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Nathan K. Hensley

@nathankhensley.bsky.social
5.7K followers 2.9K following 4.8K posts

Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse (Chicago, 2025) • The Barbara Johnson Collective (Northwestern, 2026) Fresno, Silver Spring • www.nathankhensley.net • he/him/his • Everything here in personal capacity only

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 16h
on-field thermometer at dodger stadium showing 130(?)° in early october, game continues as though all is normal: climate collapse evolving into everyday life
On field thermometer at dodger Stadium showing a reading of 130°, or way past 120 anyway
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
“Art can become “a form of cultural and spiritual regeneration,” Pope Leo XIV said on Friday, when it “resists homogenization, slows the gaze, and compels us to pause before that which refuses to be consumed.””
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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
excited to see every catholic university in the US triple down on arts.
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Sarah Osment @smosment.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
name a publication more openly committed to its own obsolescence
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🎃 Mac O'Lantern 🎃 @jacmacandsneeze.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I think being a librarian right now is really hard, just like it's hard being an instructor. You're fighting over the nature of knowledge and learning and you have to get a grip on it how you can. I really like her and I understand her view but it makes me sad as hell
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Moira Donegan @moiradonegan.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Thinking of the famous, now-tenured academic woman who told me that she thought anti-rape activism was “inevitably reactionary” and how she’s the Title IX coordinator for her department.
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Bathsheba Demuth @brdemuth.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Being in this role has already been exciting — keep the proposals coming!
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
formally alert close reading —showing the meanings coded into syntax, exposing the lie that all discourse is mere content—is what we teach students, & what separates the work of literary criticism from sociology, history, & theory—so honestly this is the most meaningful compliment to me 🙏🌿
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
This is very, very sad news about a DC landmark
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
no fan of the bezos engine but have just seen that kindle edition of the book is basically free there if anybody uses kindles and is interested
Screenshot of Amazon page for action without Hope: Victorian literature after climate collapse, showing 91% off, price 299
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
👀 🔥 🎉
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profchander @profchander.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
our series keeps growing! global.oup.com/academic/con...
casie legette, the empire’s schoolbooksdevin garofalo, worlds unmannedporscha fermanis, settler fiction from the southern hemisphere
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Our departmental staffing has been cut down to 2/3 or 1/2 its historic level depending on when you measure from and we’ve been told basically never to expect another tenure line, but i can have free chatGPT to go with my free gemini, thank you
GU
University Information
Services
Dear Colleagues,
Following our recent enterprise rollout of Google Gemini, we are offering a 12-month pilot program for ChatGPT trial licenses. If you have a specific academic, research or business need that would benefit from having a ChatGPT license, please see the information about the pilot and how you can get involved.
ChatGPT Pilot Program: How it Works
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Sheila Liming @seeshespeak.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Congratulations to CMU for taking dirty hedge fund money from a guy who believes neither in education nor in free speech! We always knew you had it in you!
Text of article from The Financial Times with the following material highlighted, “. In January, he called Harvard students “whiny snowflakes” and halted his donations to the school, which have topped $500 million. On Monday, he said the protests were the result of a “failed education system,” adding that the situation at Harvard looked better than at Columbia, where police raids last month cleared out protesters and their encampment.
When asked by the Financial Times what Harvard should do next, Griffin replied, “Harvard should put front and center [that it] stands for meritocracy in America and will educate the next generation of leaders in American business, government, healthcare, and the philanthropic community. Harvard will embrace our Western values that have built one of the greatest nations in the world, foster those values with students, and ask them to manifest these values throughout the rest of their life.”
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
A corollary to this important point about AI & invisible labor is that, 100% of the time, the dudes most obsessed with onboarding LLMs into classrooms either suck deeply at teaching or are not teachers at all but instead lifelong administrators who think teaching is “generating feedback” & that’s it
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Weird to live in a time where the ppl with the most power on earth are the ones whose brains have been most fully standardized & transformed into bullet-pointed mush
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Philip Leventhal @philipleventhal.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
"African storytelling sees the forest as something that cannot be owned and marks the limits of the world as we know it." Ainehi Edoro discusses her new book FOREST IMAGINARIES: HOW AFRICAN NOVELS THINK tinyurl.com/3fvwks5a @brittlepaper.bsky.social @columbiaup.bsky.social
tinyurl.com
Books That Take You Into the Woods
Ainehi Edoro-Glines’ latest book explores the ways African writers play with (and in) the forest.
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
written in another lifetime (2015-2016), but unfortunately elements of this still feel relevant —thanks to scott for sharing this
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Leigh Claire La Berge @lclaberge.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
had him for a philosophy of language seminar many moons ago at Hampshire College! he's a tool.
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
except for the many NYT articles abt the ridiculous & spoiled students protesting mass murder in gaza, i can't remember an essay so purpose-built to be whizzed around provostial groupchats and the signal chains of trustees and donors —it's like this was cooked in a lab to feed to adminstrators
nytimes.com
Opinion | I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think.
If I do not treat writing as essential for achieving thought, it is not clear why I should force my students to.
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Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
An illuminating and generous critical review essay. It remains a year of extraordinary richness in academic books… Fun memory, WJT Mitchell was, my freshman year in college, the first visiting speaker I went to see give a talk (or three, a lecture series on What Images Want).
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Bentham for the win! I.e. loss
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
“The approach is raising questions about whether fast-tracking coursework could come at the expense of learning.” HMMM YES THIS IS A MYSTERY THAT REQUIRES FURTHER STUDY,, I RECOMMEND WE CONTINUE THE PROGRAM UNTIL WE KNOW MORE 🤔
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Martin Hewitt @vicmanch.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
New ECR opportunity, courtesy of JVC and BAVS. Please spread the word as widely as you can!
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
mesmerized by the schematic circuit board diagrams for the Onkyo TX-DS676 receiver (1999)
Circuit board diagrams from repair manual for ONKYO audio receiver circuit 1999Circuit board diagrams from repair manual for ONKYO audio receiver circuit 1999Circuit board diagrams from repair manual for ONKYO audio receiver circuit 1999Image of title page for service manual of ONKYO receiver :

Ret. No.362/
091999
ONKYO. SERVICE MANUAL
AUDIO VIDEO
CONTROL RECEIVER
MODEL TX-DS676

120V AC. 60Hz


GWR
220-230V/120V
59.10.08050169.04
Black and Golden models
AC. 50/60Hz
SAFETY-RELATED COMPONENT WARNING!!
COMPONENTS IDENTIFIED BY MARK & ON THE SCHEMATIC DIA CRITICAL FOR R
* Orky -TXOSG -av-sm pd (2,5 MB)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Specification....
Save... X
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
the postwar university for all its problems worked according to a pretty complex balance of cultural and economic capital with other kinds thrown in, but it looks like we can simplify our Bourdieu for the phase of neoliberal higher ed we’re in now, where the only thing that matters, ever, is money
Diagram of Bourdieu’s four fold grid of forms of capital — Economic, Cultural, Social, and Symbolic, showing all of them crossed out except for Economic, which is now the only form recognized by the neoliberal university
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Citizen of Somewhere Else @citizense.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Yes, and part of what’s been happening on the teaching front is that administrators are realizing they can increase the profit margins on humanities gen ed if they close majors outright or just let them dwindle away by never funding replacement lines, just hiring contingent faculty.
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Eleanor Courtemanche @ecourtem.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
🙂 pressing onward in the great common project 😁
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Eleanor Courtemanche @ecourtem.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
UIUC talk by @nathankhensley.bsky.social based on his book Action Without Hope — here he’s saying “Perhaps my title is a little intense” 😁
Nathan Hensley of Georgetown U giving a talk at UIUC entitled No Escape, No Ending: Gesture, Improvisation, Solidarity
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Yeah! One issue this highlights is the rise of an administrative class, cozy by both trade & disposition w trustees & donors but increasingly remote from actual learning, who’ve been completely captured by the promotional narratives of tech capitalism & the fantasies of airport-book reading CEOs
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
“Machine-readable & hermeneutically mute at the same time,” contemporary images are “nodes in an ever-expanding network designed to provide, & trade, information between systems concerned with the preferences, habits, and behaviors of human actors” for purposes of financial optimization
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Astonishing to see it even being discussed. One highly placed person told me they supported AI grading in large classes because “it’s better than nothing.” when I asked why the university couldn’t hire enough people to grade those students’ work he said “well that’s not realistic.”
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
“Schnell's Sept. 18 email statement to The Dartmouth was itself "100% Al-written," according to a Pangram test.” Student journalists just running roughshod over this dude 🤣🤟
In an email statement to The Dartmouth on Sept. 18, Schnell wrote that he uses artificial intelligence for "language refinement, copyediting, improving clarity and organization and making writing processes more efficient," but "review[s] the final text and takes! responsibility for its content."
"I develop ideas and arguments, conduct the research, evaluate the evidence and sources, determine the structure, prepare drafts and decide what appears in the final text," Schnell wrote. "I regard these technologies as assistive tools. They do not identify the problem, design the research project, guarantee the validity of research results, interpretations, citations, conclusions or substitute for my research, intellectual judgment or authorship."
Schnell's Sept. 18 email statement to The Dartmouth was itself "100% Al-written," according to a Pangram test.
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Robbie Richardson @londonmikmaq.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I'm very excited to be giving the 2026-27 W.J. Alexander Lecture in English Literature on October 15th at University College, University of Toronto! It will be called "Joseph Brant's Unwritten History: Towards an Indigenous Antiquarianism."
uc.utoronto.ca
Joseph Brant’s Unwritten History: Towards an Indigenous Antiquarianism | University College U of T
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
write short, write strong!
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Dr. Sandra Steingraber 🏳️‍🌈 @ssteingraber1.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
I was a huge beneficiary of that era, as were many of my own professors who, like me, had come from the working classes. No more. I got my own Gen Z kids through college sans debt. Both are formidable intellectuals but see grad school as out of reach financially. Will never get over this.
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
We’ve lived through the nearly complete systematic unwinding of the postwar public university, which for all its faults, was premised on the idea that not only aristocrats could be intellectuals, & that having non-aristocratic intellectuals was better for knowledge & therefore better for everyone
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
as with the fossil fuel industry the reality of the crisis is a load bearing part of the strategy - exploited to lend urgency to plutocrats' preferred political response, which they position as sensible and responsible
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
never forget that our universities fired and expelled people for opposing this
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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
“Operations designed to insist that everything is fine inevitably betray the fact that this is not the case. And indeed, everything is not fine.” newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...
newleftreview.org
Frédéric Lordon, Warning Signs — Sidecar
On the economics of AI.
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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Can’t stop won’t stop
The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing
formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to
organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property
structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in
giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express
themselves.
21 The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism
seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result
of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of
the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its
counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production
of ritual values.
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and
war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while
respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the
situation.
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
another fun moment to remember the good old days when we were all getting scolded for using the word fascism to describe this
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
My very sincere prediction is that in future years we will see class action lawsuits by students arguing— correctly— that they were defrauded when they paid tuition dollars in an implicit contract that they would be educated 
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
💥🤩🤩🤩💥
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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
People are not mechanical templates, ideas are not mass produced widgets, and therefore any educational setting worth its salt will begin from valuing the weird.
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
in the end, the human drive to preserve, sustain, and even expand real knowledge —to try to move toward truth— is inexhaustible. No degree of oppression, and no campaign of barbarism, however sustained, can ever finally expunge it. this is a source of beauty on earth
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
in the specialized language of business, this is called "getting you coming and going"
As AI labs have flourished, a cottage industry of AI researchers has sprung up to identify the risks and dangers of charging ahead with the increasingly influential technology.
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Erin K. Maher @erinkmaher.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
*shrieks in former adjunct*
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
It’s true! I‘ll be at UIUC in November to riff about Environmental Humanities at the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory, which I have admired from afar for so long. My entire talk is about why Nathan is wrong. Just kidding. I am just gonna try to get by on the residual good vibes of his visit.
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