olivia stowell

how and why was it decided that the academic jobs wiki would be hosted on a fandom platform

anyone want to team up for scms 👀 i work on TV (esp reality TV), digital cultures and subcultures, unscripted content (TV and digital), and social media/platform studies and creator culture, w/ emphases on race, gender, and labor!

omg i would love to syllabus swap, because i'd love to see yours! let me PM!

i used to get texts like this all the time and then i started replying in a polite, friendly way with (genuine) questions about Palestine and now i never get them

blah blah blah obligatory "work won't love you back." but actually i do feel enlivened and attuned when i do this work. and *i* love me back. and it is amazing when students talk about learning new ways of seeing and new ways of thinking, when they get brave enough to ask their questions.

I hope that this isn't my last class and that these aren't my last students. But if they are, they were SO GREAT. Honestly, I have been very very lucky, to love teaching and to have had students who love learning. This work brings me joy. I'm so lucky to have gotten to do it for 6 years!

Today I taught the last class of my summer reality TV course. This fall, I'm going on the academic job market for the first time. I told my students at the end of class that there is a non-zero chance that they may be the last students & this may be the last class I ever teach at the college level 😭

lol when i first saw the title my brain immediately went “historical materialists” lol! the movie definitely has class on the brain but idk if it says anything interesting at all about class…i’m tempted to write about it but idk if i have a new take, i feel like ive seen my gripes in other reviews!

as a romcom aficionado, a frequent moviegoer, & someone who has done a fair bit of dating, i really did not like celine song's MATERIALISTS. the film is nice to look at, but weirdly cast, weirdly written, & honestly circles back around to propping up the incel-like dating ethos it's trying to skewer

Start your weekend with MTC Summer reads and join us for any and all! More information on our website mid-theory.com/reading/

sometimes the hardest part is getting started! tell your friends, your students ✨

Come read good stuff with us!!!

some days my work really makes me feel tired and frustrated, and other days what i get to do for work is pick which drag race lip syncs i'm going to include in my lecture about reality tv and queer politics, and i remember how cool and lucky my life is

revising my original tweet to *song of the year in light of this 🙂‍↕️

belle-a’s immediately evident tiktok brainrot and her egregious blaccent truly like make me feel enmity between myself and society

i know this is not the central cultural event right now but i have to express that it’s been a LONG time since i have instinctively and immediately hated reality cast members as much as i hate nic, austin, and belle-a on the current season of #LoveIslandUSA

ok this made me for the first time connect “can’t talk to you” in this flight tonight with “i wanna talk to you” in all i want! thank you for sharing!!

guarantee that whatever sabrina carpenter does next cannot rival heaven or las vegas

i need bluesky polls so people can vote:
“i want your love above and under me”
“i want to love a boy that won’t love me”
“i want to love me”
other???

the reason why this would be the perfect song of the summer is it’s a rorschach test

in lieu of cultural consensus around a “song of the summer” this year i am making an executive decision that the song of the summer is “heaven or las vegas” by cocteau twins

theory and therapy very concordant!!

sadly he had not lol

he had never heard of wittgenstein but was very compelled by my simplified rendering of the private language argument lmao! and i did also share what you said about “the dark side of the moon.” the reading group’s power!!

Shelter An autobiography in Pride Months

This year, in the absence of any media outlet or corporation asking me to write about Pride, I challenged myself to write a Pride essay I’d actually want to read. This is what I wrote. open.substack.com/pub/johnpaul...

me, this morning in therapy: “so have you ever read anything by the philosopher ludwig wittgenstein?”

This summer MTC will be running two reading groups, one fiction and one theory. We hope you can join us for one or both. You can find more information on our website:
mid-theory.com/reading/

Love Will Keep Us Together (Trapped on the Severed Floor) The shift from the outward-facing politics of severance to the intrapersonal desires of the severed is the political problem of season two in a nutshell. In a climactic, chaotic moment from the sea…

For MTC, Emily Coccia reads the class and political evolution of Severance and why love stories are bad actually.

mid-theory.com/2025/06/02/l...

showing my class (all born after 2003) a clip from FX's horrible 2006 reality show Black.White. today wish me luck

many many many thanks to Danielle for putting this cluster together, to Rachel Greenwald Smith for all her edits, and to the brilliant other contributors to the cluster for giving me so many new ways to think about a show that i love so deeply!