anthony petro

Mellon Foundation The Mellon Foundation makes grants to actively unlock the power in the arts and humanities that helps connect us all.

“American Academy of Arts&Sciences reports 96.3% of humanities grads age 23-32 fully employed. Earnings in humanitiess comparable to social/life sciences, job satisfaction levels too. A serious mismatch bw actual employment for hum grads +general perception."
www.mellon.org/voices/human...

These two...

What Happened When Their Art Was Banned

Good read.

Close up of a Blackberry lily, a red and orange flower, in full bloom

Today in floral drag... Blackberry lily, which is actually Iris domestica (so I have learned!)

'Broderick Chow, Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024. Lianna Mark, Theatres of Autofiction. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024). Patrick McKelvey, Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation. (NY: New York University Press, 2024). Brahma Prakash, Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India. (Delhi: LeftWord, 2023). Ben Spatz, Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024).' .

Happy to share that "Disability Works" has been shortlisted for the Theatre and Performance Research Association's David Bradby Monograph Prize. Congrats to this stellar group of finalists!

Religious Challenges to Abortion Bans are Winning in Unlikely Places Almost immediately after Dobbs V. Jackson Women’s Health overturned the federal right to an abortion, more than a dozen states passed legislation effectively banning abortion. Soon thereafter, Jewish ...

"Polling reveals that a majority of religious people believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases."

Review Essay: Critical Secularism Studies in These Times: The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and the Poetics of World-MakingSecularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global So... In our era of polycrisis, so many targets of struggle and critique are linked, overlapping, symbiotic. It is imperative but difficult to find terminology t

New from me in JAAR -
“Review Essay: Critical Secularism Studies in These Times” academic.oup.com/jaar/article...

Review #4 of Disability Works is out in Review: The Journal of Dramaturgy!

"a thoughtful, nuanced, and deeply archival analysis of the intersecting histories of labor, theatre, and disability...Every scholar concerned with even loosely connected topics should have a copy on their bookshelf."

It was EIGHT MINUTES LONG!

My partner is forcing me to listen to dance remixes of "I've Written a Letter to Daddy." How did it come to this?

Please help us spread the word!

2) Assistant Professor in Sports, Media, and Culture: apply.interfolio.com/170582

1) Annenberg Chair in American Studies and Journalism: apply.interfolio.com/170389

ND American Studies is hiring! We have two searches this year:

Looks great!

Oh yes, Kinkade comes up briefly. I'd love to read that essay!

Seen this going around. I write about how culture wars conservatives appeal to sentimental realism and an aesthetics of literalism in *Provoking Religion.* There's a long history to this aesthetic take--I trace it back at least (and in part) to the American reception of Scottish Commonsense Realism.

“Disability Works” turns 1 today! I’d like to celebrate by making sure it finds its way into the hands of even more readers. You can help by:

1) Requesting your library purchase a copy (link in bio)

2) Let me know if you assign it (I can zoom in!)

#disability #academicsky #historysky #booksky

Two bright red poppies against a background of green foliage

These poppies were from a few weeks ago but I still think about them.

(I don't usually cut them to bring in the house, but these three shared a stalk that was damaged in a rain storm.)

Three white/soft yellow lilies in a purple vase sitting on a window sill.

Now that we have a real garden, I feel compelled to post flower pics. Blueskiers, beware.

For sure. They have a program where fac can get a course release to "audit" for a semester and then join a rotation for 3-years. That was one way they brought people in. The students were on the whole fantastic.

It's housed in the College of Arts and Sciences, and has a director and other administrative support. Kind of operates like a large department in many ways.

It has a mix of TT and non-TT (unionized) ladder faculty, but it's true that, I think, it's been harder to get TT fac involved as the years have gone by, mostly because of competing needs in their own departments

Sure this: this is the link to the Core Program: www.bu.edu/core/

pro. i taught in an opt-in version of this at BU and it was fantastic. and in the class i taught, on critiques of "modernity," we covered Kant, Freud, Foucault, Fanon, Butler, etc.

Patrick and Anthony posing together outside with nerdy frames and content smiles

You might not know this, but the 13th anniversary is the Hoosier anniversary! Ever glad that @pmckelveyphd.bsky.social trained from Providence to Boston those many years ago to meet me at a bookstore.

Moving from Janet Malcolm's book on Gertude and Alice to Steven Hahn's Illiberal America causing mental whiplash

IRS says churches can now endorse political candidates Since 1954, an IRS rule had barred houses of worship from explicitly endorsing political candidates.

Evangelicals don’t realize how prohibiting pastors endorsing candidates protected their churches. Now if a pastor endorses a candidate, some will leave. And if they don’t endorse, others will say “Why not?” And they’ll leave.

It’ll accelerate partisan sorting in church.
www.npr.org/2025/07/08/n...

Automated transcription of a voicemail that ends with: I hope you didn’t have a good day bye-bye

Transcription error or Totally Normal voicemail from my mother ?