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Thomas S. Davis

@thomassdavis.bsky.social
2.2K followers 622 following 768 posts

English/Env Hum/Analog Hum/Prof at Ohio State. The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism & Everyday Life (Columbia 2016). Forming Attachments: Aesthetic Education & Ecological Crisis (out for review!). www.thomassdavis.net

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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Wait, meaningful conversations…?
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
We had this exact same thought. My 12 year old son was like “is this Trump using AI?”
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
…
news.osu.edu
Ohio State, Google partner to accelerate research and AI Fluency
The Ohio State University and Google Cloud today announced a new strategic partnership to accelerate scientific discovery, expand campuswide technology access, support AI Fluency, and assist students ...
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
For the briefest hallucinatory moment I wanted this to be an announcement that the US govt was replacing AI with the Situationist International. Alas. Back to the Sazerac.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This opening line is already bullshit: “Most college professors I know believe that students learn to think — critically, creatively, reflectively, tenaciously — only by writing.” I can’t think of a single academic I know in any discipline who would reduce student learning to any single activity.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Ordering and fully expect to be nodding along with the analysis as I also internally scream at "reading as self-care." Hoping this helps me convert my screams into analytic clarity! Looking forward to getting it.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I do the same generally, but I woke up feeling a certain type of way and sent a snarky reply.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I received something from them yesterday. I think I get at least one a week and they all follow the same pattern with AI-generated drivel about my work. What did they say when you replied? I think these things typically end up asking for you to pay or something, right?
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I am teaching this section next week! Can’t wait to read and fold it in to our class discussion .
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Read Sarah’s story instead of all the Ed Sheeran mess. And support HEAL-Palestine if you can.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
My partner has pushed me for years to start a blog called "white men pick their noses in front of me." I don't know why this happens to me or what I did to offend the gods...
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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
If I was in charge of an educational institution and learned that a technology fostered “cognitive surrender” in young people, I’d like to think I would do everything in my power to keep it away from the young people who pay my institution to educate them. But I guess I’m just a weirdo.
Students are using artificial intelligence for everything, including cheating, and a recent M.I.T. report said the technology was creating
"cognitive surrender."
Philip Cheung for The New York Times
Many university leaders are embracing A.I. anyway. →
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
i think this would end up as us uniting to make a formidable tag-team duo against enemies (who, of course, would not be present).
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
The next task is for us to be in the UP at the same time and actually meet up! I am nearly certain we must have been minutes and mere feet from one another in August.
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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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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
My son told me two yeas ago (4th grade) that he was “really good at the lockdown drill” and I had to leave the room. It broke me.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
"What I think is completely irrelevant" is the most accurate thing she said in this clip.
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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
BREAKING: Boston University's English department (my dept) recently voted to approve new learning outcomes for the English major, including an anti-AI provision that requires students to “craft and revise writing that is sustained, original, and generated without the assistance of AI."
bu.edu
New Learning Outcomes Announced | English
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Never thought I’d have nostalgia for prn or pfc, but things really have degraded…
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I'm in the same shit situation. I removed it from my phone and allow myself one check on Sundays. Have I missed show announcements and watched things sell out? Yes. Is my brain in a better place...god I fucking hope so. I just want message boards to come back.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Wait, what?!?! This sound awesome. I have been teaching bits of Weil for the last two years to my undergrads and they end up pretty enthralled by her (we do the material on attention).
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Cirino believes market principles should dictate which courses & majors survive…unless it is the right wing “civics center” forced on OSU, which has low enrollments & low interest. In that case, you push new legislation that would require undergrads to take their courses. That’s freedom, baby!
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Thank you for reaching out to AAUP & others who dealt with Cirino. He is being incredibly disingenuous here. His bills were wildly unpopular in Ohio & you can see the vast asymmetry in testimony for and against them.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
As an OSU professor, I have watched this unfold over the last few years. The new legislation will mandate students take courses from the Chase Center—a state installed right wing institution—because students aren’t interested in what they offer & can see right through its “civics” posturing.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I’ve been doing this for two years & it has been warmly received by students & accommodations are always made. I did have two students with ADHD last semester write on evals that not having a sea of screens around them was refreshing. Plenty of ways to innovate & accommodate in analog classes!
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
God, this is so dispiriting. In better news, I’m looking to reading the book and will give it properly human praise, which I am certain it will deserve.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
It can’t do any of these things you fucking dipshits.
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Caleb Wellum @calebwellum.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
The Renewable Normal (the latest After Oil book) is on its way. I cannot say enough about how wonderful the collaborative process of making this book was. Looking fwd to talking a bit about it next week at Petrocultures 2026 in Dresden.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Those are both so good for thinking through mediation and oil. I’m Obviously going to push Len Lye’s short film the Birth of the Robit (best modernist petro-ganda!) and Juliana Spahr That Winter the Wolf Came.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
WG Sebald The Rings of Saturn, Laila Lalami’ The Dream Hotel (for data extraction and climate hell), and Ben Okri “Stars of the New Curfew.”
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Yes, which is why it’s so weird. Part of the argument is how the attachments of petro-masculinity survive the swap from oil to electricity: the way the plug mimics the pump, the size of this stupid thing, & other features Cara D. notes emerge at the intersection of gender & petroleum.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
(I actually dropped this insane image into my book where I talk a bit about petro-masculinity).
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
That quote is reason enough to totally dismiss someone’s judgment on your work (although that doesn’t make it any less infuriating). FWIW, here is an absurd image showing petro-masculinity is both real and survives electrification.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Yesss! See you next week, yeah?
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Aaaand look what just showed up in the mail.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
I should note that I contributed to the chapter on fuckedness and the section on hell because, well, of course I did.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Our book The Renewable Normal, the third After Oil book, is out earlier than expected! If you’re at Petrocultures next week there will be discounted copies (come say hi if you’re in Dresden). Come for the critique of renewability & stay for the theories of hell & fuckedness!
nebraskapress.unl.edu
The Renewable Normal - Nebraska Press
The Renewable Normal confronts the aesthetic, affective, and political dimensions of the transition to renewable energy. Written by the After Oil Collective,...
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Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Professor Jason Arday's former students want to "gather everything good about Jason Arday, in the words of the people who were there" to make their contribution to the public record about him (rather than to debate events + controversies of recent months) leilacancode.github.io/everythinggo...
leilacancode.github.io
Everything Good About Jason Arday
First-hand accounts from people who knew him. Collected by his students.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Yes. This is exactly how to respond to this bullshit posturing and bad faith “reporting.”@kwazana.bsky.social 👏👏👏
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Today we did the Shipwreck boat tour thing and then hung around Au Train beach. We went to some smaller waterfalls earlier too.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
OMg. We were there yesterday too. We kayaked Pictured Rocks in the morning and then went to Miners Castle and Falls. Any suggestions for Ontonagon/the Porkies?
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Well damn.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Where are you?! We just came back from a swim in Lake Superior. We have been in Munising for the past few days and heading west to Marquette and Ontonagon tomorrow.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
“Damn! Let him cook.“—My 12 year old’s response to Odysseus killing the suitors at the end of the film. We were also the only people in the theater who thought of this as “family night” evidently.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
I think they’re going to be a lot of fun to watch (until half of them are out with injuries…).
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
i bought Blood, Sweat and No Tears at Record Bar circa 1992 when I was just getting into punk & hXc. I’d never heard anything that aggressive and mean and I loved every second of it. I’ve heard nothing but lovely things about Lou over the decades.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
I’m late to this, but this is definitely worth your attention if it slid under your radar. Thanks @gabrielh.bsky.social for this!
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MSA Modernism & Environment SIG @msa-modenviro.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Modernism and Environment enthusiasts! Check out the TWO latest installments of our “Letters from the Field" blog series on @moderniststudies.bsky.social's M/m print+ "Modernism, Energy, and Environment" blog! Do read and share! modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts...
modernismmodernity.org
Letters from the Field: #2 and #3 | Modernism / Modernity Print+
I write from Tampa, Florida, where last year’s back-to-back hurricanes have subsided into this year’s drought, and where I have been thinking obsessively about the university as environmental infrastructure. Like Virginia Woolf’s narrator Mary Beton in A Room of One’s Own, I have “sat down on the banks of a river” on a university campus. I’ve thought about how this place
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
This Is the sort of thing I need to see when I wake up.
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Thomas S. Davis @thomassdavis.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
This was great! For sensibility, I would advocate hard for the DIY (largely anti-capitalist) ethic that was really prominent in the 90s (but existed prior & continues): Dischord & Ebullition embody that ethic. Side note: my band played Gilman last month & it was awesome & now has 🇵🇸 over the stage.
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