Efram Sera-Shriar

Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.

CALL FOR PITCHES

@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.

We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.

Details below!

Great... now I'm hooked. That's my morning spent 😂

In my lecture and seminars this week, we will be exploring the Lizzie Borden murder case. I taught this last semester too at the MA level and it was wildly popular. I plan to also discuss the emergence of a dark tourism culture in Fall River, MA, which was the setting of the murders.

The walls of Katsema, Nigeria, 1930. Photo by Elizabeth Wilhelmina Ness/Royal Geographical Society

So pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded PhD opportunity co-supervised with Royal Geographical Society (with IBG):

"Collaborative Research as Pedagogical Method: Reinterpreting Photographic Collections at the RGS-IBG"

Deadline: 30 April. Full details here: lnkd.in/euQvMmrR

It does, but to be fair, I'm already paid to play with video games and talk about ghosts. Why push the envelop further? 😂

I get dozens of suggestions to work at Lego!

It's the first day of term and it is time for my lecture on Silent Spring and the dangers of chemical pesticides like DDT. Here are some old adverts to enjoy!

2026 HSS Dissertation Travel Grant Applications are Open We are excited to announce that applications for the new HSS Dissertation Travel Grant are now open. This grant supports dissertation research activities, with an emphasis on travel to sources, for PhD students in the history of science and technology working on their dissertation proposal or dissertation itself. Graduate student members from any university are eligible to apply. The application includes a two-page, single-spaced research proposal, two-page cv, a short budget detailing anticipated expenses, and a letter of support from a faculty member in the applicant's program. Individual grants may be up to US$2,500. Applications will be open until Tuesday, March 31.

HSS Dissertation Travel Grant to support travel to sources for PhD students in history of science and technology working on their dissertation. Grants may be up to US$2,500. Grad students from any university are eligible
Deadline Tuesday, March 31.
hssonline.org/page/dissert...
#HPS

Shryock Medal Shryock Medal Graduate students are invited to enter the Shryock Medal Essay Contest. The medal honors Richard Harrison Shryock (1893–1972), a pioneer among historians interested in the history of med...

Hey, do you know a grad student who's written a good history of medicine paper? Suggest that they submit it for the AAHM Shryock prize. histmed.org/shryock-medal/ Deadline extended to 15 Feb.

We've been receiving some wonderful book proposals of late for @incsa.bsky.social's book series with Clemson University Press. But you can never have too much of a good thing. If you have a monograph or edited collection, consider sending it to us!

Details 👇
libraries.clemson.edu/press/series...

Lecturer in Early Medieval History | King's College London

Anyway, good news! Open-ended lectureship in early medieval history at KCL.

www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/136727-...

CALL FOR PAPERS: PERFORMING EVIL: the mediation and display of diabolic spectres, 1700-2000'. 4 & 5 June 2026, Leuven. This conference explores the tangled histories of supernatural, diabolic evil and all kinds of spectral apparitions in the last three centuries – Walter Scott’s ‘malignant and unhappy beings’. Specifically, it is interested in how and why ghosts, spirits and related apparitional phenomena were framed as diabolic, demonic or malign manifestations from the afterlife. Diabolic connotations of ghosts and spirits did meaningful cultural work. They were mobilised to discredit ghost beliefs and spiritual practices, to delegitimise competing beliefs, or to invest doctrinal arguments with occult authority. They could also function as tools of scepticism and ridicule as well as triggers of wonder, fear and religiosity. Put differently, the nexus of ghosts and evil is deeply historical. And it was often articulated through performative means: in gestures and expressions of (dis)belief, in visual and textual representations, in séance rooms, on the stage and on the page. Emerging from this nexus are theatrical spirits of evil, staged, embodied, and made legible through mediation and display. In this sense, every ghost is a theatrical ghost. Through the focus on the construction and staging of diabolic spirits, this conference aims to develop a methodological framework for studying historical forms of occultism and demonology more broadly in terms of performance.

Exploring how the relationship of spectrality and evil has shifted in shape over time and across different cultures, the conference invites contributions that can consider a wide range of historical actors – clerics, mediums, ghost-hunters, debunkers, necromancers, stage performers, eyewitnesses. This conference aims to study cultural intersections and interactions to arrive at a more granular understanding of discursive, practical and material connections between spirits and evil. At the same time this lens zooms out, making visible broader dynamics of knowledge construction in specific historical moments. How, for instance, did hauntings and possessions shape communities and audiences? How did religious or folkloric ideas about the devil inform spectral encounters? We hope to bring together historians, art historians, theatre and literary scholars, folklorists and anthropologists from every stage in their career around the above questions. We welcome 20-minute papers on topics that include but are by no means limited to: - making spectral evil visible: performance, arts, media, technologies, popular cultures - making spectral evil invisible: popular and occult knowledge circulation - performing (un)belief: practices and rhetoric, summoning and debunking on the stage (from popular stages to the lecture hall and the laboratory) - materiality of spectres: the function of bodies and objects - diabolic spirits and (intellectual, vernacular, theological, folkloric) ideas about morality, mortality and temporality - occult performance and ‘cultural scripts’ of ghost encounters (from necromancy to poltergeists) - affect and emotions: fear, grief, trauma… and hope Send abstracts (c.250 words) and bios (c.100 words) to kristof.smeyers@kuleuven.be before 21 March 2026. Please do get in touch if you have any questions.

Hi everyone, I'm organising a conference in Leuven, 4-5 June, and you're all invited*! It's called 'Performing evil: the mediation and display of diabolic spectres 1700-2000' and here is the call for papers (get in touch if you'd like a pdf!). Please share widely!

*to submit an abstract before 21/3

I'd like to thank Efram from 8 years ago for taking such meticulous notes so that Efram of today would not need to waste a day going through archives all over again. That old Efram was real smart. Efram of today could learn something from him...

I forgot how wonderful William Crookes' experiments in the early 1870s with the medium D.D. Home were. I've revisited them for some new research, and I'm geeking out hard right now...

An all too familiar experience. Good luck with the final push!

I hadn't realised there was a version on Archives. I should have known better to check! Thanks for sharing.

I was going through some old files and found these scans from Lewis Carroll's handwritten manuscript "Alice’s Adventures Underground" (1862). He originally gave it to Alice Liddell as a Christmas gift. The full text was available at the BL before the infamous hack.

I've got some exciting news brewing about the Henry Slade case from 1876. But I can't share it just yet. This was a famous event in the history of spiritualism when the naturalist E. Ray Lankester supposedly exposed the medium Slade as a cheat. It went to trial but ultimately Slade was acquitted.

a woman wearing a pink and white striped shirt and blue jeans is standing with her hands on her hips ALT: a woman wearing a pink and white striped shirt and blue jeans is standing with her hands on her hips

Trying to explain the Pokeroo to people who didn't grow up in the late 70s or early 80s feels like a weird fever dream...

"The Polkaroo was here?!? And I missed him again?!" 😂

a woman stands in front of a purple and blue background ALT: a woman stands in front of a purple and blue background

Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space is super good. I've not taught it before, but it has made this year's syllabus.

Call for Proposals: Special / Themed Issues - International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Call for Proposals Special / Themed Issues Advances in Nineteenth-Century Research, the journal of the International-Nineteenth Century Studies Association Follow on BlueSky Call for Book Reviews Adva...

This is a reminder that our journal @advancesjournal.bsky.social is currently open for receiving proposals for themed issues. We are the official journal of @incsa.bsky.social. If you have ideas for a themed issue, email me.

Details👇
in-csa.com/themed-speci...

Save the Games 2.0 Call for Papers is open! The symposium will be held at The Strong in Rochester, NY on July 29 and 30. The deadline for submissions if February 20, 2026! www.museumofplay.org/save-the-gam...

"The Octopus" from the Moody Bible Institute Monthly, December 1925. Published a hundred years ago and still on the money... 😬

1950-something

@mbsbirmingham.bsky.social Modern British Studies Conference 2026 CfP is live. Deadline for proposals 31 January 2026. www.birmingham.ac.uk/events/moder...

Woo hoo!

To be honest, you probably don't want a Dell anyway...

Sega co-founder David Rosen dies aged 95 Rosen, who led Sega from the 1960s into the 90s and who died on Christmas Day, was a hugely important figure in the history of arcade and home gaming

I've long been interested in the history of Sega, and Rosen's death is another reminder that this is an area of historical game studies in need of work.

www.theguardian.com/games/2026/j...