Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Hester Blum

@hesterblum.bsky.social

3.4K followers 1.7K following 710 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

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

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

29 4 180

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 7h

Skrillex

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 11d

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

1 11

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 24d

A minor G on you

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · 24d

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

4 6

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

freakonomics.com

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Aug 21

If only the non-Lego Endurance were so well cradled

The fully-constructed Lego Endurance, elaborately packed by excellent movers and ungrammatically labeled

1 3

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Aug 20

(the story of how I came to have Melville's commode: avidly.org/2021/12/05/h...)

Herman Melville’s Commode

I have recently become the reverential custodian of a commode that belonged to Herman Melville. I achieved this honor through an unlikely sequence of events that began with a Facebook post about a …

avidly.org

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Aug 20

thank you, very excited!

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Aug 20

We are about to move, I finally opened the bottle of hard cider made from apples from Arrowhead, Melville's farm. It was dry and lovely and I drank it amid the packed-up broken pieces of marble that top Melville's commode, which I was even more wonderfully given a few years ago.

The wooden surface of a c19 commode, missing its marble topping, with joinery and screw visible.

yr correspondent with a glass of cider sitting on the floor of an old, garishly painted house surrounded by packed-up bits of art and broken marble and a leather couch not yet packed

My spouse pouring out a green bottle of cider made from Herman Melville's apple trees, with the cap labeled "A" for Arrowhead

1 20

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Aug 19

Resharing my A.I. statement for the fall semester—I’ll be amending “hallucinatory” because hallucinations are actually interesting and original.

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Jan 9

My draft of a syllabus statement on a.i. for my writing class, for what it is worth:

A NOTE ON GENERATIVE AI

This class helps you to be a better writer and thinker. Generative AI (ChatGPT and other platforms) is neither writing nor thinking. Any use of AI in this class (whether to write, brainstorm, outline, or summarize) will be considered a violation of academic integrity. It undermines your intellectual development, for one: AI content is often inaccurate or hallucinatory and is always boring, banal, and average. This is by design, as generative AI works by predicting the most obvious or basic sequencing of words. Good writing—writing that is persuasive, powerful, lively, funny, surprising, rousing, insightful, transformative, provocative—requires human work. Human creativity is weird and variable and uneven, but it holds the capacity for growth, revelation, empathy, and brilliance. I urge you not to abandon the glorious experiential potential of human messiness and transformation for the tedium of robot sentences.

One further reason to abjure generative AI, especially in a class on environmental literature: in addition to its counterproductivity to your work as a writer and thinker, AI is enormously environmentally destructive.

12 32

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Aug 16

Excellent to see this resource, @annakornbluh.bsky.social—thank you. (I’ll be updating my syllabus statement from last spring: bsky.app/profile/hest...)

Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · Aug 15

teachers!

excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone.

take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE
against-a-i.com

AGAINST AI

against-a-i.com

2 9

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Aug 9

This is super excellent, Haaris!

Harris Feinsod @feinsod.bsky.social · Aug 8

We're launching a new Tidewater Initiative at JHU. Our research group on working waterfronts and coastal infrastructures includes a new student research lab, courses, programming partnerships with the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, and more in the works. sites.krieger.jhu.edu/tidewater/

Home | The Tidewater Initiative

We are a multidisciplinary research group devoted to study, stewardship, and stories of working waterfronts, coastal infrastructures, and oceans under conditions of globalization and environmental ins...

sites.krieger.jhu.edu

1 4

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Aug 1

self-hugged 🙋‍♀️

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Aug 1

Happy birthday HM

Bananas paragraph from Herman Melville's Mardi: "And here, in this impenetrable retreat, centrally slumbered the universe-rounded, zodiac-belted, horizon-zoned, sea-girt, reef-sashed, mountain-locked, arbor-nested, royalty-girdled, arm-clasped, self-hugged, indivisible Donjalolo, absolute monarch of Juam:—the husk-inhusked meat in a nut; the innermost spark in a ruby; the juice-nested seed in a goldenrinded orange; the red royal stone in an effeminate peach; the insphered sphere of spheres."

Reposted by Hester Blum

ProfKori @profkori.bsky.social · Jul 30

Look at what the fabulous Dr. Sarah Mesle and I are up to!!! We’re offering a seminar at C19's 2026 conference in Cincinnati, Ohio! Proposals aren't due until September 15th, so you've got plenty of time. Spread the word!

Details on how to apply, etc., at www.c19society.org/2026-confere...

1 13 16

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Jul 25

Ooooh that looks excellent

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Jul 25

Ephemera studies is the best

Allegra Rosenberg @tchotchke.bsky.social · Jul 25

let out a very happy sound at the sight of @hesterblum.bsky.social cited in this book about early 20th century female film fangirls ... MY INTERESTS !!!

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Jul 25

Oh wow, this makes me happy, thank you Allegra!! What is the book?

1 1

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Jul 24

Meredith McGill‘s chapter in my edited collection Turns of Event addresses this beautifully! @mlmcgill.bsky.social

1 5

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Jul 5

Well-governed angels the both of them

VictorianLondon @victorianlondon.bsky.social · Jul 5

The romantic fiction you didn't know you wanted to read.

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Jul 4

Nobody in government is monitoring anything but their vile appetites

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Jul 1

My therapist today was asking me about moving from an allegedly purple state to a red state and I was saying that Pennsylvania has not felt like a safe place in a while. Fuck Penn (I’m a PhD alum and will never support Penn again), fuck the state medical systems that are now betraying trans kids.

Yashar Ali 🐘 @yasharali.bsky.social · Jul 1

BREAKING

The University of Pennsylvania has come to an agreement with the Trump administration on what the Department of Education said was its Title IX violations.

This will include stripping trans athlete Lia Thomas of her records, titles, and recognitions.

• UPenn will restore to female athletes all individual UPenn Division I swimming records, titles, or similar recognitions which were misappropriated by male athletes allowed to compete in female categories;
• UPenn will issue a public statement to the University community stating that it will comply with Title IX, specifying that UPenn will not allow males to compete in female athletic programs or occupy
Penn Athletics female intimate facilities;
• The statement will specify that UPenn will adopt biology-based definitions for the words 'male' and 'female' pursuant to Title IX and consistent with President Trump's Executive Orders "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism" and "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports";
• UPenn will post the statement in a prominent location on its main website and on each of its websites for women's athletics;
• UPenn will rescind any guidance which violated Title IX, remove or revise any internal and public-facing statements or documents that are inconsistent with Title IX, and notify all staff and women's athletics of all such rescissions; and
• UPenn will send a personalized letter of apology to each impacted female swimmer.

10 65

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Jun 28

Can’t teach about gender or queer books in schools, can be “100% cool and 0% awkward”

A bus advertising “true girl” which promises to bring “moms and daughters closer to God and to each other,” in teal and pink lettering

At the back of the same bus, in red white and blue lettering, the boys version which is called “born to be brave, a one night father son adventure”

Close up on the profound cringe of the line “100% cool 0% awkward”

1 3

Hester Blum @hesterblum.bsky.social · Jun 27

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.”

1 2