Aarthi Vadde

Well this is going on my required reading list! Congrats to @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and @johannawinant.bsky.social on an incredible lineup and on elegantly breaking down a practice that, at its best, feels (but never is) effortless.

This rare skeet is dedicated to my husband’s coworker, who will be heading to a bookstore at midnight, to buy the new Pynchon book. Such commitment still exists!

Poster showing Tom Comitta (big photo) and Deidre Lynch (smaller one) and the covers of their two new novels: Patchwork and People's Choice Literature. Monday, September 29th, 7 p.m., Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, MA

Boston-area friends, if you're in the vicinity of Harvard tomorrow, please come to @harvardbookstore.bsky.social for a conversation about novels, LLMs, public opinion polls, collages, cut-ups, and patchwork with me and @tomcomitta.bsky.social. It will be a wild ride--hope you can join us for it!

Trying to keep my professional chill but I’m SO excited Carnegie Mellon is launching a cluster hire in computational humanities—MULTIPLE JOBS!

1. Asst Teaching Track Prof in Computational Humanities - apply.interfolio.com/173622
2. Asst Tenure Track Prof in CH - apply.interfolio.com/173626

Modern Fiction Studies is sponsoring a conference on “Cultural AI” at Purdue, to be followed by a special issue. @aarthivadde.bsky.social, @richardjeanso.bsky.social, N Katherine Hayles, @mattwilkens.bsky.social , @mellymeldubs.bsky.social, and I will be there later this week.

Want to read something interesting? Stop doomscrolling & check out this amazing special issue!

Sally Rooney putting her money where her mouth is (figuratively of course). Bravo.
www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...

Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century A user’s guide to the fundamental practice of literary studies, providing context, examples, and practical exercises

You can now read most of the introduction (co-written by me and @johannawinant.bsky.social) to CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, out in October from Princeton UP press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Congrats, Matt! What an exciting position and place!

How demoralizing - have lots to say about online learning but not here

How did those students respond when you confronted them (assuming you did)?

Plus gorgeous bookmarks courtesy of Novel Dialogue!

SNS registration starting at 8am! Pick up your program and name tags!

Ngugi should have won the Nobel. An incredible body of work dedicated to the promotion and institutionalization of African languages as literary languages. Devil on the Cross was my personal favorite of his novels.

Who Owns These Tools?: Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde “The desire for that sort of purist kind of connection that one might call communion, is something that I'm interested in in all of my work.”

Amid fears about AI, @aarthivadde.bsky.social‬ chats with @vauhinivara.bsky.social‬ about what it really means to put ChatGPT on the printed page and whether generative AI will steal writers’ paychecks.

I loved talking to @aarthivadde.bsky.social and Sarah Wasserman about how “language is the main tool we have to bridge the divide" among us — it's why I'm a writer — and how big tech companies have been colonizing language, most recently with AI, but starting long before that.

9.5 Who Owns These Tools?: Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW) In an essay about her recent book Searches, a genre-bending chronicle of the deeply personal ways we use the internet and the uncanny ways it uses us, Vauhini Vara admits that several reviewers see…

It was a true pleasure to discuss Searches with @vauhinivara.bsky.social and Sarah Wasserman for the Novel Dialogue podcast! We ranged through the fic/nonfic binary, pushing the boundaries of form with human writing and machine outputs, and AI as a labor issue.
noveldialogue.org/2025/05/22/9...

Agh, I wish you were coming. I would love to see you and Kathy P. in the same room

we'll pour one out for you, Tommy!

Full program for SNS 2025: Novel Languages now available! So happy to see this event come together and to have so many good people descend on Durham, NC! Come for the terrific panels and seminars and stay for signature novel-inspired cocktails and bookish swag!

So excited to hear your stuff and read! 🎉🎉🎉

The press shared a 50% discount code for preorders, May 1-31!

SPRING25

press.umich.edu/Books/A/Arti...

So many great books coming down the pike!

Yay! Can’t wait to read, Rose!

Available for preorder, Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style is out from Fordham on 7/1/25.

I analyze property law expansively, across Nigeria, India, South Africa, and the English Atlantic, to argue that both legal and literary innovations are undoing law's colonial legacies.

Today's the day! I invite close readers to see if they can find the places where I channeled the most rage into this project. It is supposed to make you uncomfortable. You are supposed to try to dismiss it as "praxis" vs. "theory" and then you are supposed to be convinced otherwise.

Passage from "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold" by Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank

Taught Eve Sedgwick&Adam Frank alongside Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun in my Novel after the Internet course and found their engagement with Silvan Tomkins to be a helpful reminder that emotion and child development was quite central to early AI discourse. Here's the quote on "humanoid machines":

Event flier for Building the Indigenous Internet panel and Q&A featuring headshots of Ashley Cordes, Majerle Lister, and Lisa Nakamura. Flier text: This panel brings together key voices in infrastructure as broadly imagined, data sovereignty and decolonial perspectives to critically explore the history, present, and future of the Indigenous Internet. The conversation will showcase how Indigenous knowledge has and will continue to shape data worlds by bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives on emerging technologies--ranging from computer science, artificial intelligence, social media, online activism, the work of infrastructure and circuit building, and beyond. By centering Indigenous voices, the discussion aims to create transformative visions for a sustainable, equitable, and inclusive digital future while inviting speculative thinking about post-settler digital worlds. Free copies of Indigenous Currencies: Leaving Some for the Rest in the Digital Age (MIT Press) by Ashley Cordes will be available for the first 50 attendees!

UPCOMING: Join us in-person or virtually for a conversation about Building the Indigenous Internet, with Ashley Cordes, Majerle Lister, and @lnakamura.bsky.social

🗓️ Monday, April 14, 2 - 3:30 PM ET

📍 Weiser Hall 10th Floor, UMich & Zoom

More info and register: events.umich.edu/event/130932

James Joyce Curator, Special Collections The Special Collections unit of the University at Buffalo (UB) Libraries seeks dynamic and collaborative applicants for the position of James Joyce Curator in the Poetry Collection. Founded in 1935, t...

Whoa University at Buffalo Poetry Collection is hiring a James Joyce curator specifically for that collection. This is someone’s dream job (I would love it but I can’t leave AL yet). Salary range is respectable, $65-80k (Buffalo is not an expensive city).

www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/postings/56217

Novel Dialogue Season 9 Trailer: Writing Against the System with Aarthi Vadde - Public Books In the trailer for Season 9 of Novel Dialogue, Aarthi Vadde looks at the web as the predominant platform of cultural life, and one that needs to be understood in light of literary history.

In the trailer for Season 9 of our partner podcast Novel Dialogue, @aarthivadde.bsky.social looks at the web as the predominant platform of cultural life, and one that needs to be understood in light of literary history. Hosted by Chris Holmes and Emily Hyde.
buff.ly/lJVTBMC