Eagan Dean

It's a unicorn job for this printer-scholar and I am beyond excited to be continuing the work I did at @skeuomorphpress.org with @ryancordell.org! I'd love it if folks helped me celebrate by making a donation to support KLP's programing: give.uky.edu/campaigns/47...

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Reparations and the Human

www.dukeupress.edu/reparations-... @dukepress.bsky.social is currently offering a 30% discount on David Eng's "Reparations and the Human" Use this code: E25DLENG

I was very pleased to review @riislover667.bsky.social's gorgeous volume _Feminism Against Cisness_ for @legacy1984.bsky.social . A great step toward trans studies as method and highly accessible for C19 practitioners!

Art Exhibit Mirror, mirror by Auriane Kolodziej Auriane Kolodziej’s artwork will be on display at Le Club de la Sorbonne (galerie Gerson) on Friday 17 October, from 5:30 til 7:00 pm Auriane Kolodziej (bo…

Paris-based artist Auriane Kolodziej will showcase her work during the “Critical Health” conference I’m coorganizing. Find out more about her sculptures and beautiful poetry here: criticalhealthconference.wordpress.com/art-exhibit/
(desktop version recommended)

“Trans people have kitchen tables. People that love trans people have kitchen tables. Immigrants have kitchen tables,” Abughazaleh said. “Democrats have been messaging on this issue, which is basic human decency, wrong this entire time. It’s a two-pronged thing. When it comes to extremism, if you’re constantly ceding ground that trans people don’t deserve to exist, or that there are carve-outs for that … it never stops with the people that you deem inhuman, it will always come to you.”

19thnews.org/2025/09/kat-...

In a scary, chaotic week, I'm feeling grateful for teaching. It's a rare privilege to walk alongside young folks willing to plant their feet and wrestle with hard ideas. The questions my senior thesis/I.S. students want to ask all have to do with justice, community, and connection.

Yes, we learned more about data privacy and got rid of our Alexa, even though it only ever set alarms and kept the grocery list.

A Threads screenshot showing a post by "dcpubliclibrary" which reads "Simple: Getting a library card." responding to a tweet from "threads" asking for life hacks that surprisingly work.

Getting a library card!

When I was 12, on day 2 of rec center tennis camp they demoted me to the under-10s group based on skill. My 10yo brother was, however, promoted to the tween group. This was so normal for me that he didn't even think to tease me about it.

On day 3 I got heat sick and didn't have to go back.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Thank you for the inspiration!

We're especially inspired by Emma Heaney's (@riislover667.bsky.social) collection /Feminism Against Cisness/!

Please submit an abstract of 200-300 words to Eagan Dean and Will Younts by August 10.

Can we look at C19 gender as a rhizome––as a network of people and communities whose gender expressions bloom because of their submerged entanglements? What relationships underlie/are underground to what look like individual expressions of gender?

CFP: Rhizomatic Gender

Cisness, like many forms of normativity, defines itself through rejecting what it constructs as the abnormal. There are also, however, many nineteenth century American stories of entangled figures whose genders arise from shared roots.

CFP: Rhizomatic Gender C19 conference, Cincinnati, OH March 12-14 2026 Cisness, like many forms of normativity, defines itself through rejecting what it constructs as the abnormal. There are also, however, many nineteenth century American stories of entangled figures whose genders arise from shared roots. This era is replete with gender-nonnormative and trans figures who develop their genders in relationship to more normative companions (Woolson’s Felipa and her tourists, Ellen Craft in disguise with her husband,) or enemies (Lillie Blake’s Frank Heywood against Judge Swinton), as well as communities whose gender norms emerge when they embrace a gender rebel (the March sisters and Jo, Hawkeye’s company and David Gamut). It seems as if transness and cisness are always subtending one another. Drawing from new discourses about the co-constitutive nature of cisness and transness, especially Emma Heaney’s Feminism Against Cisness, we invite papers that consider normative and nonnormative genders in relation. Can we look at C19 gender as a rhizome––as a network of people and communities whose gender expressions bloom because of their submerged entanglements? What relationships underlie/are underground to what look like individual expressions of gender? Particularly, how do these relationships develop between trans and non-trans people? How do trans and non-trans people collaboratively develop narratives and self-concepts of gender, including within and across racial dynamics of power? What alliances emerge across cis and trans characters in C19 literature and history? What conditions––material, social, and figural––have allowed for trans life to persist? What can we learn from these stories as teachers and thinkers living in an environment that discourages solidarity with trans people?

Topics papers might address include: The roles of trans characters/episodes of gender nonconformity in the bildungsroman. The prevalence of minor trans characters and the significance and/or function of their minorness. Constructions of cisness/normativity that embrace rather than reject trans characters (and the potential/pitfalls of this sort of inclusion). How such relationships challenge a cis/trans distinction. White supremacy’s role in such distinctions. Clandestine networks of care forged across a seeming cis/trans binary. Interracial solidarity (and its failures) in constructing gender. Strange, unwieldy, or baffling means of describing both cis and transgender. Embodiment and lived experience as gender’s locus. The challenges of trans historiography in American literature. The role of artificiality (especially fiction) in constructing trans and non-trans alike. Please submit an abstract of 200-300 words to Eagan Dean (eagan.dean@stanford.edu) and Will Younts (wyounts@vols.utk.edu) by August 10.

CFP in C19 trans studies for @c19americanists.bsky.social 2026 conference!

#C192026 #transstudies #c19

A big WHOOPS—and congratulations—to Elizabeth James, who co-wrote "Methodologies for Exploring Unknown Archives." Our social media coordinator missed the fact that James was the Recovery Hub consultant for the Woman's Literary Club of Baltimore Digital Archive. Great work, Elizabeth! #academicsky

You can read more about the #CriticalHealth conference on the @fullersociety.bsky.social website: margaretfullersociety.org/conferences/...

🤝my husband and I after our 8 hours of weekly commuting ft. Trixie & Katya

(mostly addressing the cat)

A screenshot from the article. Above, two photos of people looking at boxes and papers in a storage area, one with short gray hair and the other with long black hair. The text reads, Figure 3: Bridge work (photographs by Mich Ling, 2023). Emily and I in Merle’s garage. Reproduced by permission of Merle Woo. Looking for Merle is an archiving project full of contradiction; it bridges the personal and the collective, the embodied and the digital, the grassroots and the institutional, the past and the present, the radical and the reformist. An organizer works not only to critique and dismantle systems but also to build alternative ones. This process inevitably produces new kinds of contradictions that we then work to resolve. Bridge work is about building shared analysis and strategic action, or about navigating the space between the two. In this sense, to do bridge work is to move through contradiction with an ethics of accountability, care, and generosity

A screenshot of a poster, reading: 'WOMEN AGAINST RACISM ANNUAL CONFERENCE THE POLITICS OF COLOR APRIL 10-12, 1987 Speakers: Winona LaDuke, Toni Cade Bambara, Merle Woo, Ricky Sherover-Marcuse In Concert: Sweet Honey In The Rock For more information, contact the Women Against Racism Committee at Women's Resource and Action Center, The University of Iowa, 130 N. Madison, Iowa City, Iowa 52242, 319/335-1486. Caption reads, Figure 5: The Politics Color (photograph by Mich Ling, 2023), a flyer for Women Against Racism' annual conference in 1987 from Merle's papers. Reprinted by permission of Merle Woo.'

"This article does not argue that archiving is inherently radical, but rather that archiving collaboratively, and with a queer of color feminist ethic of care, is a kind of bridge work...[which] is organizing in that it embraces contradiction: the 'both/and." www.scholarlyediting.org/issues/42/lo...

What happens to the archives of our feminist elders? Walk alongside scholar Mich Ling as they work with Merle Woo--a contributor to /This Bridge Called My Back/ and an Ethnic Studies vanguard--to organize, analyze, and preserve her records.

People gathered in a large well-appointed lobby behind an easel with a placard featuring a photo and words that are too small to be deciphered.

Congratulations to Vassar Historian and head of Vassar Archives and Special Collections, Prof. Ron Patkus, who just received the AAVC's Outstanding Faculty Award.

So well-deserved!

CFP-ACH 2025 Special Session #166: What the NEH ODH has Inspired After the dismantling of the National Endowment for the Humanities, how do we move forward? From 1965 to 2025, the NEH was the nation's largest public funder of the humanities. In the noise of this m...

If the dismantling of the ODH has impacted your work, sign up to give a lightning talk during the "What the NEH/ODH has Inspired Session" by Monday, June 9th: bit.ly/ach-inspirat...

I think a lot about how Aaron Swartz committed suicide while facing a probably long jail sentence for download some of JSTOR, but no one at Meta is going to face any repercussions for using all of Libgen to train its AI.

Trump is unleashing anti-trans hysteria onto the world | Moira Donegan The new administration are targeting trans people because they think they can be bullied without great political pushback

I don't know enough about the feminism and porn topic to comment but Donegan is pro-trans

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

In addition to our reading groups, MTC will host a writing workshop on job market materials this summer. First meeting will be June 27th @ 2pm ET. Second meeting first week of August, date TBD. More information: mid-theory.com/mtc-writing-...

Idk, after he sold out trans folks on his podcast it became clear he stood for nothing but electability. sd11.senate.ca.gov/news/senator...

ADD YOUR NAME: Sign the Open Letter in Support of NIH Staff Join the courageous and committed National Institutes of Health (NIH) public servants by adding your name now.

*URGENT* please support NIH research and the NIH employees who are standing up for science at the risk of losing their jobs! Sign *TODAY* in support of the Bethesda Declaration. The senate appropriations committee is reviewing the NIH budget Tuesday at 10 am. SHARE widely! 🧪