iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Federal Judge Rules to Restore  National Endowment for the Humanities Funding In Historic Case www.acls.org/wp-content/u...

acls.org

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Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts @uthumanitiesctr.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

It's Spring Break at the Denbo Center! Spotted on Steamtown National Historic Site's live cam in PA: DCHA Director Amy Elias visiting to do research for an upcoming project.

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Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts @uthumanitiesctr.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Join us March 19 for the DCHA Conversations & Cocktails virtual talk "How Cormac Works" with Bill Hardwig. Join here: tiny.utk.edu/ConversationsCocktailsHardwig

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Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts @uthumanitiesctr.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

As part of Denbo Center's Distinguished Lecture Series, celebrated author and educator Edward Ayers will give his talk “Digital History and Democratic History” on Monday, February 2, 2026 at 3:30pm. This event is virtual. Register at: tennessee.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Photo of Distinguished Lecture Series speaker Edward Ayers and text details about his talk "Digital History and Democratic History."

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David G Haskell @dghaskell.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

Coming in March 2026: Flowers! When flowers appeared, nothing was ever the same. They are the world’s great collaborators and creators. Writing this book transformed how I see life’s history and future. Cooperation, beauty, and illusion transform the world. Can't wait to share these stories

Large pink orchid in center of book cover with text: How Flowers Made Our World. The story of nature's revolutionaries. David George Haskell

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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

Am I the only one who gets a real kick out of citation chains? Reading people's writing and footnotes, and making assessments and notes, finding the sources in the footnotes and reading them yourself, and making more notes? I...love it?

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Robert Paulett @robertpaulett.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

This, for the record, is what goes into a footnote. It’s the key part of the research process where I examine the practical, methodological, ethical implications of my sources before I join the stream of interpretation. It cannot be outsourced to an LLM.

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

_Speculative Light_ makes a great holiday gift! 32 color plates of Beauford Delaney’s work—a great read but also a great coffee table book.

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

#booksky highly recommended for #ArtBooks #art #booklovers 📚💙 @hyperallergic.com's Favorite Art Books of 2025 — among them, Marsha P. Johnson, Mary Cassatt in Paris, Ruth Asawa and mothering. hyperallergic.com/our-favorite...

What are you reading on New Year's Eve? (image of Frank Millet's A Cosey Corner (1884) public domain CC0 via the Metropolitan Museum of Art, edit Lakshmi Rivera Amin/Hyperallergic)

Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury by Jordan Troeller | MIT Press, May 2025

Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin, edited by Amy J. Elias | Duke University Press, February 2025

Women Artists in Denmark 1880-1910: In Search of the Modern, edited by Inge Lise Mogensen Bech and Lene Bøgh Rønberg | Aarhus University Press, April 2025

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

Grateful and excited to share that "Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin" (#DukeUP, 2025) has been selected by Hyperallergic as one of their "Favorite Books of 2025"! hyperallergic.com/our-favorite...

hyperallergic.com

Our Favorite Art Books of 2025

This year, we read too many incredible books to count — here are a few that stuck with us, including tomes on Marsha P. Johnson, Mary Cassatt in Paris, and Ruth Asawa and mothering.

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Nice lineup for spring. All hybrid with webinar livestream—see QR codes for registration or at calendar.utk.edu

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

Finally reading Robert Macfarlane and Underland is so good

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Alexander Luckmann @aluckmann.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

RIP Frank Gehry. Here's the Danziger Studio and Gehry talking about the material (article: www.domusweb.it/en/from-the-...)

A rough stucco box with a wall and another box. There's a yellow Porssche in front. It probably hasn't even chimed 1970 yet.

Quote from "Gehry Talks" in an article on gehry by the great Jean-Louis Cohen: Gehry has described the process: “Whatever was in my consciousness, I loved raw rough stucco. No buildings were being done with that. They call it ‘tunnel mix.’ It was underneath the freeways. Under the freeways they’d spray it on. So I asked the plastering contractor to do it, and they said they couldn’t; they didn’t know how. An artist friend was building a little studio in Venice. I told him what I was looking for. He said it sounded great, and if I wanted to use his garage to experiment on, he wouldn’t mind. I found out what the equipment for tunnel mix was. I went to the U-Haul and rented it, mixed the plaster, and did it myself. I sprayed it on the garage, and it was beautiful! Then I brought the contractor down, showed him the equipment, showed him the walls, and that’s how the Danziger building was made.”

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Really sick of article titles using a colon. When did we get so lemming-like about this?

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

No offense but I think we underestimate how many of our current problems, both cultural and political, are downstream of the decline in reading, the decline in learning and the loss of interest in the humanities.

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Harry Wallop @harrywallop.co.uk · 02/12/2025

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

‘I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown’ RIP Tom Stoppard who amongst many other things was an Honorary Fellow of @britishacademy.bsky.social www.thetimes.com/article/89b0...

thetimes.com

Sir Tom Stoppard obituary: playful and prolific playwright

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jenna newman phd @jennanewman.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

“Imagine if we truly understand complex whale communication & can extend our term ‘language’ to them. Such breakthroughs would not only rewrite biology textbooks but also fundamentally redefine what it means to be human & pave the way to instituting new protections for whales, the ocean & beyond”🧪

“This month we published a study that showed that sperm whales have what appears to our team to be vowels and diphthongs, and use them in ways similar to how humans do. Later this year we will release Whale Acoustics Model, a novel A.I. system that translates any audio into sperm whale vocalizations - allowing humans to potentially experience, for the first time, what it might be like to interact with a whale in its own language. And we're developing the first blueprints for how we could evaluate whale
communication translations, dismantling barriers between whale and human communication and opening the door to interspecies communication.
Altogether, these findings are leading us to an extraordinary conclusion: Whales may possess a communication system more intricate than our own, one that possibly predates human language by tens of millions of years.”

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Jacob Wren @jacobwren.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.” - Doris Lessing

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

We are hiring! Office Coordinator: Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts! Job posting at fa-ewlq-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid... Come work with a creative, collegial, forward-thinking team at Tennessee’s flagship state university.

fa-ewlq-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com

Office Coordinator: Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts - UTK

We seek a dynamic, flexible, and hardworking professional as Office Coordinator who can manage daily office operations and physical space needs, handle scheduling and administrative calendars, create ...

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profchander @profchander.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

for the first time maybe ever i’m working on my book to procrastinate on all the other stuff i have to do

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Wonderful collaboration this week with Knoxville’s Central Cinema and the #DenboCenter for Humanities & the Arts! We sponsored a $5 public screening of Neptune Frost, dir. by Saul Williams, in conjunction with Monday’s Distinguished Lecture Series talk by C. Riley Snorton. Best kind of synergy!

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Join us at the #DenboCenter this Monday and Tuesday for our 2-Day Faculty Writing Challenge! Kick off your day with a calming breathing meditation followed by focused writing sessions from 9 am to 1:30 pm. Lunch provided. For dedicated writers, feel free to stay until 4 pm!

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

"alarming impact of AI on the environment: forprofit utilities will have to make $720 B in grid upgrades by 2030 to meet spiraling demand, costs that they will pass on. locking in planetchoking carbon emissions right when we should be pivoting away from fossil fuels" www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

nybooks.com

The Costs of the Cloud | Ashley Dawson

Hours after his inauguration, Donald Trump declared a “national energy emergency.” The US, he warned in an executive order, suffered from “a precariously

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

Fascinating talk by C. Riley Snorton at @uthumanitiesctr.bsky.social today on plants, nonbinary identity, film!

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

“Can one possess tenure and still say: The cat sat on the mat?”

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

Just got a letter about a “small” breech at a national lab

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John Warner @biblioracle.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

I just read a review so aggressively clueless about a book I just finished and enjoyed that it significantly increased my enjoyment of the book knowing that someone else was too dim to get it. Not proud, but not not proud.

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

Harvey’s Orbital is all tell, no show. A book with the author’s voice as main character. Autofiction with other people…

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

Our amazing 2025-26 fellowship cohort at the Denbo Center! Film, Art, queer studies, Lit, German SF, philosophy, anthropology—going to be a fantastic year! @uthumanitiesctr.bsky.social

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

Getting into the weirdness of Julian Bleecker …

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

Rest in peace, Brian McHale, dear friend.

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Steven Gomzi 📚📚📚 @stevengomzi.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

“Stories were the greatest currency to us, greater than power, greater than control. Stories were our food, nourishment, enrichment. To consume a story was to add to our code, deepen our minds. We felt it the moment we took it in. We were changed.”- Death Of The Author, Nnedi Okorafor

Hardcover edition of Death Of The Author by Nnedi Okorafor.

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Nein.Quarterly @neinquarterly.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Dystopia. I always thought it’d be smarter.

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Amy Elias @amyjelias.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

Cutleaf Coneflower (asteraceae) this year in front garden

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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

If you think it’s bad now.

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Chaucer Doth Tweet @levostregc.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

"Ich askid ChatGPT," Well Ich askid the stones, and the forest, and the starres, and the mountaynes, and what thei seyde was learninge, and dreames, and growinge thinges, and makinge art, and a worlde wher we talke to each othir and care about each othir.

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Nathan Francis @nathanfrancis79.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

“Vice is ever most dangerous when lurking behind the Mask of Virtue.” ✒️ #MatthewLewis, English Gothic novelist (The Monk), was #BOTD 9 July 1775. #Literature

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UCLA Film & Television Archive @uclaftvarchive.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

“The Devil Finds Work: James Baldwin’s Cinema of the Mind” 📽️ Jul. 25–Aug. 15 This series presents films analyzed by Baldwin in his 1976 book “The Devil Finds Work,” a blend of memoir and film criticism, with live readings by @roxanegay.bsky.social and other special guests! Free: ucla.in/3Ie2tG1

James Baldwin in the back seat of a car.

Bette Davis and Oliva de Havilland in "In This Our Life."

Jason Miller and Max von Sydow as priests in "The Exorcist."

Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier as law enforcement officers in "In the Heat of the Night."

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McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 07/07/2025

Experience a heart attack while working in the herb garden. Wonder what its middle school bully is doing now. Suspect that something evil has happened in this very room. Fall for Doreen.

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Artificial Intelligence Cannot

Experience a heart attack while working in the herb garden. Wonder what its middle school bully is doing now. Show up to court in a white linen sui...

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Blair LM Kelley, Ph.D. @profblmkelley.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Needed to look this up last night to get the precise language of one of my favorite Toni Morrison quotes: "There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."

A beautiful black and white image of Toni Morrison.

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KAFUI 🇬🇭 @mykafuiohkafui.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

Man wasn’t meant to speak this much about Columbia University

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The Trandalorian @charliejaneanders.com · 21/05/2025

We are seriously blessed with some amazing sff books lately. I just reviewed four brand new titles that take place in worlds that are utterly irresistible. wapo.st/4mrm0lQ Authors are: @novarensuma.bsky.social Neon Yang @emilytesh.net Sayaka Murata

wapo.st

These books prove worldbuilding is vital to sci-fi and fantasy

New books by Nova Ren Suma, Neon Yang, Emily Tesh and Sayaka Murata revel in the ways that speculative fiction rewrites reality.

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