Amy Bouwer

On Tuesday I had the privilege of graduating from UoN with my PhD in English Literature ✨

Great news! Our latest issue is now ready to download in full from our website: www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/gro... ✨ Start your weekend right by delving into some brilliant research by postgraduate and early career researchers 🥳

“It’s not just the students: Multiple AI platforms now offer tools to leave AI-generated feedback on students’ essays. Which raises the possibility that AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.”

and are those Other Countries with thriving academic job markets and healthy higher education sectors in the room with us now?

is the “masculinity crisis” currently going around not just a more paranoid patriarchy

as a text-based creature in an increasingly video-first world I'd like to be cherished as a sort of charismatic but doomed animal, to be fed treats in my enclosure until I meet my inevitable demise, after which my taxidermied corpse might greet visitors in a lobby somewhere

Amy, Jodie (me) and Isabelle sitting in the audience for Burna' Beggars Opera on the last night of BARS, July 2024

Happy International Women's Day to my ECR friends especially. I admire your courage, kindness & wit every day & I would not be where I am today without you ❤️

(not everyone is on here but shout out to @wilcocksonamy.bsky.social, @amybouwer.bsky.social, & @diddykeats1.bsky.social who are)

An excerpt from Dorothy Roberts's 'Reproductive Justice, Not Just Rights', reading: 'A reproductive justice framework can attract support from tens of thousands of women alienated by the mainstream agenda – poor and low-income women, women of colour, queer women, women with disabilities, and women whose lives revolve around caregiving. In addition, the movement’s social justice focus provides a concrete basis for building radical coalitions with organisations fighting for racial, economic, and environmental justice, for immigrant, queer, and disabled people, and for systemic change in law enforcement, health care, and education. True reproductive freedom requires a living wage, universal health care, and the abolition of prisons. Black women see the police slaughter of unarmed people in their communities as a reproductive justice issue. They recognise that women are frequent victims of racist police violence and that cutting short the lives of black youth violates the right of mothers to raise their children in healthy, humane environments. The reproductive justice movement and Black Lives Matter are likely allies because, at their core, both insist that American society must begin to value black humanity. Black, Latina, Asian-American, and indigenous reproductive justice organisations have a history of solidarity, exemplified by SisterSong, and they have begun to forge links with other social justice movements.'

Important words from Dorothy Roberts in my morning reading today.

Continuing the thread again:
11. What A Way to Go — Bella Mackie
12. Piranesi — Susanna Clarke (✨SO GOOD✨)
13. Field Notes for the Wilderness —Sarah Bessey
14. The Poisonwood Bible — Barbara Kingsolver
15. Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov
16. Devolution — Max Brooks
Send recs; my TBR is cowering before me.

My life is going great thanks I drunkenly did the NYT Mini Crossword in 14 seconds today.

Protect Trans Youth logo

Now more than ever 🏳️‍⚧️

#CFP Contemporary #WomensWriting Annual Conference!

Please share!

#TV #film #creativepractice #literary #genre #romance #scifi #crimefiction #gothic #poetry #screenwriting #fanstudies #biography

All welcome!

January has been dedicated to reading (a) random books in my childhood room (including ones my parents left there for me while I’ve been away ❤️), (b) secondhand Secret Santa gifts that I brought with me, and (c) the 900-pg tearjerker monstrosity I’ve been threatening to finish since 2020.

A pile of paperbacks (listed in the post) in a sunny patch on a white bookshelf.

4. Trinity — Leon Uris
5. Beware the Woman — Megan Abbott
6. youthjuice — E. K. Sathue
7. A Kiss Before Dying — Ira Levin
8. Pandora — Susan Stokes-Chapman
9. Pieces of Her — Karin Slaughter
10. The Hundred Thousand Kingdom — N. K. Jemisin (an old favourite, clearly)

I’m on a roll, so I’m making this into a thread of 2025 reads — until I inevitably forget to update it.

First books of 2025:
1. The Neighbour’s Secret — Sharon Bolton ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
2. American Psycho — Bret Easton Ellis ⭐️⭐️
3. The Familiar — Leigh Bardugo ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Speaking of Luigi Mangione and entertainment in prison, I would like to direct people's attention to a charity that's really cool, The Prisoners Literature Project. They're looking for year end donations! www.prisonlit.org

But, that survival-of-the-fittest mentality shouldn't surprise us. Because we treat health as a private good in this country. Because we equate health with morality. And because we tell people that the way to be healthy is to make "good choices" that minimize risk.

Check out our website for more information and email us at pg-lts@nottingham.ac.uk! Our editors would love to talk you through the submissions process, advise you on article ideas, or discuss other options for publishing your work.
nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/languagestextssociety/lts-journal/

Hello Bluesky! We’re LTS, an interdisciplinary journal based at the University of Nottingham and spotlighting cutting-edge postgraduate and early-career research. Get to know us in the short 🧵 below 👇🏻

i've had enough of unexplained mysteries. i want all the explained ones. give me answers. give me endings. give me resolution

Just found out, 7 years into taking sertraline, that it causes manic episodes (in addition to the long list of other side effects)! Love that for me. Love that I believed this was normal and okay and how not-depressed people felt (spoiler: it’s not! It doesn’t have to be like this!).

So you’re telling me he took violent action against hyper capitalism without reading a *single Verso e-book*?

Screenshot of an audiobook player, showing the cover of Lauren Beukes’s novel ‘Bridge’. The cover shows a young white woman’s profile from the shoulders up, her head tilted upwards, with a blue and green rectangle covering her eyes. The shapes in the rectangle look ethereal, like a sonar or lava lamp. Everything else is tinted pink to match a bright pink gradient background.

Possibly an unpopular opinion but after finishing the audiobook yesterday I think Bridge is my favourite Lauren Beukes novel. Tight prose, brilliant world building, intrigue balanced with ethical inquiry… not to mention all the sf/f tie-ins. Beukes is a fucking force.

Call for Papers: British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies - What Happens Now Conference (BACLS-WHN) 10-12th June 2025, University of Stirling BACLS are delighted to open for proposals for their 2025 conference which, for the first time, will be held in Scotland at the University of Stirling. Now a quarter of the way into the 21st century, theorisations of the contemporary and the discipline of literary study have sought to capture both new and reiterating forms: Anna Korbluh proposes that we've entered a permacrisis-induced age of 'immediacy' where art eludes mediation and prioritizes feelings of presence; for John Guillory in his recent Professing Criticism, the perennial disciplinary and existential anxieties of university English should be understood as a now-permanent feature of the subject. BACLS-WHN asks its participants to engage with cultural and creative works and their relation to the emerging formations of the present-engaging, in broad terms, with the question: what happens now?

Just saw this CfP on the Other Site and thought I’d share here for anyone that missed it! The @bacls.bsky.social What Happens Now Conference will be held in Stirling on 10-12 June 2025 🤩 Proposals due 24 Jan.
forms.gle/Jmx4BBpdB7L3...

Cover of Elle Nash’s Deliver Me: a black paperback with striking orange title, featuring an open mouth with a large black and orange beetle/roach crawling out of it.

Elle Nash’s Deliver Me was weird as hell but I couldn’t put it down. Highly recommended if, like me, you need something queer and thrilling and horrifying every once in a while. (Big CW for pregnancy, miscarriage, Pentecostal trauma and bugs.)

Clare Pollard’s novel ‘Delphi’: a bright yellow paperback, with an off-centre faded picture of dying pink tulips on the cover.

Still uneasy about pandemic-related stories (/novels set during Covid) but I’m glad I gave Delphi by Clare Pollard a chance. Skilful handling of mundanity and anachronism in ‘unprecedented times’, all while meditating on prophetic methods and myths.

Thank you! My aunt crocheted it — without a pattern as far as I’m aware. She’s very talented 🥰

A small tabby cat curled up on a blue and white crocheted blanket, one paw stretched out as she licks her leg.

Arrived home-home to this little one today 🥰 I’m away for 8-10 months at a time and she still comes to sleep on my childhood bed whenever I visit my parents.

And this is why you’re my favourite Blake researcher 🙏🏻🫶🏻