Twitter and Academic Discourse
Left: Manu Chander
Right: Gena Zuroski
On this episode, Geoff digs into academic social media and
Twitter with Manu Chander and Gena Zuroski. What purpose does Twitter serve
for academics as a social outlet or a space for activism and the sharing of
ideas? What are some ways that the “shorthand” of Twitter (GIFs, etc.) can help
or hinder the rigor of academic conversation? How do Twitter and other forms of
social media contribute to a form of communal “peer review” in a field where
getting your ideas out is a key form of developing those ideas/conversations?
How can that Twitter standard, the hashtag, help develop and strengthen
scholarly communities in the vein of #bigger6, #bipoc18, #ShakeRace and #MedievalTwitter. How do
these platforms help us break down the walls between specializations and
periods that often create false boundaries and limit our research and
conversations?
The link for the episode can be found here!
You can follow the conversation on Twitter with Manu and Gena at @profchander and @zugenia.
Please consider submitting to the CFP discussed in this episode. More information can be found here:
Special issue: “Refusing Eighteenth-Century Fictions”Editors: Manu Chander and Eugenia ZuroskiSubmissions due May 30, 2022Publication in Summer 2023When ECFwas founded in 1988, it was conceived as a journal that would publish top-quality scholarship on prose fiction published in the historical eighteenth century. In 2003, in consultation with the editorial board, the journal expanded its vision to reflect changes in the field, broadening the meaning of “fiction” to include all forms of cultural narrative, unlimited to particular genres or even mediums, and to embrace the widened and elastic periodization of the “long eighteenth century.”This special issue of ECFmarks another shift in how we might think through the paradigm of “eighteenth-century fiction.” Recognizing how many “eighteenth-century” narratives, epistemes, and social and political structures persist into the twenty-first century, and recognizing as well the urgency of addressing and dismantling so many of the eighteenth-century visions that have passed themselves off as ahistorical realities for too long, we invite articles and essays that take an unflinching approach to the myriad fictions—myths, claims, meticulously crafted political logics, fantasies, or outright lies—of and from the long-eighteenth-century period that condition the way we live and relate to each other and our shared worlds today.Some of the most egregious eighteenth-centuryfictions include: racial taxonomies; binary gender; the need for police; white supremacy; the political legitimacy or inevitability of settler colonialism; the political innocence of scholarship itself.Recognizing that one of the eighteenth century’s most enduring fictions is that of the enlightened individual, elevated by Romantic ideology to the level of solitary genius, we particularly encourage collaborative work that foregrounds methods of collective thinking that have been too long marginalized in our discipline and fields of study.We also recognize the study of cultural fictions as an urgent and ongoing process of dismantling and rebuilding, of challenging the bounds of collective imagination and gathering our shared capacities to imagine anew. To that end, we welcome the submission of “flash essays,” short pieces of 500–1000 words, that incisively call attention to something—an overlooked text, a crucial keyword, a theoretical or political imperative—that contributes to a reinvented eighteenth-century studies, unreliant on the violent fictions of the past and committed to radically hopeful futures.
Contributor bios:
Manu Samriti Chander is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. His first monograph, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell,
2017), examined the appropriation of British Romantic tropes
by colonial poets throughout the nineteenth century. He has also
edited a collection of short fiction by the nineteenth-century Guyanese
author, Egbert Martin (Caribbean Press, 2014), and co-edited, with
Tricia A. Matthew, a special issue of European Romantic
Review on generic experimentation in Romantic abolitionist literature. Professor Chander is currently working on The Collected Works of Egbert Martin, with the support of a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant, and developing a second monograph, Browntology,
currently under contract with SUNY Press.
Eugenia Zuroski is Associate Professor of
English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Since 2010 she has
served as Editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Her first book, A Taste
for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism
(Oxford UP, 2013) argued that “things Chinese” played a crucial role in
the shaping of the liberal subject of taste, with British literature
organizing the relationship between the Chinese
and the English in ways that eventually yield orientalist logics. She is
currently completing a book on how moments of “funniness” in
eighteenth-century culture can teach us how to refuse the era’s
disciplinary legacies. She has articles and essays online at
Avidly, Journal18, MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, the ASECS Grad Caucus Blog, Hyped on Melancholy, and forthcoming in Post45 and The Rambling, and poems forthcoming at Columba and Room.
