Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
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caitcoker.bsky.social
Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
@caitcoker.bsky.social
480 followers 560 following 750 posts
Curator, fangirl, utter nerd. Assoc. Prof/Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at U of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Co-Editor Women in Book History Bibliography at womensbookhistory.org. Fan Studies, Tolkien Studies, SFF Studies. I just really love books ok
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Reposted by Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
adapalmer.bsky.social
It’s time! Blackout Friday!

Please join unions 💪 & organizers 🤝 worldwide and BUY NOTHING 💸🙅from big chains this weekend! Instead support small & local businesses 💵 🙌 while sending the message:

the People Will Not Tolerate Corporate Complicity With Authoritarianism & Worker Oppression!
adapalmer.bsky.social Ada Palmer @adapalmer.bsky.social · 21h
Black Friday sales are tempting, but remember unions are calling for a mass shopping strike for national chains, esp. Amazon, Whole Foods, Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Starbucks, & Apple. If you shop between now & Dec 2, please support small & local businesses & avoid crossing the picket line 💪
November 28, 2025 at 3:07 PM
caitcoker.bsky.social
Man, between the hit on the Louvre and this, France really can't catch a break!
November 28, 2025 at 4:16 AM
caitcoker.bsky.social
AS GOD IS MY WITNESS, I THOUGHT TURKEYS COULD FLY!
November 27, 2025 at 6:47 PM
Reposted by Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
shadowdogdesigns.bsky.social
#ISS #astronauts photograph two #comets soaring over Earth’s auroras #Photography #AuroraBorealis

Link for more info and photos: www.popsci.com/science/come...
November 27, 2025 at 12:34 AM
Reposted by Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
libraryofamerica.bsky.social
If you missed last night’s stellar talk with @imaniperry.bsky.social and @tananarivedue.bsky.social on Octavia E. Butler, you can watch the entire program for free on YouTube. Hear these acclaimed writers delve into the genius of the Xenogenesis Trilogy, and catch rare audio of Butler herself!
The Radical Imagination of Octavia E. Butler
YouTube video by Library of America
youtube.com
November 25, 2025 at 6:08 PM
Reposted by Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
levostregc.bsky.social
Poetrye, theatre, storyes, daunse, art, scholarlye researche about literature, historye, and language -- all of these thinges mattir more now, not less.
November 23, 2025 at 7:32 PM
Reposted by Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
marthawells.com
I know there’s a lot going on but if you have any money to spare, please consider protecting a vital wetland area, or share this link.
secure.qgiv.com/event/beonei...
Be One In a Million
We are asking YOU and 1 million people to give $10 to protect and preserve 1,400 acres of wild lands on West Galveston Island.
secure.qgiv.com
November 23, 2025 at 5:40 PM
caitcoker.bsky.social
I’ve taken in my head I want to do a session on early modern “cannibals” at some point, and lo I am reading a book on Romanticism when boom:
November 23, 2025 at 6:54 PM
caitcoker.bsky.social
Dunno why this hits me, but it does. Being 101 and a barista for 60 years.
www.reuters.com
November 22, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Reposted by Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
literaturegeek.bsky.social
Seth Rockman: 'Experiential research as a method for IDing questions you didn’t know to ask, rather than providing answers you wouldn’t have had...an experiential research method lets us envision more things we want to know about the past' (experiential=do something the way it was done in the past)
Screenshot of text from an interview answer by Seth Rockman: " SR: There are so many problems with transcending our subjectivities; so many difficulties when encountering the violence that structured a past that can't and shouldn't be reproduced or approximated. And that creates a real barrier. But at the same time, as historians, we are committed to inhabiting other bodies and living in other times and making sense of universes that don't make sense in our own. Our craft requires imagining ourselves across differences of cosmology and spirituality, of material conditions, of the day-to-day experiences of survival. But this gets ever more difficult when our subjects lived on the margins of the societies whose structures of exploitation and exclusion endure to the present day. That's why I've been thinking about experiential research as a method for identifying questions that you didn't know to ask, rather than providing answers that you wouldn't have had otherwise. For example, I've been doing some dyeing projects with my undergraduates in a class called "A Textile History of Atlantic Slavery," and what we stress in that class is, No, you are not pretending to be a West African woman in 1774. No, you're not pretending to be an enslaved woman on a South Carolina plantation in 1854. You are yourself, you are now, and you're up to your elbows in a pot of really cold water. When students are toting buckets of water to rinse their fabrics, they realize that water is very heavy. And the questions then follow: How did people in the past move water? How did their backs and bodies experience this work? Who was doing this kind of work? We are then prompted to ask questions about infrastructure, about bodily experience, about the gendered division of labor. Once we're asking these kinds of questions, then we can go searching for the answers. An archival record might not prompt us to pose these questions. An experiential research method allows us to envision more things that we…
November 22, 2025 at 1:32 PM
Reposted by Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
isabel.kim
theyre never letting us have another american pope after this huh
vuc.bsky.social David✶🇬🇹 @vuc.bsky.social · 8d
He said "Amen" straight into the drop

Lmao Pope Leo threw a rave for an archbishop's 75th birthday this is kind of incredible
November 22, 2025 at 12:42 AM
Reposted by Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
kateai.bsky.social
Thanks to the wonderful staff in the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections, today my 2nd-year tutorial groups have been thinking about book history and reading practices from the Middle Ages to the 18thC, including this copy of Sidney’s ‘Astrophel and Stella’ (c.1592)
Handwritten copy of the opening sonnet from Sidney’s ‘Astrophel and Stella’, in a late 16thC secretary hand.
November 20, 2025 at 2:27 PM
caitcoker.bsky.social
RSA 2026 program is up which means I better write my paper!! (I'll be presenting on my work on Zacharias Kallierges!)

rsa.confex.com/rsa/2026/mee...
The 72nd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America
rsa.confex.com
November 21, 2025 at 12:01 AM
Reposted by Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
marshslibrary.bsky.social
And that's why you can't have ink in the reading room! Historic damage to a 1647 pamphlet on infant baptism by John Cotton #readers
Ink damage (possibly intentional?) to a page from the pamphlet 'The grounds and ends of the baptisme of the children of the faithful' by John Cotton, 1647
November 19, 2025 at 4:33 PM
caitcoker.bsky.social
Scott thinks that green bean casserole is disgusting.

However, I learned that he has no objections to "green bean and mushroom gratin" for Thanksgiving and am intrigued by what this means for my future culinary suggestions.
November 19, 2025 at 9:23 PM
Reposted by Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
guynes.bsky.social
Did not expect a note about Saddam Hussein to show up in the Wikipedia entry about the famous fantasy artist Rowena, but it's hilarious:
Text reads: "Following the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, art which appeared to be Morrill's original paintings King Dragon and Shadows Out of Hell were discovered hanging in one of his houses.[10][11] According to Morrill, they were copies, as she had sold the originals to a Japanese collector.[12]" Rowena's painting "King Dragon," featuring a dragon menacing a chained up mostly nude woman Rowena's painting "Shadows out of Hell," featuring a mostly nude woman directing a snake to attack a mostly nude man.
November 19, 2025 at 4:18 PM
caitcoker.bsky.social
The link said "These Nu Metal Albums Aren’t So "New" Anymore" because Discogs chose violence today. ::crumbles to dust and blows away in the wind::
The Records That Made Nu Metal Impossible to Ignore
A deep dive into the 10 albums that shaped the legacy of nu metal, from Korn’s unsettling debut to Linkin Park’s world-dominating breakthrough.
www.discogs.com
November 18, 2025 at 6:39 PM
caitcoker.bsky.social
Theater class deeply impressed by the Venetian doge…
November 18, 2025 at 3:59 PM
caitcoker.bsky.social
Poured my coffee into my cereal bowl, that's how today is starting. Hopefully improving from there.
a man in a black shirt is holding a cup of coffee in his hand
ALT: a man in a black shirt is holding a cup of coffee in his hand
media.tenor.com
November 18, 2025 at 1:57 PM
Reposted by Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
sarahebond.bsky.social
Imperative reading. 📖
hetanshah.bsky.social Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 10d
I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight
www.cityam.com/the-british-...
The British library is in crisis: why does nobody care?
The widespread indifference to the British Library's crippling cyberattack demonstrates a perilous failure to value the knowledge infrastructure vital for national prosperity
www.cityam.com
November 18, 2025 at 1:53 PM
Reposted by Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
sarahebond.bsky.social
Me: What did you do today?

5-year-old: I don’t remember.

Me: Okay.

5-year-old: what did you do? Tried to remember for other people?

Me: Yup. That’s basically what all of history writing is.
November 18, 2025 at 12:43 AM
Reposted by Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
theatlantic.com
Some on the right, including Elon Musk, are misinterpreting the game Dungeons & Dragons—and the intention behind its original story—to further a racist agenda, @adamserwer.bsky.social argues: https://theatln.tc/YRKYtIjQ
November 17, 2025 at 12:15 AM
Reposted by Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
verityholloway.bsky.social
Time to bring back this Patricia Lockwood banger.
Screenshot of a tweet by Patricia Lockwood: ""I'm pregnant!" shouts Jonathan Franzen's wife. He places a finger on her lips. "No, it is I who am pregnant," he says. "Pregnant with the next great American novel." He walks into the backyard and places a single portobello upon the grill."
November 16, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Reposted by Cait Coker <<digital brat with an insect mind>>
markchilcott.bsky.social
Back to it…
#Frankenstein #artwork @realgdt.bsky.social
November 16, 2025 at 6:10 AM
caitcoker.bsky.social
Work in progress.
November 16, 2025 at 12:27 AM