iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Louise @selkies.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Is this a good time to mention that in college my History of Translation lecturer (Michael Cronin) told us that one of the first vernacular translations of The Illiad was into Irish, and the translator had to give the main characters dogs because in Gaelic society a free man had a dog

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Eoin Price @eoinprice.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Reading Emily Wilson's review of Nolan's Odyssey (which I have not yet seen) reminds me of the discourse around Thomas Heywood's spectacle Red Bull plays in the 17th century. Like Nolan, Heywood took on Greek myths & was accused of favouring noise & spectacle over supposedly literary qualities.

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Jess Zimmerman @jesszimmerman.com · 24/07/2026

I can’t believe it took me this long into the Odyssey discourse to think to post this but… if you loved the Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis and you also love stuff Elon Musk would consider too woke, have I got a book for you

penguinrandomhouse.com

Women and Other Monsters by Jess Zimmerman: 9780807055540 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

A fresh cultural analysis of female monsters from Greek mythology, and an invitation for all women to reclaim these stories as inspiration for a more wild, more “monstrous” version of feminism...

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Book Post @bookpostusa.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Christopher Nolan cited Emily Wilson's @wwnorton.com translation of #TheOdyssey as the inspiration for his adaptation. Read Book Post's Diary on the translation by @laurakolb.bsky.social free to non-subscribers for a limited time: books.substack.com/p/diary-laur... #TheOdyssey2026

books.substack.com

Diary: Laura Kolb, “Sing, Notes”

Venturing into the Iliad with new students and Emily Wilson’s notes

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michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

I love the opening line of The Odyssey, “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip”

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michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

sometimes i like to share a new poem instead of trying to get it published somewhere. i've been published in all the places i wanted to be published when i was young, so who cares. anyway, hope you like this, loosely inspired by the shijing

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Laura Kolb @laurakolb.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Well now I, too, am mad about the Odyssey movie

Screenshot of showtime details, reading, “ Butt Kicker: Enhanced with Buttkicker® Recliners - experience every seat-shaking moment”

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Laura Kolb @laurakolb.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Well now I, too, am mad about the Odyssey movie

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Matthew Harrison @matthewharrison.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

I have been remiss in promoting this Shakespeare Association seminar, called Close-Reading Now, that @laurakolb.bsky.social and I are running next April. We're gathering folks who want to delve deep into particular poems. (They made me cut the line banning all abstract theoretical discussion.)

Close Reading Now
Matthew P. Harrison
(West Texas A&M University)
Laura Kolb
(Stony Brook University)
What does close reading mean for early
modernists? How does it make meaning,
particularly now? This seminar invites
papers that develop close readings
of individual early modern poems.
Participants will engage the nuances
of each other's practice, with broader
methodological discussion emerging
from the details of our work.

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Surprised Eel Historian, PhD @greenleejw.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

Several years ago, on a whim, I started drawing a map of an eel's life travels as seen by the eel. I figured an eel thinks about its life as a linear journey, rather than a there-and-back again adventure. So I wanted to do a map to reflect this. This morning, on another whim, I finished the map!

A long, skinny map titled: "Life and Travels of the European Eel" with a subtitle reading: "From the Eel's Perspective." A label at the bottom of the map reads: "Begin Here." The map top half of the map is an mirror copy of the bottom half.

I will put the full text of the column in the alt text in an image in the next post in the thread.

The map goes from the bottom of the page up, starting in the Sargasso Sea. An set of arrows show the eels paths to shore, then up a river and into a marshland. The arrows continue up the page to show the eel leaving the marshland and heading back downstream, and out to sea. The land is green and verdant at the bottom of the map, because the eels migrate upstream in the spring. The land is brown and dry at the top of the map, because eels migrate downstream in the autumn.

A column of text on the side tells about the eels' journeys and changes. It is more text than I can relate in the space allowed here. Each paragraph has an arrow pointing up to the next one, and they are designed to be read from the bottom of the page going upwards.

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Tom Rutter @obscuredrama.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Please repost: Can you recommend a piece of writing (by you or anyone else) that sets out to make the writer's research in early modern lit/culture accessible to a general readership? I mean Conversation-type stuff but not necessarily The Conversation.

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Super Nintendo Chalmers @snchalmers.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

The ides of March has the chance to do the funniest thing ever

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Matthew Harrison @matthewharrison.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

just learned that my piece on teaching Shakespeare at WTAMU is out in Borrowers and Lenders: on sounding country, Shakespeare voice, and the shame of trying. borrowers-ojs-azsu.tdl.org/borrowers/ar...

borrowers-ojs-azsu.tdl.org

View of Borderlands Shakespeare and the Sustaining Strategies of Collaboration | Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

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Matthew Harrison @matthewharrison.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

My department at West Texas A&M is hiring a creative writer (with a Ph. D. required). Please encourage anyone you know who might be interested to apply. I'm also glad to answer any questions that anyone might have. Job listing here: tamus.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/WTAMU_Extern...

tamus.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com

Assistant/Associate Professor of English

Job TitleAssistant/Associate Professor of English Agency West Texas A&M University Department English, Philosophy & Modern Languages Proposed Minimum SalaryCommensurate Job LocationCanyon, Tex...

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Megan Heffernan @thecompass.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

If you’re as incensed as everyone at DePaul is about the closing of the university art museum, consider signing this letter. Thanks for the support! openletter.earth/letter-oppos...

openletter.earth

Letter Opposing the Closing of DPAM

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michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

new poem, "Altogether Elsewhere," in new issue of The Sewanee Review thesewaneereview.com/articles/alt... (1/2)

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matthew schratz @mattschratz.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

celebrate valentine's day by reading this thing i wrote last year about geoffrey chaucer: shooktownreview.substack.com/p/parliament...

shooktownreview.substack.com

Parliament Fowladelic

I apologize for the title

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Zachary Lesser @zacharylesser.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

This will warm any annotator’s heart

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Laura Kolb @laurakolb.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

Last semester, I got very excited about one endnote, then ALL the endnotes, in Wilson’s Iliad. Then @bookpostusa.bsky.social gave me the chance to write about them: books.substack.com/p/diary-laur...

books.substack.com

Diary: Laura Kolb, “Sing, Notes”

Venturing into the Iliad with new students and Emily Wilson’s notes

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Book Post @bookpostusa.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

New Post → Laura Kolb on the joy of great annotations hitting their mark and the stellar marksmanship in a translation of The Iliad. books.substack.com/p/diary-laur... @wwnorton.com @laurakolb.bsky.social

books.substack.com

Diary: Laura Kolb, “Sing, Notes”

Venturing into the Iliad with new students and Emily Wilson’s notes

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Stephanie Insley Hershinow @sinsleyh.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Question re: accreditation site visits for departments. Are your institutions doing these online now? In person again? Curious what these are looking like these days. (Also welcoming answers from those who serve on eval teams.)

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Equiton Press @equiton.net · 23/01/2026

It was used as a fortune-book. It was custom to write the professions of their future possible husbands in the margins, and then 'flip the pages' and then see what came out.

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David Atkinson @davidatkinsonpoet.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

This from Meadowlands, which uses the Odyssey as a conceit to tell the story of deteriorating marriage. There are 3 broken hearts There is the detachment of not taking sides, but also the detachment of time – the speaker looking back as an adult and seeing things differently #poetry #poemoftheday

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Beth Skwarecki @bethskw.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Fortune teller game? Open the book to a random page to play? (I’m thinking of how we’d play MASH with types of houses and occupations of husbands)

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Laura Kolb @laurakolb.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Yesterday, nearing the end of a magical library fellowship, I called up The Rules of Civility, a conduct book written originally in French but very popular in Restoration England. Curiously someone has written “A Tanner” in the right-hand margin…

Title page of The Rules of Civility, printed in London in 1685. In the right-hand margin, “a tanner” has been written in ink

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matthew schratz @mattschratz.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

I wrote a B-Side at Public Books, about Lydia Millet's great Oh Pure and Radiant Heart--enjoy!

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British Association for Local History @balhnews.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Join us next week to learn about how an Atlas of London in 1666 has been researched! This webinar is in collaboration with the Historic Towns Trust @historictownstrust.bsky.social Find out more: www.balh.org.uk/event-balh-r... #WeAreLocalHistory #LocalHistoryForAll

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András Kiséry @andrask.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

I was so happy to be in Reps that I forgot to brag about it here. The book trade, their catalogs, and how they made literature. First stab at something that is part of a bigger project. Abstract below, dm for pdf if you don’t have access.

online.ucpress.edu

Useless BooksBooksellers’ Catalogs, Puritans, and Our Categories of Literature

The catalog is a technology that mediates access to books and also mediates its users’ cultural categories. In a 1657 catalog, the bookseller William London effectively created a category for what we ...

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Daniel Bellingradt @dbellingradt.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

“Graham Granger, a student in the school’s film and performing arts program, came upon some AI-generated art by MFA student Nick Dwyer and promptly ate it in protest.”

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Kit Whitfield - fantasy writer @kitwhitfield.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Had an intriguing editorial discussion recently: how did people in the past talk about 'minutes' when they didn't have watches or standardised times? How does that affect your thinking? Come down an Elizabethan/Jacobean rabbit hole with me. 1/

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Dave Hershinow @dhersh.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Well, color me gobsmacked, I got an NEH grant! tinyurl.com/3a37thbk

tinyurl.com

NEH Announces $75.1 Million for 84 Humanities Projects

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Book Post @bookpostusa.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Book curses! Great little blog post by Kait Astrella on these maledictions for the Morgan Library. One guy offers this book "with joyful heart in order that it may be an expiration for all sins committed by him. May he who steals it suffer violent bodily pains.” www.themorgan.org/blog/curses-...

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English Literary Renaissance @elrjournal.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

We have been remiss, absent, and not here, but, for your belated consideration: Our last issue of 2025 was a special issue guest edited by @laurakolb.bsky.social and Jessica Rosenberg entitled "Comic Epistemologies." Go read! (And see TOC in next posts). www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/elr/curr...

journals.uchicago.edu

English Literary Renaissance | Vol 55, No 3

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michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

They were always going to kill someone. I think we all felt that was inevitable. But the guy shouting, in the immediate aftermath, "You gonna murder someone else? You can't kill us all, Nazis!" has it right. "Where there is power, there is resistance" is as close to a law as one finds in history

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Laura Kolb @laurakolb.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

In the past month two essays of mine on Measure for Measure have appeared in the world. They are very different & politely act like they don’t know each other. One is in this (fabulous-looking) issue of Shakespeare Studies

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(Dr.) Diana Henderson @dianahenderson.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Delighted the new year brings (at last!) vol. 53 of Shakespeare Studies to the world, in all its purple-edged glory: Marlowe stars in the Forum, & the NGP, Articles & Reviews all full of wit & wisdom. Congratulations to Jim Siemon for 11 years of leadership, w/ huge gratitude for our collaboration!

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Matthew Harrison @matthewharrison.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

My son asked me tonight (after her appearance in bedtime stories for a year or two) whether @laurakolb.bsky.social really studies Shakespeare (yes) and whether she really trains seagulls to perform the plays (i think no).

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Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

A story Stoppard told several times, in several places:

"Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water — the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view.
And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone.

"When you look up the stage directions, it says, 'Exit Ariel.”

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Reina Hardy @reina.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

Gorgeous looking student production of "Glassheart" at USC! www.instagram.com/modernminori...

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Anna E. Clark @annaeclark.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

I wrote about the divide between high school and college English, and what we might do to bridge it, for @publicbooks.bsky.social—part of an excellent roundtable on higher ed under Trump organized by @dennismhogan.bsky.social www.publicbooks.org/toward-the-h...

publicbooks.org

Toward the Higher- and Secondary-Ed Alliance! - Public Books

The influence of K-12 policy and pedagogy on higher ed can perhaps be seen best in the trickle-up effect of the standards of the Common Core.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

If you are a supporter and reader of @contingent-mag.bsky.social one of the biggest things you can do to help us at the moment is get this CFP to the NTT folks in your life. The fracturing of social media has made it very difficult to get the word out esp. to adjuncts and VAPs.

contingentmagazine.org

CFP: A Time of Monsters

The monster has been here all along. It is a historical constant that manifests in wildly different ways across time, place, and culture. Whatever form it takes, the monster claws at categories; it un...

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Brodie Waddell @brodiewaddell.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

Who did what in early modern England? New #OpenAccess book, 'The Experience of Work in Early Modern England' by @jwhittle.bsky.social, @markhailwood.bsky.social, @hkrobb.bsky.social & @aucointaylor.bsky.social, based on thousands of #EarlyModern court depositions 🗃️ Read it: doi.org/10.1017/9781...

This book applies the innovative work-task approach to the history of work, which captures the contribution of all workers and types of work to the early modern economy. Drawing on tens of thousands of court depositions, the authors analyse the individual tasks that made up everyday work for women and men, shedding new light on the gender division of labour, and the ways in which time, space, age and marital status shaped sixteenth and seventeenth-century working life. Combining qualitative and quantitative analysis, the book deepens our understanding of the preindustrial economy, and calls for us to rethink not only who did what, but also the implications of these findings for major debates about structural change, the nature and extent of paid work, and what has been lost as well as gained over the past three centuries of economic development. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Cover of Whittle, Jane, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb, and Taylor Aucoin. The Experience of Work in Early Modern England. of Cambridge Studies in Economic History - Second Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.

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Laura Kolb @laurakolb.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

I have been browsing AL Daily ever since I discovered the joy—the necessity—of wasting time on the internet at my sad, gray, post-college office job. And now look! 2003 me would be proud

A screenshot of the Arts and Letters Daily home page, including the following text: “Oct 1 2025: Mary Carleton, the German Princess, charged with bigamy and theft, was a sensation in 1660s London.
More than 500 people visited her in jail”

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Cristina León Alfar, PhD 🐈🎭📚🌻💃🏻🐈‍⬛ @cristinalalfar.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

The English Department at Hunter College, CUNY is very happy to announce a Tenure Track position in #Medieval British Literature at the Assistant Professor level. Applications from scholars in interdisciplinary and/or global approaches are especially encouraged to apply. cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...

cuny.jobs

Jobs | City University of New York

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 29/09/2025

YES! THIS on GenAI! Please read this absolutely splendid piece of writing that had me cheering, a little bit weepy, and writing in the margins: "An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."

nplusonemag.com

Large Language Muddle | The Editors

The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

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Reina Hardy @reina.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

How old is the Phantom of the Opera supposed to be? Get into the weeds with me and Lord Andy on Phantom age gap discourse: open.substack.com/pub/reinahar...

open.substack.com

Phantom Age Gap Discourse

What lies between an ingenue and an Opera Ghost?

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