to Strip Schools of Tax-Exempt Status www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/b...

The new Chicago Social Sciences AI policy is really rather good. chicagomaroon.com/flipbook/202... > The strong consensus [] is that our sequences are best understood as a pedagogical setting without AI And INB4 🤡 "bUt tEChnoLogY is inEVItablE", this kicker of a closing paragraph:

A fire breathing dragon sticking out its tongue in the evening sky. See the flame coming out from under its nose? The little bird had a lucky escape #pareidolia

🫣 terrifying - and utterly predictable

And my pinned post on LinkedIn about social rather than physical tipping points:

Students and faculty want Yale to stand up for their campus, not sell them out to Trump. The Trump administration threatened to launch a DOJ investigation into Yale and instead of standing up and fighting back, President Maurie McInnis is actively trying to cut a deal.

I hope y’all see that this will mean the imminent closure of a number of graduate programs.

Whenever I turn in a piece of writing my reward is tackling the general life morass created by ignoring all the other things in order to finish writing it.

Here's my alt text version from earlier. I just love this art. bsky.app/profile/horr...

Just re-upping this, as everyone starts to think towards the semester. Help us spread the word that Wesleyan is hiring a tenure track professor of early modern literature! Deadline September 15!

I’m on my first full sabbatical so if I don’t think for a minute about *how everything is burning* - your email does in fact find me reasonably well

Exactly this definitional confusion between writing and ‘writing up’ ideas I’m rewriting and rewriting - not ‘writing up’ - my section on Adorno.

Amazing resource to de-AI your tech

UChicago realizes AI-free UG critical formation in certain subjects like Soc Sci = graduates w/ cultural capital. More schools will follow

Will henceforth use tc;dr (too Claude; didn’t read) as feedback on student papers! Chasing ‘proof’ of LLM use (when forbidden for writing assignments) is exhausting & hours of time. But reproducing LLM writing tics & ‘flat style’ = reasons enuf for a rewrite to strengthen thought, claims

“Our analysis shows LLM editing & co-writing significantly change the underlying content & meaning expressed in the original essays. While these shifts are significant in educational contexts, they raise the question of how these effects translate in…environments where experts make decisions.”

“…and include a brief statement of your vision for what ‘intellectual pluralism’ means via Interfolio” It is called a university and it already does this without/despite shabby heterodox Trojan horses

“Today we are in a very different place to … the 18th c Romantic poets. We are in the inferno, whereas for them it was approaching. I feel you cannot be writing about natural beauty today in a poem w/o it being burdened w/ ideas of climate catastrophe.” … “It’s time to write about daffodils again.”

Someone please explain what is going on at the Chronicle of Higher Ed

Currently finishing a piece of academic writing and the desk debris field is really getting out of hand… Old drafts, inked up articles, books to check fns & quotes, cold cups of tea, unwashed teaspoons, the good pens, thumb drives, book weights, water bottle, notebooks, post-its…oh, more post-its

Newly translated Adorno lecture on Marx’s materialism as well as many other delights in the new issue of RP! #theory

“Thought does emerge from writing. Something ineffable happens when you write down a thought. You think something you did not know you could or would think and it leads you to another thought almost unbidden.”

Recently seen on a building in Hamburg - reminder that as the academic semester looms in ever more difficult circumstances for so many, solidarity is a tool to fight with. But it’s also a feeling - an adjacent word is “the feeling of togetherness-belonging”(zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl)