Jenny Leetsch
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jennyleetsch.bsky.social
Jenny Leetsch
@jennyleetsch.bsky.social
1.4K followers 650 following 390 posts
juniorprofessor of anglophone literatures and cultures (university of trier) • views my own • she/her • #firstgen

website: https://www.jenniferleetsch.com/

“soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost, but climb."
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jennyleetsch.bsky.social
liebe @rennmausinuk.bsky.social, hier noch einmal ganz offiziell: ich bin ✨hin und weg✨, gleich zweimal absolut ins schwarze getroffen! um die patti smith autobiographie schon oft im laden herumgeschlichen, und super gespannt auf das debut von tochi eze! danke-danke-danke! #litgangwichteln
photograph of two books laying on a grey couch: patti smith’s new memoir bread of angels, featuring a black and white cover (a picture of the artist, hands raised, in midst of foliage), and the novel this kind of trouble by tochi exe, with an orange cover featuring leaves on a branch, which include the title and author name.
December 21, 2025 at 1:54 PM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
this is not only a fantastic article, it’s also helped me discover this graphic/comic biography of one of my favourite artists!
Cover of a book, a comic biography of artist Ana Mendieta (published in 2011); the cover is black with white letters, in the lower right hand corner there is a black and white drawing of a naked female figure hugged by a skeleton, both sit in a bed of leaves which also blow out from them and scatter across the cover.
December 17, 2025 at 7:37 AM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
mit dem postgang gleich mein eigenes wichtelgeschenk in empfang nehmen dürfen! bin schon sehr gespannt, warte mit dem auspacken aber noch bis weihnachten, glaube ich. aufregend!! #litgangwichteln
photo of an unopened parcel, signed with the hashtag litgangwichteln, next to an advent wreath.
December 9, 2025 at 1:56 PM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
das #litgangwichteln packerl macht sich die tage auf den weiten weg. dieses jahr sind die verpackungs-vibes weniger weihnachtlich, dafür umso thematisch passender zum buch. ich hoffe so sehr, meine wichtel-person hat es noch nicht gelesen! 🌱
a wrapped present, viewed from above. the wrapping paper is midnight blue, the card is a very light turquoise and has gold-embossed stems and flowers on it. the present is tied with a green ribbon that looks like tiny leaves.
December 7, 2025 at 6:18 PM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
wish me luck 😂
November 6, 2025 at 10:01 AM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
ahhhhh so happy!! just signed the contract for my second book with EUP @edinburghup.bsky.social!! "Writing Black Atlantic Ecologies: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Black Life Writing beyond the Colonial Anthropocene" is now officially ✨✨ ✨ 𝒻𝑜𝓇𝓉𝒽𝒸𝑜𝓂𝒾𝓃𝑔 ✨✨ ✨
Screenshot of the contract, showing the book's title and the series, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures.
September 9, 2025 at 12:56 PM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
toll!!! ich hab diesen urlaub auch alle gemocht, die ich gelesen hab, außer eins, das musste ich wieder weglegen, das war einfach zu zynisch (rejection: kurzgeschichtensammlung, die ganz nah ranbohrt an das schlimmste im menschen; war einfach nicht süd-italien/strand-urlaub material 😅)
September 2, 2025 at 4:29 PM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
summer term done! 👏👏👏 my first as junior prof @unitrier.bsky.social, and it was a really really good one. now onto this 348-page baby!! in collab with wonderful @dependencybonn.de colleagues. (other book baby needs to be patient a little while longer… 😅)
photograph of the title page of an edited volume, showing the title: “ecological interdependencies: strong asymmetrical relations and more-than-human worlds,” edited by zeynep y. gökçe and jennifer leetsch.
July 17, 2025 at 6:51 AM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
after a couple of stressful weeks (thanks to a nasty flu and the ensuing admin/email pile-up), I've finally had a chance to look at the first anonymous reviews for my second book, and I am just so moved and humbled by how closely, carefully (and caringly) these scholars engaged with my work... 🙏🙏🙏
meme featuring spongebob squarepants in a scene where he gestures with his hands to create a rainbow. The rainbow arches above his head, and the caption at the top of the image reads "PEER REVIEW" in bold white letters with a black outline.
July 4, 2025 at 10:24 AM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
Meine Gedanken zu ozeanischen Grenzen und #WarsanShire morgen bei der Ringvorlesung “Grenzen – Grenzräume – Grenzbegegnungen” @unitrier.bsky.social. Alle Infos, auch zur Online-Teilnahme, hier: www.uni-trier.de/studium/weit...
June 3, 2025 at 9:39 AM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
📢 JOB KLAXON 📢 Come work with me: I am advertising a PhD position in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (50%, for 3 years initially, starting date: September 2025) - please share widely! www.uni-trier.de/fileadmin/or...
May 2, 2025 at 9:09 AM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
Big news! I’ll be taking up a Professorship for Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Trier University next month. Beyond excited, a bit nervous and, to be quite honest, very relieved—I feel like I haven’t really wrapped my head around this whole no-longer-a-precarious-academic-thing yet…
Collage of three different photos: the top one shows a brown, red and golden mural of the old Roman city of Trier that’s part of Trier Central station. The bottom left is a selfie in which I am smiling and holding the official appointment documents. The bottom right is a photo of the wintery Moselle river that flows through Trier.
January 29, 2025 at 4:51 PM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
Very glad to see this out in the world! My colleague Sinah Kloß and I edited this special issue on indentureship and embodiment, with a range of fantastic contributions, pedagogical interventions and a curatorial response. It's available open access here: www.scienceopen.com/journal-issu...
Cover of the 4:2 issue of the Journal of Intentureship and its Legacies ToC 1. Sinah Theres Kloß and Jennifer Leetsch: Introduction: Indentured bodies/embodiments of indenture 2. Morag Flora Wright: Promiscuous, diseased and unfit: Discourses and embodiments of Indian indentured women across the British Empire, c. 1840–1920 3. Christopher L. Ballengee: Ghostly (re)visions: Embodying the Indian Caribbean churile 4. Rupa Pillai: Teaching how to critically read Indo-Caribbean bodies in nineteenth-century postcards 5. Baishali Ghosh: Indentured impressions: The embodied materiality of artistic practices in Mauritius 6. Sandrine Soukaï: Embodied performances of (post-) indenture: Creolization of Indian dance, music and nadrons in Guadeloupe 7. Grace Aneiza Ali: Indentured bodies/embodiments of indenture: A curatorial response 8. Bethan Holt: Book Review -- Why Should We Be Called ‘Coolies’?: The End of Indian Indentured Labour by Radica Mahase 9. Joy Mahabir: Poem -- Rumshop Illuminations Nicholas Dornellas, Adrian–w/ void, 2022, hand woven & quilted screenprint using appliqué technique on assorted fabrics, 60 × 40.5 in. Courtesy of the artist. nicholasdornellas.com (Detail) Alka Dass, Family Heirloom, cyanotype and thread drawing, 2023, 100 × 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist. @alka_the_artist.
January 22, 2025 at 12:32 PM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
Screenshot of the article with the following quote highlighted: “But there’s something about literature, an art form that evokes consciousness while being composed of language, which for many (though not all) of us is the medium in which consciousness makes itself felt. Literature is fractal in this way – it is about, among other things, the thing that it’s about other things with. One text can hold seemingly (though not actually) everything.”
December 12, 2024 at 6:58 AM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
ok konnte doch nicht mehr warten-die neugiede war einfach zu groß! und was soll ich sagen? MY FIRST PRATCHETT!! als absoluter sci-fi/fantasy fan war das bisher eine meiner grössten lücken. und dann auch noch feminismus + stereotype gender rollen als thema? CAN’T WAIT! danke danilo! #litgangwichteln
Hardcover of Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment
December 7, 2024 at 9:15 AM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
#litgangwichteln das buch macht sich, gut eingemummelt, morgen auf den weg! 🤍
Picture of a wrapped book: the wrapping paper has a dark blue and creamy white William Morris flower pattern, there’s a dark blue envelope and light golden gift ribbon and a straw star pendant. The present is laid in a paper box and surrounded by crumpled paper wrapping to keep it safe during transport.
December 1, 2024 at 3:06 PM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
Show me a picture on your phone that has your energy that isn’t a selfie
Picture of a Halloween puppet: it’s a large, perhaps life-size, green witch with a black hat, green skin, yellow eyes, only a few teeth and wild tangled hair. There is a white sheet of paper taped to her side stating “Please do not play with the witch. She is fragile.”
November 28, 2024 at 3:18 PM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
Embroidery hoop featuring, one at the top and one at the bottom, round flowers in vintage pink wool, each framed by two smaller flowers in purple wool. In-between the sentence, in pink: "Girls just wanna have funding for scientific research." The second part of the sentence switches to a dark green-blue in the middle of the word funding, fund-ing, thus playing on "girls just wanna have fun".
November 28, 2024 at 3:10 PM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
Hooked from the start. Brilliant reflection on the impossibilities of the archive and the possibilities of art.
Screenshot of the LRB article, with the following passage highlighted: “This is what historians call the problem of the archive. Our surviving written and visual materials from the past are not neutral. They don’t do equal justice to different people and groups. On the contrary, they perpetuate the disparities of the past. And this is a particular problem for the era of the transatlantic slave trade. Millions on millions of men, women and children were kidnapped, enslaved, systematically abused and murdered yet the only now remaining traces of their lives were created by people who treated them as disposable ciphers. We have to engage with this hostile and dehumanising evidence in order to speak about the enslaved and the silenced because we have almost nothing else, but it’s extremely problematic material.” If the painting was nothing more than a realistic portrait of an 18th-century Black scholar in his study, that would be extraordinary enough. It’s the earliest such image in Western art, the first self-presentation of a Black person as an intellectual. But in fact, it is much more than that. It is a very detailed message from Francis Williams, which its original viewers would have immediately recognised. It says not just: ‘This is who I am!’ It also says: ‘Look! This is what happened, and this is what I did!’ This painting commemorates an event, one with huge significance for Williams – and not just for him, but for everyone across the 18th-century Enlightenment world.
November 28, 2024 at 8:38 AM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
the inaugural issue of the new open-access journal Public Humanities is out — nodding along to the brief piece by Susan McWilliams Barndt, “Why Study the Humanities When People Are Dying?” www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
“Cambridge University Press is launching a new journal, Public Humanities, which seeks to bridge the connection between the academic and everyday life. The journal will provide a new space for scholars, students, activists, policymakers and general readers to explore human habits and histories, art and ideas, language and beliefs – past, present, and future. An open access publication, the journal will demonstrate the breadth, depth, and value of the humanities in its varied contributions to public life, and will engage with a wide range of issues, authors, and readers. This means the journal’s remit ranges from historical examples of the humanities at work in the world, to theoretical debates about the field today; from governmental policy related to the humanities, to scholarly interventions in ongoing social problems.” Description of the journal on the Cambridge University Website, link here: https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/about-us/news-and-blogs/scholarship-with-fire-and-footnotes-introducing-public-humanities
November 24, 2024 at 4:05 PM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
A few of my recently acquired non-fiction books for the bedside table to tide me over these dark dark times (politically, seasonally).
An image of a few books laid out on a wooden table, among them: Dionne Brand’s Salvage, Maggie Nelson’s Like Love, Olivia Laing’s The Garden against Time, and Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years' War on Palestine. Also pictured: a pink Kindle and a bookmark from Utrecht bookshop De Utrechtse Boekenbar.
November 19, 2024 at 7:03 PM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
From time to time, they vote.
From time to time, language dies.

—Fady Joudah
October 14, 2024 at 7:53 AM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
The special issue closes with an exploratory coda in which Hannah Nelson-Teutsch offers an approach she calls “Scrappy Reading; Or, Reading the Breakdown in a Small Place” which moves intimately with and through Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place.
September 27, 2024 at 2:26 PM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
My own article on “Oceanic Kinship and Coastal Ecologies: More-than-Human Encounters in Cristina Ali Farah’s ‘A Dhow Crosses the Sea’” connects oceanic kinship networks to colonial histories, offering a vision of Black ecological solidarity across more-than-human realms.
September 27, 2024 at 2:26 PM
jennyleetsch.bsky.social
Arunima Bhattacharya’s “Beyond the Developmental Narrative of Postcolonial Nation-Time: The Materialities of Water and Geological Faultlines in Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing” offers a geo-ecological reading to highlight storytelling as a means of discovering empathy.
September 27, 2024 at 2:26 PM