Hester Blum
LightNews LightNews
banner
hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum
@hesterblum.bsky.social
3.4K followers 1.7K following 730 posts

A patched professor in Queen Nature’s granite-founded College. Polar humanities, C19, oceanic studies. Ask me about Moby-Dick. I teach environmental and nineteenth-century American literature at WashU. Protect trans kids. She/her. hesterblum.com .. more

Videos
History 34%
Art 13%
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · May 16
Some personal news: I will be leaving Penn State and joining Washington University in St. Louis as the Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Chair of English. My husband Jonathan Eburne will be J. H. Hexter Chair in Humanities at WashU. We are thrilled and energized by this new chapter in our lives. 1/3

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 4h
Good morning St Louis
The cover of the St Louis post-dispatch: the top headline reads “Judge: Wig photos were private”

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 4d
And the book is incredible
literaturegeek.bsky.social Amanda Wyatt! Visconti @literaturegeek.bsky.social · 4d
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)

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 4d
Same, must-watch (and must-share with your a.i.-pushing administrators):
mattseybold.bsky.social Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 4d
This video is so overwhelming I had to sit down & stare at the wall awhile. I was physically shaking.

I had heard some of these anecdotes before - Proctorio & Tubman bot - but Tanksley synthesizes them (with much much more), revealing undeniable regime of EdTech racialized surveillance & policing…
ruha9.bsky.social Ruha Benjamin @ruha9.bsky.social · 4d
I need everyone, esp anyone working in education or tech (but really everyone) to WATCH THIS CLIP of @drtanksley.bsky.social discussing the technologies infiltrating our schools & psyches and how she is addressing it with our young people. youtu.be/5mtcSL4S3HQ

Reposted by Hester Blum

mattseybold.bsky.social
Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 4d
This video is so overwhelming I had to sit down & stare at the wall awhile. I was physically shaking.

I had heard some of these anecdotes before - Proctorio & Tubman bot - but Tanksley synthesizes them (with much much more), revealing undeniable regime of EdTech racialized surveillance & policing…
ruha9.bsky.social Ruha Benjamin @ruha9.bsky.social · 4d
I need everyone, esp anyone working in education or tech (but really everyone) to WATCH THIS CLIP of @drtanksley.bsky.social discussing the technologies infiltrating our schools & psyches and how she is addressing it with our young people. youtu.be/5mtcSL4S3HQ
Howard University AI Panel
YouTube video by Tiera Tanksley
youtu.be

Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Fabián Muniesa, Hester Blum , and 5 more

ruha9.bsky.social
Ruha Benjamin @ruha9.bsky.social · 4d
I need everyone, esp anyone working in education or tech (but really everyone) to WATCH THIS CLIP of @drtanksley.bsky.social discussing the technologies infiltrating our schools & psyches and how she is addressing it with our young people. youtu.be/5mtcSL4S3HQ
Howard University AI Panel
YouTube video by Tiera Tanksley
youtu.be

Reposted by Hester Blum

literaturegeek.bsky.social
Amanda Wyatt! Visconti @literaturegeek.bsky.social · 4d
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…

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 5d
It's a capacious field!

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 5d
A BLUE HUMANITIES job: jobs.uc.edu/job/Cincinna...
Assistant Professor, Blue Humanities, College of Arts and Sciences
Assistant Professor, Blue Humanities, College of Arts and Sciences
jobs.uc.edu

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 10d
highly recommended whether you are binging it in order to take a break from the news about vile academic workplaces or not

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 10d
The Chair Company is the Twin Peaks of office shows, everyone watch now

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 10d
He sounds like Humbert Humbert in these emails

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 11d
Epstein money directly funded that video program

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 12d
My kid’s existence and thriving and free movement are all valid. These annihilating vile monsters
erininthemorning.com Erin Reed @erininthemorning.com · 12d
1. The Trump administration has just quietly updated the State Department website to indicate that it may invalidate transgender people's passports.

This comes a week after a SCOTUS ruling blocking lower rulings allowing trans people to update them.

Subscribe to support our journalism.
Trump Admin Quietly Changes State Department Page To Indicate It May Invalidate Trans Passports
The change comes after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the administration and lifted a temporary injunction.
www.erininthemorning.com

Reposted by Hester Blum, Matthew Waites

erininthemorning.com
Erin Reed @erininthemorning.com · 12d
1. The Trump administration has just quietly updated the State Department website to indicate that it may invalidate transgender people's passports.

This comes a week after a SCOTUS ruling blocking lower rulings allowing trans people to update them.

Subscribe to support our journalism.
Trump Admin Quietly Changes State Department Page To Indicate It May Invalidate Trans Passports
The change comes after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the administration and lifted a temporary injunction.
www.erininthemorning.com

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 12d
I've been doing a pretty good job remaining minimally functional in this terror regime but the last couple of days really got to me (my former advisor in the email tranches etc.) and now I can't imagine how I minimally functioned at all.

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 13d
How many university presidents/administrator/thought leaders will take away from this that maybe they should not be all in on whatever rich men in tech are selling to them? (Zero)

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 13d
All of the time we spend defending higher ed and

Reposted by Anna O. Law, Fabián Muniesa, Hester Blum , and 5 more

qjurecic.bsky.social
Quinta Jurecic @qjurecic.bsky.social · 14d
new meme
DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 14d
Aurora visible in the middle of Chicago
A pink purple aurora with a baseline of faint green visible in the middle of Chicago despite light pollution

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Oct 22
www.studlife.com/news/2025/10...
Arts & Sciences Dean says WashU will not sign Trump’s higher ed compact as-is - Student Life
Dean of WashU’s College of Arts & Sciences, Feng Sheng Hu, told faculty at a meeting on Tuesday that Chancellor Andrew D. Martin does not plan to sign the Trump administration’s compact for higher edu...
www.studlife.com

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Oct 22
Oooh I will!

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Oct 21
WashU will NOT sign the compact, as the dean of arts and sciences announced just now to faculty – the dean was told by the chancellor that he could share that information (and that moment was the closest I’ve ever seen a college-wide faculty meeting come to a standing ovation).

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Oct 18
St Louis says NO KINGS in thunder (and lightning)
STL NO KINGS in front of the Gateway Arch STL NO KINGS , Amphiba: amphibians against facism Antifa cavalry riding a pink and blue hippo DT as Marie Antoinette: “no health care for you but a ballroom for the queen”

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Oct 11
What Democratic candidates should be fighting for
katelynburns.com Katelyn Burns @katelynburns.com · Oct 11
I wrote a little about some of the little details you might have missed in this video and why it hit me so hard as a trans person this morning:

www.burnsnotice.com/you-have-to-...

Reposted by Catherine Baker, Hester Blum, Melanie C. Green , and 5 more

katelynburns.com
Katelyn Burns @katelynburns.com · Oct 11
I wrote a little about some of the little details you might have missed in this video and why it hit me so hard as a trans person this morning:

www.burnsnotice.com/you-have-to-...

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Oct 8
Skrillex

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Sep 27
Yesssssss @sunsetandecho.bsky.social !!
Sarah Mesle’s brilliant new book Reasons & Feelings: writing for the humanities now, with a bright red-pink cover featuring a tattoo-style arrow, saying hello to my tattoo of a Temple toggle harpoon head

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Sep 14
A minor G on you

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Sep 14
The Penn State BoT is killing the public radio station. WPSU serves a half million rural Pennsylvanians, and it was cut at the same time the Board gave the PSU president--whose greatest hits include closing 7 (seven!) PSU campuses--a 1.1 million dollar raise. Please sign

www.change.org/p/save-wpsu
Sign the Petition
SAVE WPSU
www.change.org

hesterblum.bsky.social
Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Aug 25
Freakonomics just re-aired its three-part series on the history of whaling – it was a joy and an honor to be part of that conversation: freakonomics.com/podcast/what...
What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? (Update) - Freakonomics
What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? (Update) - Freakonomics
freakonomics.com