"Taste can be whatever so long as it is a vector for patriarchal racial capitalist accumulation and status. The point is that it is subjective and non-universal."
www.its-her-factory.com/2026/02/the-...
My latest essay is out with Intervenxions! It was a real pleasure to write.
A page from the comic Ash Grey & Saturn Olympus #2. From the comic script: PAGE 7 - PANEL A Ash is in the center of the frame, with Laney to his right. Ash looks concerned and a little upset, while Laney is listening earnestly and sincerely. They each carry a small wooden bucket of rags which are soaked in blood. They’re tossing the bloody rags from the buckets onto the ground. MEANWHILE, ASH AND LANEY SPREAD RAGS SOAKED IN HUMAN BLOOD TO ATTRACT THE VAMPIRES. ASH: I TRUST GOD THAT BEING PREGNANT IS WHAT’S RIGHT FOR ME. BUT . . . IT DOES MAKE ME FEEL LIKE THE WOMANHOOD I TRIED TO LEAVE BEHIND HAS CAUGHT UP WITH ME. PAGE 7 - PANEL B Closeup of Laney, who is trying to be a good friend and give good advice. Comforting, but a little stern. LANEY: THE WITCHES OF THE ORDER GIVE YOU MASCULINIZING POTIONS, AND GIVE ME FEMINIZING POTIONS. PAGE 7 - PANEL C Slightly zoomed out from the last panel so we can see Ash listening intently. LANEY: BUT WE CAN’T CHANGE OUR GUTS. I’LL NEVER HAVE THE ORGANS TO BECOME PREGNANT MYSELF. PAGE 7 - PANEL D Ash on the left, Laney in the center, with the right reserved for the speech bubble. Laney and Ash are smiling modestly, connecting over their transness. LANEY: MY POINT IS, I’M A WOMAN EVEN IF I CAN’T HAVE A BABY. AND YOU’RE A MAN EVEN IF YOU CAN. THAT’S NOT WHAT DEFINES US.
I wrote and @palletgx.bsky.social illustrated a comic! We're both trans.
Ash & Saturn is about trans and queer heroes in the 1880s fighting Vampires using alien tech and info from the future!
Check out this page.
Launches on Kickstarter March 1st:
www.kickstarter.com/projects/jam...
My short take on the long view of Political Economy has happily just been released as a paperback🥳 It begins with the South Sea bubble & ends with the digital economy & Irish bogs, with many interesting pitstops along the way. It's true to its title & only 80 pages🙂
www.routledge.com/Political-Ec...
Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.
CALL FOR PITCHES
@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.
We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.
Details below!
So it looks as though you can access my new book already if you’re subscribed to OUP. Here’s the link :) 🎉✨
academic.oup.com/book/62228?s...
NEW BOOK!
I'm very happy to say that my new book, Utopia, co-written with Douglas Mao, has been published on-line
academic.oup.com/book/62279
New in the journal! Mickwitz, N., (2026) “On Reading as Political Practice: A Review of Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics”, The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 16(1). doi: doi.org/10.16995/cg.... #ComicsStudies powered by @openlibhums.org; @janewayolh.bsky.social
I used to hate awkward, confused undergraduate prose, but now I cherish it—and gobble it up with glee. For this gift, I would like to say thank you to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. That half a trillion or so spent towards building data centers was totally 100% worth it!
I wrote for the New York Times about how state violence that was hidden in the borderlands has burst into view in Minneapolis. The solution cannot be simply to send it back there www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/o...
Our book is out today! 🎉
"Cultural Landscapes of Energy" adds a historical perspective to current debates on energy transition by bringing together conflicting histories around work, habitation and leisure in landscapes impacted by energy production across Europe.
I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
Stay free
Figure 1. Composite image from Baldo, by Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos
Check out the introduction to our latest special issue 9.3 on Latinx Comics
muse.jhu.edu/pub/30/artic... @projectmuse.bsky.social @ohiostatepress.bsky.social
Here are 8 successful *proposals* for academic books/monographs. I am hoping that these help someone who is starting out trying to write one and wants to see what worked for me. They are provided as examples, rather than exemplars. A lot of it was just finding my own way eve.gd/2026/01/16/s...
Open for late applications - master's programme in #Colonial and #Postcolonial Studies.
Still time to apply to our wonderfully interdisciplinary humanities & social sciences #master in 🇸🇪 - start September '26!
🕰️ 👣🦉🌎🌈🌲✏️ 🚲🗣️
(check right column for the distance track:)
lnu.se/en/programme...
Generative A.I. This class helps you to be a better writer and thinker. Generative AI (ChatGPT, Copilot, and other platforms) is neither writing nor thinking. Any use of Al in this class (whether to write, brainstorm, outline, or summarize) will be considered a violation of academic integrity. It undermines your intellectual development, for one: AI content is often inaccurate or hallucinatory and is always boring, banal, and average. This is by design, as generative Al works by predicting the most obvious or basic sequencing of words. Good writingwriting that is persuasive, powerful, lively, funny, surprising, rousing, insightful, transformative, provocative-requires human work. Human creativity is weird and variable and uneven, but it holds the capacity for growth, revelation, empathy, and brilliance. We urge you not to abandon the glorious experiential potential of human messiness and transformation for the tedium of robot sentences. One further reason to abjure generative Al, especially in a class on environmental literature: in addition to its counterproductivity to your work as a writer and thinker, Al is enormously environmentally destructive.
Yes in thunder. My syllabus statement:
Hi perhaps you would like a little break from the news in the form of an essay about my trip to Centralia, Pennsylvania, the town that’s been on fire since 1962—a place where surprisingly I found a great deal of hope, wonder, and mystery.
New book going to press: *Character Networks in Contemporary U.S. Fiction.* It’s about social networks as context for—and formal element of—the novel. For contemporary lit, novel/narrative theory, DH, lit and sociology, network analysis crowds. Here’s what it’s about: (1/n)
Hey friends! I’m psyched that so many folks want to read Mary Shelley’s prescient climate/pandemic apocalypse novel, THE LAST MAN, in community, in this, its bicentennial year.
#LastMan200
I wasn’t sure they were going to publish this. So good for them.
OK wrote this up in longform: www.its-her-factory.com/2025/12/ai-h...
My book, Realism after the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel, is now out with @uchicagopress.bsky.social! Use discount code UCPNEW for 30% off. I'm so excited! 🥳
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
"The nation once reliant on its own objectification is infinitely cast into this role: a self-devouring ouroboros, the paradoxical snake endlessly chasing its tail..." writes Chichi Ayalogu in our newest review on Biafran history, visual culture, conflict, & more!
asapjournal.com/review/digit...
Official pitch that I have joined the wonderful editorial group at Refugee History Blog. Please get in touch if you want to write for us! refugeehistory.org/about
Cover of Princess Knight
As most things in manga owe a debt to Tezuka Sensei (Osamu Tezuka), it is not surprising that scholars have isolated Tezuka’s 1953 series “Princess Knight” as a deeply important touchstone for the evolution of trans representation in manga as a whole. #princessknight #tezuka 1/11
There is a graphical novel coming out about the DC bands Gray Matter and 3 by the bassist Steve Niles, who apparently has since gone on to have a career as a comic book writer. He wrote the original comic 30 Days of Night.
steveniles.net/news/f/gray-...
This racialised timeline cast the Sámi as premodern and even endangered - narratives that helped justify intensifying resource extraction and colonial settler claims in Sápmi. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
My daily writing goal has fallen to 300 words/day, but that must be enough. The chapters will still get written eventually!
My new book argues technology needs an ethos: In Africa and Ghana that ethos is Pan-African Futurism. The product of over 10 years of on-the-ground and digital research with tech developers and Ghana's digital diaspora — www.ucpress.edu/books/pan-af...
Call for inaugural issue of—Polyfora: A Journal of Speculative CoFutures—an interdisciplinary journal devoted to unearthing possible futures, accepting peer-reviewed articles, stories, artworks, and essays from many languages and perspectives:
journal.cofutures.org
