Andreas Tranvik

Cover of How Close Reading Made Us by Yael Segalovitz

In our new Comparative Literature issue: Yael Segalovitz examines 4 recent books on close reading, asking how they converge on a bold though often implicit premise: that close reading operates through the bodily and cognitive training of the reader.
muse.jhu.edu/journal/128

Painting of man behind bar, holding half of a lemon staring forward with his reflection and the reflection of the patron and others in background.

Winter 2026 issue is here! Featuring essays by Yves Winter, Christopher Grobe, Esther Yu, Saul Nelson, Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, James I. Porter, Michael Dango, and Robert Mitchell, Orit Halpern, and Henning Schmidgen.

criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/past_issues/...

The ‘Crisis of the Humanities’ Is Over. That’s Not a Good Thing. All of higher ed now suffers the attacks of politics and technology.

This was published in the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s. If you work in education & were, reasonably, taking a break, maybe you missed it.

Don’t miss it.

Philology Now – Volume 64, Number 4 — History and Theory History and Theory, Volume 64, Number 4

It’s here! I’m delighted to share a new theme issue of @histandtheojrnl.bsky.social, “Philology Now.” Valeria López Fadul and I edited this issue, featuring smart contributions by Emily Apter, Peter de Bolla, Alan Durston, Cymone Fourshey, Claire Gilbert, Anthony Grafton…

historyandtheory.org/64-4

FREDRIK HERTZBERG: Våra universitet är på väg att bli meningslösa Universiteten har blivit långsamma, överadministrerade zombieinstitutioner. Fredrik Hertzberg läser två böcker och hittar en förklaring till varför akademin blev så dark.

I dagens Expressen skriver Fredrik Hertzberg ovanligt skarpt om universitetens svåra situation och tilltagande meningslöshet

Hanna Lublin Niklasson: I år blir det ingen raketglögg Hanna Lublin Niklasson inser att hennes familj lurat henne varenda jul.

Min syster har skrivit den roligaste jultexten du kommer läsa i år…

Anekdotiskt: på sv lärosäten (och säkert andra myndigheter) utsätts just nu TA-personal (inkl kommunikatörer) för en intensiv, närmast evangelisk AI-propaganda från central förv; man uppmanas använda AI hejvilt, inga nackdelar tas öht upp. Är man då dåligt insatt är det nog lätt att svepas med.

Setting the ‘normal study time’: temporal acceleration and standardisation in 1960s Swedish higher education The acceleration of academic time has been a persistent theme in debates on higher education, fuelled by politicians as well as students. In this article, we analyse and discuss acceleration and st...

New article on the acceleration and standardisation of time in 1960s Swedish higher education: www.tandfonline.com/eprint/WPRIW...

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

no you read your husband the quote from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia about the Library of Alexandria and started weeping too hard to finish

Hej Göteborg! Till våren kör vi en ny upplaga av "Forskaren i framtidens offentlighet". Den här gången på västkusten!

När? 15 april, 9-16
Var? Chalmers
Är det gratis? Yes, men platserna är begränsade.

Anmälan sker här: docs.google.com/.../1FAIpQLS...

Sprid och dela gärna!

Poetry in the Digital Age As a multifaceted and intermedial phenomenon, poetry in the digital age not only demands a rethinking and expansion of the traditional paradigms of literary studies but also attracts increasing attent...

I'm thrilled to share that "Poetry in the Digital Age: An Interdisciplinary Handbook" is out!

It brings together a range of perspectives on poetry parameters, formats, practices, debates & more – and is available in open access via the link below:

@poetryda.bsky.social @degruyterbrill.bsky.social

“Adversarial poetry.”

Love this. Obvs.

I like how SPECIFIC this Lily Allen divorce album is!

Men der er også et andet problem, som måske faktisk er mere skræmmende, skriver Christian Bennike: buff.ly/p6P8Nqv

Jag tänker ofta, alltför ofta, på denna passage.

This is how you blurb

När vi inte längre väger våra ord i mellanmänskliga samtal och egenförfattade texter, när misstänksamheten ersätter viljan till djupare förståelse – då har den humanistiska vetenskapen förlorat sin själ.

humtank.se/anna-hegardt...

ANDREAS TRANVIK: Svenska forskare är redan som Chat GPT Debatterna om AI-användningen i universitetsvärlden fortsätter. Andreas Tranvik tycker att vi måste stå upp för det akademiska skrivandet som ett kreativt hantverk.

I dag bråkar jag om AI, akademiskt skrivande och hantverksskicklighet. Framför allt gör jag ett försök att koppla samman AI-frågan här och nu med en sedan länge existerande andlig robotisering i universitetsvärlden, en robotisering som föregriper de stora språkmodellernas utbredning.

ANDREAS TRANVIK: Svenska forskare är redan som Chat GPT Debatterna om AI-användningen i universitetsvärlden fortsätter. Andreas Tranvik tycker att vi måste stå upp för det akademiska skrivandet som ett kreativt hantverk.

I dag bråkar jag om AI, akademiskt skrivande och hantverksskicklighet. Framför allt gör jag ett försök att koppla samman AI-frågan här och nu med en sedan länge existerande andlig robotisering i universitetsvärlden, en robotisering som föregriper de stora språkmodellernas utbredning.

Humanioras publiceringskulturer skapar huvudvärk för forskningens utvärderare. I Vetenskapsrådets Forskningsbarometer 2025 har området i vissa delar utelämnats. Är humaniora satt på undantag i kunskapsnationen Sverige?

humtank.se/linus-salo-o...

Everything Is Television A theory of culture and attention

1. Social media is now 5% following friends and 95% watching videos made by strangers.
2. Every podcast is turning into a YouTube show.
3. AI companies can't stop building TikTok clones.

Everything is becoming television.

I wrote about why that matters.

www.derekthompson.org/p/why-everyt...

THE HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE CONFERENCE

This week, on 8–10 October, LUCK is organizing The History of Knowledge Conference in Lund. I am delighted to be the host together with my dear colleagues.

The programme can be found here: newhistoryofknowledge.com/wp-content/u...

The Elusive ‘Docent Grade’: Evaluative Cultures in and Beyond the Swedish Humanities (1876–1969) - Minerva In the late nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century, an academic career in Sweden was highly dependent on what grade a scholar’s doctoral dissertation was awarded. Unless receiving a so-calle...

What was the Swedish ”docent grade”? In a new article in Minerva, @isakhammar.bsky.social and I explore evaluative cultures in the history of the humanities: link.springer.com/article/10.1... This will be part of an upcoming special issue on the history of peer review in the humanities.

Colin Burrow · Let custards quake: Satire without the Jokes To think of a satirist as a person who angrily turns against a gale-force wind and sprays liquefied shit at a group of...

‘Satire can be a powerful agent of those wider, slower forms of political and social change, though when measured against the immediate political intentions of its authors it can seem as though it has achieved nothing at all.’

Colin Burrow on satire: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Today, August 19, the sixth annual Summer School in the History of Knowledge opens. Over the next four days, an international group of 20 Ph.D. candidates and early career researchers will gather in Lund for seminars and discussions.

Thank you, @bjornlundberg.bsky.social, for coordinating this!

AGAINST AI

teachers!

excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone.

take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE
against-a-i.com

Don’t Believe What AI Told You I Said The chatbots are lying about me.

I wrote about how AI chatbots are pumping out fake quotes, attributed to real people, at scale, and polluting our public disourse with potemkin pontification and made-up appeals to authority. And the AIs are not just misquoting famous people—it happened to me and it could happen to you. Gift link:

I think we’re on the cusp of mass attempts to automate teaching, and I also think it is going to be a massive wasteful failure in ways that will make the “learning loss” of the pandemic look like a speed bump next to a mountain.