Erica Fretwell @upstaterica Twitter profile

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

The masking on subways in Berlin went from the 30% to 95% in the space of a week

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

4 years

Best student eval to date: "This class was fine but she should have taught more writers." Course title: Our Emily Dickinson

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

Once you realize universities are landlords & real estate developers more than educational institutions things really fall into place.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

pleased to announce that my summer was neither productive nor restful

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

6yo just invented foucault when he told me "We Don't Talk about Bruno" is still talking about Bruno

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

I had an abortion 10 weeks ago. Every pregnant person should have the right to safe, accessible, affordable abortions.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

1 year

immediately after taking this photo a german asked if he could take a picture of me as part of his 'americans visiting hegel's grave' project

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

5 months

honestly it's giving "uchicago faculty"

Kevin Larson Mohr

@junkspaces

5 months

The jeans are the most unsettling thing about this picture of the pronatalist couple.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

the academic urge to read more as a way to procrastinate writing the damn thing

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

So we all agree that the Michigan scandal is that the president of a public university makes a baseline salary of $900k/yr, yes?

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

@_Eric_Reinhart “You do you”

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

1 year

Favorite moment from grad school was in my first year, when on the first day of class we do introductions. Everyone preens & postures, then a german exchange student says she likes tv. Prof: "You're interested in pop culture studies, media theory?" Her: "No. I like watching tv."

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

5 years

Uni closed & preschool canceled, but I refuse to carry the water for a failed state. A hearty NO to the neoliberal imperative to Zoomify pedagogy WHILE "parenting" as a verb. Proudly half-assing both from here on out. Love to all.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

PSA: Don't forget to control+f "pubic" when you get the page proofs.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

@elizphil It’s aggravating but mainly my concern is that the bullshit of course evaluations actively harms grad and NTT teachers, compounded by race and gender. Good for you for not checking!

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

6 months

when universities are banning their own jewish studies directors, who's the antisemite?

Alan MacLeod

@AlanRMacLeod

6 months

Breaking: Annelise Orleck, Head of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth, has been banned from Campus for six months after protecting Jewish students protesting for Palestine from police attacks

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

1 month

one of the grad students asked if it's true that professors get a raise for every dissertation they chair, so i took them for a spin around the parking lot in my banged up dented honda

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

“You’re good at Twitter” is such a ruthless thing to say. Cuts to the quick, absolute violence.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

I say this with all sincerity: *not* reading that op-ed is a viable option.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

my kingdom for a sundress that structurally acknowledges that some people *need* to wear bras

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

What's your favorite feminist technology? Mine is pockets.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

the thing that most bums me out about neoliberalism is that it forces students to see instructors as either bosses or customer service, when the student-teacher relationship exists entirely outside of those bounds.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

4 years

Today it's official! Now to peddle my wares: If you're into the raucous history of psychology, affect theory, C19 literature & culture, and the racial science called aesthetics, you just might dig this book. sending love & positive vibes to all--

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

@MollyOShah I live here too and masking was minimal whenever I took the u-Bahn the past few weeks. We can have different experiences of the same space.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

A baby couldn’t come to us because it couldn’t become so we planted a forsythia in the fall in its memory so that as an early spring bloomer it would blossom about the time it would have arrived. Anyway in early spring the colors dazzle most.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 months

What's your favorite type of speculative fiction? Mine is the book proposal.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

sorry, have been tweeting & deleting a lot bc so consumed with rage and don't know where to direct it. But it boils down to this: I had long acknowledged that institutions don't love you back. What the pandemic has clarified is that it's worse: institutions hate their employees.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

dept chair ended the final faculty meeting with "Well, this has been a shit year," and honestly it is the best and only way to properly conclude a meeting.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

4 months

Happy "oooh now i get to work on *my* work!" season to all the academics who celebrate 😎

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

hey guys! if twitter goes down you can find me chained to the wall of a cave, facing a blank wall, where I and a bunch of other folks watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind us.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

fyi, i'm blocking people who response is "but what about the baby's life/ could have been adopted, etc." Not today, misogynists.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

@GerardCoen Sure! Universities are institutions that are technically non-profit (so don't have to pay taxes) but accumulate lots of $$ from tuition and their endowments (which accrue a lot of interest). Universities apportion their money unevenly: the least goes to student scholarships 1/

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

One thing the realtor won’t tell you, but Henry James will, is how much psychological space your house takes up.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

1 year

i was an adjunct & gave a paper at MLA. when i return home there's an email from a journal editor who liked my paper and invited me to submit it to the journal once i'd expanded it into an essay. from submission to peer review etc, it was published 1.5 years later.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

Last thing, then i'm off the soapbox: You don't owe anyone your abortion story. Freely choosing to terminate is "reason" enough. Compelling the justification of that choice (i.e., "good" vs "bad" abortion) is how women's, NB & trans people's bodies and personhood are regulated.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

4 years

one effect of working at a university that 10 yrs ago more or less stopped hiring TT faculty is dealing with an acutely geriatric faculty body, which is, unsurprisingly, entirely white and male and out of touch with just about everything (but of course talk down to you).

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

4 years

anthropometry & composite photos get a lot of attention, but galton hand drew people's synesthetic perceptions because he viewed mental life (not just bodily traits) as a metric of racial development. that chart is the book cover:

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 months

so if I understand the parenting manuals correctly, your kid sits in a booster seat until they're 12, and then 4 years later you teach them how to drive

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

Historian's review of literary criticism: This is an argument in search of evidence. Lit critic's review of history: This is evidence in search of an argument.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

I spent my twenties trying to be a person who likes camping. As I ease into my “Zero Fucks Forties” I am here to declare I fucking hate camping.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

Oh the service tax that comes with being a competent women in your workplace

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

1 or 2 job openings in your field is not a market. At this point, “job market” is a euphemism for un(der)employment. Let’s be more precise in our naming practices. 🙏

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

4 months

90% of what's happening in higher ed is due to corporatization, de-funding, & anti-intellectualism but 10% is the discipline setting impossibly high bars for entry, e.g., Asst. Prof job at R1 English dept listing "book ms published or under review" as a requirement.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

My colleagues had a meeting to discuss our by-laws & it devolved into a heated debate about Foucault & I just love how English departments are a parody of themselves

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

@GerardCoen so that the university runs more like a resort than an actual place of education. during the pandemic, dean directly told me we need to in teach in person not bc it serves students better (it doesn't) but bc university wants the room & board money. 4/

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

Keeping the Wordle secret is easy: each day simply forget the word within one second of completing the game.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

4 years

Is there any historical fact more heavy-handed than that Francis Galton, founder of eugenics, literally invented the dog whistle?

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

happy 2 years of a novel virus seizing 'C19' from the soft, buttery hands of a very niche academic subfield

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

"slut era" i whisper as i & my cannibal bedmate board a whaling ship docked at Nantuckett

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

speaking strictly from personal experience, all i know is that the semester I did away with an "absence policy" about 20% of my class regularly attended, and then I scorched by student evals bc apparently the students didn't learn anything 🤷‍♀️

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

@_alyssacsmith public uni, R1. hired @ $57k (2013), then union raises & cola bumped up to $70k by 2020. post-tenure raise ($4,500) plus adjustments the union did to address "salary compression" (level salary across race/gender) has me at $76k (no research/conf $). thank god for organized labor.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

@GerardCoen thing to run is education itself. Most prof's are adjuncts ($4k/class, no health insurance) and those lucky to be tenured don't make that much. So to make more money, universities need students to be living in dorms, eating the cafeteria food, using various services on campus 3/

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

the worst part about the university's imperative that humanities collaborate w/ sciences is that we all got into this profession to avoid group projects

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

@GerardCoen NYU is a great example of university-as-real-estate developer. They have amassed so much property that they use not to put back into the community but to charge ever higher room & board $ for students, further driving out longtime residents. So, finally 5/

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

@GerardCoen (nyu is notoriously stingy despite their huge endowment), while the most goes into sports and acquiring property: new construction for ever more expensive dorms and other 'public-private' programs (like suny's homeland security college). From a cost perspective, the cheapest 2/

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

@GerardCoen The university is a corporation that has non-profit status. Education is the least of its concern. The higher tuition $, higher room & board is to amass more wealth for itself by buying more property, building more buildings to then rent out to students or other shops/business.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

spending the summer developing plans to open a sandwich shop called The Ways in 'Wich

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

Non-academic CVs are *wild.* Apparently you can just catalog character traits willy-nilly, eg "emotional intelligence," as objective facts and...no one blinks an eye.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

Me, pointing at a Bruegel: So what do you notice about this painting? Does it make you think of anything? Kid: Busytown!

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

4 years

Friends, please spread the word: Hsuan Hsu & I are editing a special issue of @amlitjournal ( @DukePress ) on "Senses with/out Subjects." Essays due October 4. Would love the opportunity to think with you & learn from you! More info here:

American Literature

dukeupress.edu

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

sex is great and all, but have you ever read a cultural studies book that *doesn't* have a gerund in the title?

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

Criticized by an Historian: A Literary Critic's Memoir

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

11 months

more importantly, jimmy carter has outlived henry kissinger

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

what I am finding out the hard way is that educational institutions are *more* ableist now than they were pre-Covid

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

1 year

there is a certain type of "feminist" male academic that cultivates relationships with celebrity-caliber women scholars, but wouldntyaknow just so happens to not be able to find time for the women who didn't make it into that select world

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

6 months

universities protect their investment portfolios--not students, not staff, not free speech-- and only their investment portfolios

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

Of all the Moby-Dick gimmicks on the island, this one wins

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

Someone finding “I, personally, hate camping” elitist and offensive to unhoused people is peak twitter, 10/10 no notes

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

guys, i know everything feels like sh*t but charlie brown xmas is playing tonight on pbs and a bald-headed kid suffering seasonal depression against a jazzy soundtrack is a real salve for the soul

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

I simply refuse to acknowledge that 'impactful' is a word.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

I have *felt* 40 since I turned 36, so what I'm celebrating today —my birthday—is the alignment of affective time with the Gregorian calendar!!! 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 months

hoo boy am I ready for the semester to be over (the semester starts tomorrow)

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

you'd think after all this time i'd get better at this but no

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

Happy 170th Birthday to melville's MOBY-DICK, and Happy 39th Birthday to me! 🐳🎉

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

My lasting memory of Duke WGSS was when they hired 2 post-docs, then put out 1 TT job that year so the two women were set against each other from the beginning. (Yes, one got it, the other didn’t.) But lots of speakers invited to talk feminist and queer praxis!

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

Found a relic of 1990s suburban girl teendom. Just need to find an Ani DiFranco CD and my youth will have been entirely synched with that of my sisters in law

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

humbly propose that for promotion to full professor, my dossier include not a second monograph but instead a compilation of all my email communication with colleagues, administrators, and students.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

4 years

well hello there!

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

it's cringe to be one of those americans who gushes about europe, but it's also beautiful to experience the benefits of a social safety net, e.g. public school has: free lunch for everyone; free aftercare until 6pm (school gets out at 1.30); free care on school holidays. +

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

deeply honored to be in the company of so many luminous thinkers, including @JillCRichards , @SarahLWasserman , and @edgaresque -- look forward to celebrating these brilliant first books in november!

Duke University Press

@DukePress

3 years

Congratulations to Erica Fretwell @upstaterica ! Sensory Experiments is a finalist for the @msatweet First Book Prize. Read the introduction to the book here:

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

I love film theory. No field has better sentences than, eg, "By reading Aristotle's theory of skepticism in *Metaphysics* with Leibniz's 'ars formularia' and Derrida's law of genre, we can see how the ontology of the image in *Dude, Where's My Car?* ..."

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

@S_Insley_H @miriamkp the fellowship world still caters to "the boys club" where husbands can just willy-nilly pick up and live on the other side of the country for a school year while wifey takes care of the kids. it's time to rethink fellowships for dual-income & caretaking households!

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

everyone's a climate crisis warrior until some kids throw soup on a van gogh. protest is necessarily uncivil. it's meant to inconvenience the public. it's meant to assault sensibilities. and anyway the painting was protected by glass.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

My summer plan is to do a lot of hard thinking, e.g. how Adam Driver is the cilantro of male attractiveness.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

just wait until Sandra Oh stars in a new show called Method Wars.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

Breaking news: UAlbany dissolving College of Arts & Sciences and School of Ed; renaming itself SUNY-Hustle

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

4 years

anyone else just breaking down in tears throughout the day because, try as you might to keep your shit together, this is all too much? guys, this is too much. no creature is meant to handle this much violence at once. i'm so sad, so tired.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

faculty interact most w students, yet our labor & the limits of our power are obscured (students think we're bosses or customer service), so we're the recipients of rightful but misplaced anger. tempted to make the demystification of the univ a first day of class discussion?

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

Happy Werewolf Bar Mitzvah Day to all* who celebrate *American gen x'ers & millennials

Werewolf Bar Mitzvah

Werewolf Bar Mitzvah. http://www.youtuberepeater.com/watch?v=hC44rTFo4Zk for awesomeness!

www.youtube.com

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

this is correct; we say this constantly to admin. but admin doesn't care bc it's a choice they have made, knowing that using majors as a metric produces the data they can then use to justify further under-resourcing of the humanities & social sciences.

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

4 years

low-key obsessed with this high school teacher's discussion questions (1913) for *Walden*

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

excited to transition from bemoaning the writing i didn't do this summer to bemoaning the writing i can't do this fall

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

People say the academic monograph is dead; it’s just the intro and a choice chapter that gets read. But when I sent out my book proposal, I promised publishers “All bangers, all the time.”

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

4 years

🙏

Duke University Press

@DukePress

4 years

Read the intro to Sensory Experiments by @upstaterica freely available here #LiteraryStudies #Feminism #ScienceStudies

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

You can’t tell me this wasnt stolen from the 30 Rock writers room

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

if you see me RT'ing a lot of Lauren Berlant homages, it's because grief isn't meant to be metabolized individually

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

2 years

Friends, what is a good book series (pref fantasy) that isn't H*rry P*tter for a 7 year old?

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

T/TT fac of course shld pay more for membership & conferences than grads & NTT fac. But I'd encourage societies (C19, MLA, etc) to take a cue from SLSA: *within* T/TT payment tier, differentiate between those who & do not have institutional funding for research & conferences

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

3 years

The most annoying thing about people who are turning 40 is that they can't stop talking about how they are turning 40. (I am turning 40 this year.)

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Erica Fretwell

@upstaterica

4 years

i spent saturday thinking about white mob violence - from lynching to the pro-Trump coup - at the nexus of terror & entertainment. @majortominor shepherded my ideas to Al Jazeera, and I'm so grateful to be able to share this with you now

From lynchings to the Capitol: Racism and the violence of revelry

The history of the US shows us that, when it comes to white supremacy, entertainment and violence go hand in hand.

www.aljazeera.com

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