Erica Fretwell
@upstaterica
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good enough professor | The Art of Slight Living, 1900/2000 (in progress) | Sensory Experiments (2020) @DukePress | she her
Joined February 2020
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The masking on subways in Berlin went from the 30% to 95% in the space of a week
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Best student eval to date: "This class was fine but she should have taught more writers." Course title: Our Emily Dickinson
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Once you realize universities are landlords & real estate developers more than educational institutions things really fall into place.
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pleased to announce that my summer was neither productive nor restful
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6yo just invented foucault when he told me "We Don't Talk about Bruno" is still talking about Bruno
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I had an abortion 10 weeks ago. Every pregnant person should have the right to safe, accessible, affordable abortions.
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immediately after taking this photo a german asked if he could take a picture of me as part of his 'americans visiting hegel's grave' project
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honestly it's giving "uchicago faculty"
The jeans are the most unsettling thing about this picture of the pronatalist couple.
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the academic urge to read more as a way to procrastinate writing the damn thing
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So we all agree that the Michigan scandal is that the president of a public university makes a baseline salary of $900k/yr, yes?
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Favorite moment from grad school was in my first year, when on the first day of class we do introductions. Everyone preens & postures, then a german exchange student says she likes tv.
Prof: "You're interested in pop culture studies, media theory?"
Her: "No. I like watching tv."
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Uni closed & preschool canceled, but I refuse to carry the water for a failed state. A hearty NO to the neoliberal imperative to Zoomify pedagogy WHILE "parenting" as a verb. Proudly half-assing both from here on out. Love to all.
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PSA: Don't forget to control+f "pubic" when you get the page proofs.
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@elizphil
It’s aggravating but mainly my concern is that the bullshit of course evaluations actively harms grad and NTT teachers, compounded by race and gender. Good for you for not checking!
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when universities are banning their own jewish studies directors, who's the antisemite?
Breaking: Annelise Orleck, Head of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth, has been banned from Campus for six months after protecting Jewish students protesting for Palestine from police attacks
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“You’re good at Twitter” is such a ruthless thing to say. Cuts to the quick, absolute violence.
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I say this with all sincerity: *not* reading that op-ed is a viable option.
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my kingdom for a sundress that structurally acknowledges that some people *need* to wear bras
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What's your favorite feminist technology? Mine is pockets.
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the thing that most bums me out about neoliberalism is that it forces students to see instructors as either bosses or customer service, when the student-teacher relationship exists entirely outside of those bounds.
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Today it's official! Now to peddle my wares: If you're into the raucous history of psychology, affect theory, C19 literature & culture, and the racial science called aesthetics, you just might dig this book. sending love & positive vibes to all--
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@MollyOShah
I live here too and masking was minimal whenever I took the u-Bahn the past few weeks. We can have different experiences of the same space.
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A baby couldn’t come to us because it couldn’t become so we planted a forsythia in the fall in its memory so that as an early spring bloomer it would blossom about the time it would have arrived. Anyway in early spring the colors dazzle most.
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What's your favorite type of speculative fiction? Mine is the book proposal.
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dept chair ended the final faculty meeting with "Well, this has been a shit year," and honestly it is the best and only way to properly conclude a meeting.
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sorry, have been tweeting & deleting a lot bc so consumed with rage and don't know where to direct it. But it boils down to this: I had long acknowledged that institutions don't love you back. What the pandemic has clarified is that it's worse: institutions hate their employees.
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Happy "oooh now i get to work on *my* work!" season to all the academics who celebrate 😎
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hey guys! if twitter goes down you can find me chained to the wall of a cave, facing a blank wall, where I and a bunch of other folks watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind us.
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fyi, i'm blocking people who response is "but what about the baby's life/ could have been adopted, etc." Not today, misogynists.
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@GerardCoen
Sure! Universities are institutions that are technically non-profit (so don't have to pay taxes) but accumulate lots of $$ from tuition and their endowments (which accrue a lot of interest). Universities apportion their money unevenly: the least goes to student scholarships 1/
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One thing the realtor won’t tell you, but Henry James will, is how much psychological space your house takes up.
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i was an adjunct & gave a paper at MLA. when i return home there's an email from a journal editor who liked my paper and invited me to submit it to the journal once i'd expanded it into an essay. from submission to peer review etc, it was published 1.5 years later.
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Last thing, then i'm off the soapbox: You don't owe anyone your abortion story. Freely choosing to terminate is "reason" enough. Compelling the justification of that choice (i.e., "good" vs "bad" abortion) is how women's, NB & trans people's bodies and personhood are regulated.
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one effect of working at a university that 10 yrs ago more or less stopped hiring TT faculty is dealing with an acutely geriatric faculty body, which is, unsurprisingly, entirely white and male and out of touch with just about everything (but of course talk down to you).
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anthropometry & composite photos get a lot of attention, but galton hand drew people's synesthetic perceptions because he viewed mental life (not just bodily traits) as a metric of racial development. that chart is the book cover:
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Historian's review of literary criticism: This is an argument in search of evidence.
Lit critic's review of history: This is evidence in search of an argument.
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Oh the service tax that comes with being a competent women in your workplace
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I spent my twenties trying to be a person who likes camping. As I ease into my “Zero Fucks Forties” I am here to declare I fucking hate camping.
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1 or 2 job openings in your field is not a market. At this point, “job market” is a euphemism for un(der)employment. Let’s be more precise in our naming practices. 🙏
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90% of what's happening in higher ed is due to corporatization, de-funding, & anti-intellectualism but 10% is the discipline setting impossibly high bars for entry, e.g.,
Asst. Prof job at R1 English dept listing "book ms published or under review" as a requirement.
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My colleagues had a meeting to discuss our by-laws & it devolved into a heated debate about Foucault & I just love how English departments are a parody of themselves
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@GerardCoen
so that the university runs more like a resort than an actual place of education. during the pandemic, dean directly told me we need to in teach in person not bc it serves students better (it doesn't) but bc university wants the room & board money. 4/
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Keeping the Wordle secret is easy: each day simply forget the word within one second of completing the game.
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Is there any historical fact more heavy-handed than that Francis Galton, founder of eugenics, literally invented the dog whistle?
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happy 2 years of a novel virus seizing 'C19' from the soft, buttery hands of a very niche academic subfield
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"slut era" i whisper as i & my cannibal bedmate board a whaling ship docked at Nantuckett
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speaking strictly from personal experience, all i know is that the semester I did away with an "absence policy" about 20% of my class regularly attended, and then I scorched by student evals bc apparently the students didn't learn anything 🤷♀️
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@_alyssacsmith
public uni, R1. hired @ $57k (2013), then union raises & cola bumped up to $70k by 2020. post-tenure raise ($4,500) plus adjustments the union did to address "salary compression" (level salary across race/gender) has me at $76k (no research/conf $). thank god for organized labor.
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@GerardCoen
thing to run is education itself. Most prof's are adjuncts ($4k/class, no health insurance) and those lucky to be tenured don't make that much. So to make more money, universities need students to be living in dorms, eating the cafeteria food, using various services on campus 3/
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the worst part about the university's imperative that humanities collaborate w/ sciences is that we all got into this profession to avoid group projects
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@GerardCoen
NYU is a great example of university-as-real-estate developer. They have amassed so much property that they use not to put back into the community but to charge ever higher room & board $ for students, further driving out longtime residents. So, finally 5/
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@GerardCoen
(nyu is notoriously stingy despite their huge endowment), while the most goes into sports and acquiring property: new construction for ever more expensive dorms and other 'public-private' programs (like suny's homeland security college). From a cost perspective, the cheapest 2/
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@GerardCoen
The university is a corporation that has non-profit status. Education is the least of its concern. The higher tuition $, higher room & board is to amass more wealth for itself by buying more property, building more buildings to then rent out to students or other shops/business.
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spending the summer developing plans to open a sandwich shop called The Ways in 'Wich
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Non-academic CVs are *wild.* Apparently you can just catalog character traits willy-nilly, eg "emotional intelligence," as objective facts and...no one blinks an eye.
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Me, pointing at a Bruegel: So what do you notice about this painting? Does it make you think of anything?
Kid: Busytown!
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Friends, please spread the word: Hsuan Hsu & I are editing a special issue of
@amlitjournal
(
@DukePress
) on "Senses with/out Subjects." Essays due October 4. Would love the opportunity to think with you & learn from you!
More info here:
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sex is great and all, but have you ever read a cultural studies book that *doesn't* have a gerund in the title?
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Criticized by an Historian: A Literary Critic's Memoir
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more importantly, jimmy carter has outlived henry kissinger
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what I am finding out the hard way is that educational institutions are *more* ableist now than they were pre-Covid
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there is a certain type of "feminist" male academic that cultivates relationships with celebrity-caliber women scholars, but wouldntyaknow just so happens to not be able to find time for the women who didn't make it into that select world
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universities protect their investment portfolios--not students, not staff, not free speech-- and only their investment portfolios
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Of all the Moby-Dick gimmicks on the island, this one wins
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Someone finding “I, personally, hate camping” elitist and offensive to unhoused people is peak twitter, 10/10 no notes
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guys, i know everything feels like sh*t but charlie brown xmas is playing tonight on pbs and a bald-headed kid suffering seasonal depression against a jazzy soundtrack is a real salve for the soul
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I simply refuse to acknowledge that 'impactful' is a word.
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I have *felt* 40 since I turned 36, so what I'm celebrating today —my birthday—is the alignment of affective time with the Gregorian calendar!!! 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳
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you'd think after all this time i'd get better at this but no
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Happy 170th Birthday to melville's MOBY-DICK, and Happy 39th Birthday to me! 🐳🎉
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My lasting memory of Duke WGSS was when they hired 2 post-docs, then put out 1 TT job that year so the two women were set against each other from the beginning. (Yes, one got it, the other didn’t.) But lots of speakers invited to talk feminist and queer praxis!
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Found a relic of 1990s suburban girl teendom. Just need to find an Ani DiFranco CD and my youth will have been entirely synched with that of my sisters in law
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humbly propose that for promotion to full professor, my dossier include not a second monograph but instead a compilation of all my email communication with colleagues, administrators, and students.
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it's cringe to be one of those americans who gushes about europe, but it's also beautiful to experience the benefits of a social safety net, e.g. public school has: free lunch for everyone; free aftercare until 6pm (school gets out at 1.30); free care on school holidays. +
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deeply honored to be in the company of so many luminous thinkers, including
@JillCRichards
,
@SarahLWasserman
, and
@edgaresque
-- look forward to celebrating these brilliant first books in november!
Congratulations to Erica Fretwell
@upstaterica
! Sensory Experiments is a finalist for the
@msatweet
First Book Prize. Read the introduction to the book here:
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I love film theory. No field has better sentences than, eg, "By reading Aristotle's theory of skepticism in *Metaphysics* with Leibniz's 'ars formularia' and Derrida's law of genre, we can see how the ontology of the image in *Dude, Where's My Car?* ..."
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@S_Insley_H
@miriamkp
the fellowship world still caters to "the boys club" where husbands can just willy-nilly pick up and live on the other side of the country for a school year while wifey takes care of the kids. it's time to rethink fellowships for dual-income & caretaking households!
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everyone's a climate crisis warrior until some kids throw soup on a van gogh. protest is necessarily uncivil. it's meant to inconvenience the public. it's meant to assault sensibilities. and anyway the painting was protected by glass.
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My summer plan is to do a lot of hard thinking, e.g. how Adam Driver is the cilantro of male attractiveness.
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just wait until Sandra Oh stars in a new show called Method Wars.
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Breaking news: UAlbany dissolving College of Arts & Sciences and School of Ed; renaming itself SUNY-Hustle
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Happy Werewolf Bar Mitzvah Day to all* who celebrate
*American gen x'ers & millennials
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faculty interact most w students, yet our labor & the limits of our power are obscured (students think we're bosses or customer service), so we're the recipients of rightful but misplaced anger. tempted to make the demystification of the univ a first day of class discussion?
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anyone else just breaking down in tears throughout the day because, try as you might to keep your shit together, this is all too much? guys, this is too much. no creature is meant to handle this much violence at once. i'm so sad, so tired.
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this is correct; we say this constantly to admin. but admin doesn't care bc it's a choice they have made, knowing that using majors as a metric produces the data they can then use to justify further under-resourcing of the humanities & social sciences.
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low-key obsessed with this high school teacher's discussion questions (1913) for *Walden*
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excited to transition from bemoaning the writing i didn't do this summer to bemoaning the writing i can't do this fall
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People say the academic monograph is dead; it’s just the intro and a choice chapter that gets read. But when I sent out my book proposal, I promised publishers “All bangers, all the time.”
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🙏
Read the intro to Sensory Experiments by
@upstaterica
freely available here
#LiteraryStudies
#Feminism
#ScienceStudies
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You can’t tell me this wasnt stolen from the 30 Rock writers room
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Friends, what is a good book series (pref fantasy) that isn't H*rry P*tter for a 7 year old?
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if you see me RT'ing a lot of Lauren Berlant homages, it's because grief isn't meant to be metabolized individually
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T/TT fac of course shld pay more for membership & conferences than grads & NTT fac. But I'd encourage societies (C19, MLA, etc) to take a cue from SLSA: *within* T/TT payment tier, differentiate between those who & do not have institutional funding for research & conferences
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The most annoying thing about people who are turning 40 is that they can't stop talking about how they are turning 40. (I am turning 40 this year.)
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i spent saturday thinking about white mob violence - from lynching to the pro-Trump coup - at the nexus of terror & entertainment.
@majortominor
shepherded my ideas to Al Jazeera, and I'm so grateful to be able to share this with you now
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yes my tweets are public, and this was shared in good spirit, but gut-level response to screencapping for FB is that it feels a little, um, violate-y... right?
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Me too! Recently read "The Tell-Tale Heart" under a floorboard.
I’m that guy. I will read Mrs Dalloway in London. The Ambassadors in Paris. I’ll read the Luminaries in New Zealand. I’ve accepted this.
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Typical Sunday question: I am delving into critical phenomenology (Fanon, Beauvoir, IM Young, Grosz, Butler, Ahmed, Muñoz, Sterne). What other thinkers (Black, Black feminist, postcolonial) come to mind re: texturing or interrogating the category of 'lived experience'?
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