Historiography

Why Taylor Swift belongs on English literature degree courses

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, January 2, 2024

When I started my podcast, Studies in Taylor Swift, in the spring of 2021, I felt that I was simultaneously helping to invent, and trying to catch up to, the academic discipline of Taylor Swift studies.

Key Points: 
  • When I started my podcast, Studies in Taylor Swift, in the spring of 2021, I felt that I was simultaneously helping to invent, and trying to catch up to, the academic discipline of Taylor Swift studies.
  • I went on to design a summer school course at Queen Mary University of London on Taylor Swift and Literature in 2023.

Dear reader

  • We talked about the line “You drew stars around my scars / But now I’m bleedin’”.
  • The idea was to try to figure out how the “but” worked – whether the scars had reopened or new ones had been created.
  • It is also a song about the speaker herself, someone who keeps getting “marooned” on the shores of the past.

Hits different

  • On the other hand, there is clearly something about the idea of classes on Taylor Swift as literature that catches the popular imagination.
  • In media discussions, her name is sometimes juxtaposed with another one: Shakespeare.
  • The Times published Bate’s article alongside a quiz asking readers whether Swift or Shakespeare had written a particular line.
  • But this is born from a popular misconception about what it is we do in literature classes – even Shakespeare classes.


Clio Doyle teaches a class on Taylor Swift and Literature at the Queen Mary Summer School.

CasinosBlockchain: How Fluctuating Crypto Markets Influence Our Investing Decisions (featuring Exclusive Survey Data)

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, December 20, 2023

In the article, journalist Allie Grace Garnett explores the complexities of volatile crypto markets, examining how market participants react to rapid changes in token prices.

Key Points: 
  • In the article, journalist Allie Grace Garnett explores the complexities of volatile crypto markets, examining how market participants react to rapid changes in token prices.
  • A 2023 crypto gambling behavior survey by Casinos Blockchain reveals preferences among crypto gamblers during market volatility.
  • Complex Relationship: The article explores the complex relationship between crypto market fluctuations and traditional stock markets, highlighting the potential impact of institutional investors and macroeconomic events.
  • The article provides valuable tips for crypto investors to navigate volatile markets, including diversification, long-term planning, risk management, and avoiding impulsive decisions.

Friday essay: 'All I am is literature' – Franz Kafka's diaries were the forge of his writing

Retrieved on: 
Saturday, June 10, 2023

It is the closing years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, before the Great War changed such scenes forever.

Key Points: 
  • It is the closing years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, before the Great War changed such scenes forever.
  • A young man with sound prospects is to meet his fiancée’s father for the first time.
  • The convention of the day would require him to lay out his credentials and his family’s pedigree for the match to proceed agreeably.
  • The decision to put his thoughts in a letter was entirely consistent with the epistolary nature of his relationship with Felice.

Uncanny writing

    • As his dairies repeatedly show, Kafka’s life, his existence, was literature, and that existence was not shareable as a “lived experience”.
    • Each of these things he saw as challenges, counter forces, to his writing.
    • His existence was entirely directed towards what was, for him, both the necessary and the uncanny nature of writing.
    • For Kafka, writing was a strange way of thinking and being in the world.

Kafka’s literary legacy

    • Brod became Kafka’s literary executor.
    • Perhaps more than those of any other published writer, the diaries of Franz Kafka have a special value in providing insight into his modest but profound literary output.
    • It was the only literary honour Kafka would receive during his lifetime.
    • Meyer had a background in the business side of publishing; he showed little interest in cultivating relationships with authors or discussing the literary content of their work.
    • It thus fell to Brod to establish Kafka’s posthumous legacy as a literary genius.
    • But in doing so he tightly entwined his own literary reputation with that of his friend.

A forge for sentences

    • But this also meant Kafka’s reception was influenced too heavily by Brod’s concern with his own reputation.
    • Benjamin’s new translation of Kafka’s diaries, in their presentation and arrangement, enables English readers to see them, for the first time, as the forge of his craft.
    • We can now read in the diaries Kafka the writer rather than Kafka the author.
    • Restored are the frequently ungrammatical and sometimes half-legible sentences that Brod often completed or replaced with the syntax of High German.
    • Restored are the homoerotic observations, descriptions of visits to brothels, and negative comments about well-known people, including the odd barb directed at Brod himself.
    • The dairies require us to suspend our familiar habit of asking who is speaking and trying to place who is being referred to.

The law of the diary

    • This parallels the way we habitually think of the movement of a life and its recording in a journal.
    • Maurice Blanchot tells us the only “formidable law” of the diary is that it must respect the calendar.
    • Frequently, Kafka abides by this law:
      Wrote nothing […] Wrote almost nothing […] Awful.
    • And later still:
      It has become very necessary to keep a diary again.
    • As the notebooks start increasing, the dating falls away, transgressing Blanchot’s law completely.

A new literature

    • The diaries act not only as a forge for Kafka’s writing; they also forge a new possibility for the diary’s place within literature.
    • He also makes the allusive suggestion that diary-writing has its analogue in the literature being produced by his Jewish contemporaries in Warsaw and Prague.
    • This new literature, Kafka says, is united by a Hebrew mother tongue assimilated within the dominant German language culture.
    • It was a literature seeking modes of expression for the effects of that assimilation.
    • literature is less an affair of literary history than an affair of the people […] everyone must always be prepared to know, to defend the part of literature that falls to him and at least to defend it even if he doesn’t know or bear it.

New NHC Institute Builds on Efforts to Strengthen Teaching in African American Studies

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, February 8, 2023

How have efforts to support Black self-worth and self-determination collided with legal, social, and political forces that work to devalue and ignore both the successes and suffering of African Americans?

Key Points: 
  • How have efforts to support Black self-worth and self-determination collided with legal, social, and political forces that work to devalue and ignore both the successes and suffering of African Americans?
  • The National Humanities Center (NHC) is working to help K–12 teachers with these and other questions through its series of Teaching African American Studies Institutes.
  • "This institute builds on the Center's ongoing efforts to prepare teachers to more effectively address these subjects in their classrooms.
  • "More Than a Slogan" is the first African American studies institute being offered by the Center this year.

Gale and ASECS Award Fellowships to Five Scholars to Support Emerging Research of Eighteenth-Century Studies

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, September 14, 2022

FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich. and FISHKILL, N.Y., Sept. 14, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Gale, part of Cengage Group, in partnership with the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), has awarded fellowships to five researchers, known as the Gale-ASECS Non-Residential Fellowships. Funded by Gale, each fellow receives $2,500 and access to Gale's Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), as well as access to the Gale Digital Scholar Lab (The Lab). Using The Lab, the program provides fellows with invaluable text and data mining tools to explore ECCO and advance their work using digital humanities methods. The fellowships aim to help scholars expand the field of eighteenth-century studies for research or teaching.

Key Points: 
  • The fellowships aim to help scholars expand the field of eighteenth-century studies for research or teaching.
  • Access to Gale Digital Scholar Lab lets these fellows explore the use of digital humanities methodologies in new ways.
  • Gale Digital Scholar Lab was created to address common challenges researchers and scholars face when analyzing large sets of archives.
  • In offering fellowships, to scholars in multiple-disciplines, Gale is increasing access to text and data mining tools and furthering opportunities in both research and teaching.

OUTFRONT Media Displays 'HERstory' Campaign on Digital OOH Assets for Women's History Month

Retrieved on: 
Monday, March 8, 2021

Today, women do it all and gender is no limitation to what is possible in one's career or personal life.

Key Points: 
  • Today, women do it all and gender is no limitation to what is possible in one's career or personal life.
  • Highlighting several unique characteristics of women, OUTFRONT's 'HERstory' campaign reimagines what those paper dolls can be.
  • "We are happy to bring the Women's History Month celebration into public view through this creative which is both whimsical and thought-provoking," said Jodi Senese, Chief Marketing Officer at OUTFRONT Media.
  • Every woman has her own 'herstory' and we are thrilled to display this campaign on highly visible displays across the country."

Amidst 21st-Century Racial Strife, 20th-Century African American History At Risk of Being Lost Forever

Retrieved on: 
Thursday, January 14, 2021

Racist ideology is on the rise and significant parts of 20th-centuryAfrican American history and culture are at risk of being lost forever.

Key Points: 
  • Racist ideology is on the rise and significant parts of 20th-centuryAfrican American history and culture are at risk of being lost forever.
  • The HistoryMakers, the nation's largest African American video oral history archive ( www.thehistorymakers.org ), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit headquartered in Chicago, has made preventing this loss its mission.
  • "The challenges facing our country reinforce the need to preserve and elevate the truth about the African American experience.
  • We must work together to massively digitize the personal collections of our HistoryMakers and other African American leaders, making them accessible worldwide.

High Herstory Announces Streaming Partnership with Social Club TV: Available Across Phones, Tablets, and Smart TVs

Retrieved on: 
Friday, December 18, 2020

NEW YORK, Dec. 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- High Herstory, the highly anticipated historical comedy series at the intersection of cannabis and feminism, will be available for streaming through distribution partner, Social Club TV, early next year.

Key Points: 
  • NEW YORK, Dec. 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- High Herstory, the highly anticipated historical comedy series at the intersection of cannabis and feminism, will be available for streaming through distribution partner, Social Club TV, early next year.
  • The storytellers, of course, unapologetically consume cannabis throughout each episode.\
    Social Club TV's Joshua Otten says, "Social Club TV is proud to be a distribution partner with High Herstory.
  • High Herstory has opened the series to advertisers in the cannabis space seeking amplification to an intellectual audience of cannacurious women.
  • Watch High Herstory, the series, on Social Club TV in early 2021.

Nonprofit Global G.L.O.W. Joins 300 Girls at The United Nations for 'Girls Speak Out' Event on The International Day of The Girl

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, October 9, 2018

The Global HerStory Summit culminates on International Day of the Girl on October 11, 2018 when Global G.L.O.W joins more than 300 girls to present at the 'Girls Speak Out' event at the United Nations.

Key Points: 
  • The Global HerStory Summit culminates on International Day of the Girl on October 11, 2018 when Global G.L.O.W joins more than 300 girls to present at the 'Girls Speak Out' event at the United Nations.
  • At a time where #MeToo and similar cultural moments have served as a rallying cry to address the concerns of women, Global G.L.O.W.
  • joins the UN's Working Group on Girls to create a global platform for girls to voice their biggest challenges.
  • The presenters at 'Girls Speak Out' include girls from a range of communities including both rural and urban centers.

Fashion Label C+plus SERIES Presented at New York Fashion Week

Retrieved on: 
Friday, September 14, 2018

NEW YORK, Sept. 14, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --C+plus SERIES, a brand born from the era of modern elegance, presents its SS19 collection.

Key Points: 
  • NEW YORK, Sept. 14, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --C+plus SERIES, a brand born from the era of modern elegance, presents its SS19 collection.
  • With each piece in the SS19 collection, the label pays homage to the natural refinement of a career woman.
  • C+plus SERIES ( www.cplusseries.com ) is designed for the sublime nature of woman, translating her internal freedom into physical form.
  • C+plus SERIES is the embodiment of modernity within feminism, and it is at the core of our exciting new collection.