Mid Theory Collective

I submitted my book Domestic Denial: Terror, Race, and Home in Literature After 9/11 for peer review today! It's under contract with @uminnpress.bsky.social. I'm super stoked that this whole process is chugging along!

This is good!
I'm really interested in [perceived] "misalignments" between genre and content, especially around reps of disability in genre texts. I approach this by "defining" genres in terms of characteristic affects, but I like @mjkeran.bsky.social's approach too.

One thing about me is that I will never shut up about genre

Generic Guarantees How do we face a generic crisis, a sense—a dread—that a subject exceeds the bounds of the genre that seeks to contain it? In retrospect, the generic crisis of the film It Ends With Us (2024) was ea…

Molly Keran on Colleen Hoover, Jennifer Crusie, contemporary romance, and what happens when genres get adventures.
mid-theory.com/2025/07/29/g...

Story Bored What happens if we are never bored? Boredom is a thoroughly modern feeling; or rather, one etymologically contiguous with modernity. The noun did not enter the language until the middle of the nine…

For MTC, Daniel Fraser thinks about boredom's potential both narratologically and politically.

"Boredom is a universal motor and product of social being in capitalism, yet its formal make-up contains a (negatively felt) kernel of the future."

mid-theory.com/2025/07/24/s...

The first one went so well that MTC will be running two more of these workshops over the summer. Sign up here: mid-theory.com/mtc-writing-...

My piece on the dynamics of contemporary boredom for the excellent @mid-theory.bsky.social:

this essay is one of my absolute favorites we published this summer’ come for the white lotus recap, stay for the walter benjamin reference, leave with historical materialist defense of staying in board and feeling time. after all. “boredom returns as communal rhythm”
mid-theory.com/2025/07/24/s...

Story Bored What happens if we are never bored? Boredom is a thoroughly modern feeling; or rather, one etymologically contiguous with modernity. The noun did not enter the language until the middle of the nine…

For MTC, Daniel Fraser thinks about boredom's potential both narratologically and politically.

"Boredom is a universal motor and product of social being in capitalism, yet its formal make-up contains a (negatively felt) kernel of the future."

mid-theory.com/2025/07/24/s...

Mid Medieval: Romantasy, Heteropessimism, and History We can’t seem to get ahead, and we can’t get off either. Romantasy, a mash-up of romance and fantasy, is one of the hottest subgenres in romance today. If you have just woken from a year…

Emily Lynell Edwards reads the proliferation of Romantasy in contemporary literature. "Romantasy does not bother with political economy any more than it bothers with indoor plumbing."

mid-theory.com/2025/07/18/m...

My latest banger!! How does Romantasy play into fascist aesthetics? Is the single bed at the inn related to an under discussed feudal economy? Can shadow daddies be woke?? Stay tuned 👇👇👇

Mid Medieval: Romantasy, Heteropessimism, and History We can’t seem to get ahead, and we can’t get off either. Romantasy, a mash-up of romance and fantasy, is one of the hottest subgenres in romance today. If you have just woken from a year…

Emily Lynell Edwards reads the proliferation of Romantasy in contemporary literature. "Romantasy does not bother with political economy any more than it bothers with indoor plumbing."

mid-theory.com/2025/07/18/m...

Our second meeting on Praiseworthy is this afternoon, July 2, @5pm ET Today we will cover pages 150-337, “The Censer” and “Moth Opera.” You are, of course, welcome to join even if you are not caught up with our reading schedule! Sign up below for zoom link.
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I am once again asking you to read Mark's book. I meant it!

‘Stress Positions’ and on Queer Millennial Decline If Stress Positions is taking the pulse, mood, and outlook of LGBTQ social worlds today, its prognosis is rather bleak. Stress Positions, the 2024 dramedy co-written, directed by, and starring Thed…

For MTC, Sean Donovan (@theseanmdonovan.bsky.social) revisits Theda Hammel's pandemic indie STRESS POSITIONS and the leftovers of rainbow liberalism.

mid-theory.com/2025/06/24/s...

Deadline extended! TEACHING 21st CENTURY LITERATURE calls for short essays of avid, teching-oriented criticism. CFP:
call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/04/...

‘Stress Positions’ and on Queer Millennial Decline If Stress Positions is taking the pulse, mood, and outlook of LGBTQ social worlds today, its prognosis is rather bleak. Stress Positions, the 2024 dramedy co-written, directed by, and starring Thed…

For MTC, Sean Donovan (@theseanmdonovan.bsky.social) revisits Theda Hammel's pandemic indie STRESS POSITIONS and the leftovers of rainbow liberalism.

mid-theory.com/2025/06/24/s...

We are so delighted to introduce our first cohort of contributing writers—critics and thinkers who exemplify the spirit of what we want MTC to be. We are grateful for their work and thrilled to have them on board as we continue to grow and evolve!

My article on commutes and film is one of my favorite things I wrote last year and I'm so grateful to the Mid Theory team (esp @bakaari.bsky.social) for creating this space and for including me in this incredibly cool cohort.

I remember having a conversation with @mattseybold.bsky.social less than a year ago about how some of the great accessible academic writing venues of the last decade had lost a bit of their pop and sparkle, and then shortly after that these guys drove Mid Theory onto the scene at 100 miles an hour.

Thank you, Andy for always been so supportive and wonderful <3

Nowhere Men: Pop Music and the Waning of Character It is as if to escape the curdling of character, pop music has to get either too close to or too far from the listener. It was the year of the blues lawyer, the himbo, the boogeyman, the main pop g…

And last but not least is Mitch Therieau (@mitchtherieau.bsky.social), an indomitable critic and a founding member of MTC. He wrote the pragmatic piece on "mid culture" and most recently the question of character study in contemporary pop music.
mid-theory.com/2025/03/18/n...

Commuter Cinema Repetition, of course, may be dull, but it is also one of the surest signs of conviction COVID’s normalization of work from home—and the clear divide between the remote worker and the worker that c…

Charline Jao is a scholar of 19th-century American literature, although her interests and talents span centuries and genres. Here she is writing about recent cinema that contends with our declining relationship with transit.
mid-theory.com/2024/10/23/c...

History Uncapitalized: A Review of Joseph Andras’s ‘Faraway the Southern Sky’ This is not just a story about a man called Nguyễn, or a man called Andras who researched his movements in Paris in the years 1917-23, but a story about you, about your relation to revolutionary ac…

You can read Matthew Beeber's review of Joseph Andras’s recent book, Faraway the Southern Sky, translated from the French by Simon Leser here:
mid-theory.com/2024/12/05/h...

People of the Sun By forging lasting relationships between the United States and Mexico, between Mexican-Americans and indigenous Mexicans, RATM left behind a legacy beyond their discography. Sitting in a barren off…

Jordan Baldridge is a practicing musician and critic. You can read his piece revisiting the legacy of Rage Against the Machine here: mid-theory.com/2024/12/10/p...

On Nakba Time: A Conversation with Omar Khalifah For this old man, the only thing that matters — whether it’s ‘48 or ‘49 or ‘56 or ‘91 — is that Palestine is lost. Palestine is no longer so. Why do you even want to hear more details, when this is…

Omid Bagherli latest for MTC included an interview with the Palestinian writer Omar Khalifah on his latest novel the Sand-Catcher and the challenges of giving literary form to Nakba Time.
mid-theory.com/2025/03/06/o...

Mourning On-Demand: Digital Afterlife Services and Lamentation Economics When the dead become avatars for the living they are always present, but as on-demand services rather than messy intrusions, as applications to open or close.  Last year your mother died–now, she’s…

You can read their work across all our sections. In January, Sarah Sgro co-wrote a piece on lamentation economics and the services that seek to broker the digital afterlives of the dead.
mid-theory.com/2025/01/08/m...

We are so delighted to introduce our first cohort of contributing writers—critics and thinkers who exemplify the spirit of what we want MTC to be. We are grateful for their work and thrilled to have them on board as we continue to grow and evolve!

The first meeting of Praiseworthy Reading Group will take place TODAY @5pm. Sign up here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Speed Reading the Novel: Reading Dynamics and the Value of Reading at Midcentury Abstract. This essay explores the literary foundations of the mid-twentieth-century speed-reading craze. Focusing on the most popular speed-reading program

I wrote about mid-20th century speed reading and its surprising interest in novel reading. Come for descriptions of how to move your hand down the page to increase your eye span, stay for an argument about speed reading, like close reading, as a defense of human reading in an age of reading machines