Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 9h

We could hear them laughing

Jack Jenkins @jackjenkins.me · 9h

Gonna be thinking about this lede for a minute.

(RNS) — Last month, the Rev. David Black stood in front of a Chicago-area U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility and spread his arms wide. Adorned in all black and wearing a clerical collar, the pastor looked up at a group of masked, heavily armed ICE agents on the roof and began to pray.

“I invited them to repentance,” Black, a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), said in an interview. “I basically offered an altar call. I invited them to come and receive that salvation, and be part of the kingdom that is coming.”

But when Black began to lower his arms a few seconds later, the agents responded to his spiritual plea by firing pepper balls, or chemical agents that cause eye irritation and respiratory distress, video footage shows. One struck Black in the head, exploding into a puff of white pepper smoke and forcing him to his knees. Fellow demonstrators rushed to his aid, and as the pastor rubbed his face in pain, the agents continued to fire.

“We could hear them laughing,” Black said.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 15h

fascist violence 🤝 real estate capital

flipinidaho @flipinidaho.bsky.social · 17h

southsideweekly.com/federal-agen...

The building is in a 27 million dollar foreclosure filed by Wells Fargo. The next day, Wells Fargo filed an emergency motion for receivership. The fascist regime kindly emptied the building for donor Wells Fargo.

Federal Agents Storm South Shore Building, Detaining Families and Children

Families were woken by flashbangs and helicopters as hundreds of federal agents raided their homes. Days later, neighbors are still searching for the missing.

southsideweekly.com

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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · 19h

Obviously signing Trump’s compact is the death knell for a university, but the fact that any of them are even *considering* it exposes something deeply rotten at the heart of their leadership. It should disqualify them forever.

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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Johanna Winant @johannawinant.bsky.social · 1d

I’m shilling CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY hard because I’m so proud of it —specifically because it, like every close reading, is the product of a community and an offering to a community.
@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social
and I collaborated with each other and also 22 brilliant contributors.

stack of copies of CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

i love his writing (CL's) so much!! 💫 [comet not coming back]

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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

kristinmahoney.bsky.social @kristinmahoney.bsky.social · 1d

I loved collaborating with my academic sibling @nathankhensley.bsky.social (along with some of my very favorite Victorianists) to recognize the work of our fantastic advisor and mentor Kathy Psomiades. Read her book!

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

"Caring about thought in time means caring about scholarship."

Please allow yourself the pleasure of reading Kathy Psomiades, reading a bunch of other people, reading her award-winning book, *Primitive Marriage* (cluster of response-essays now out in VLC)

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Article header:
THINKING IN TIME
Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Duke University

Caring about thought in time means caring
about scholarship as well—it has always seemed strange to me that the call
to deepen and enrich our readings of the literature of the past so often
goes hand in hand with a shallow and impoverished reading of the texts of
our more recent critical past, as if we could throw away the past fifty years
of reading practice to encounter the text in all its purity. This is not so
much an ethics for me—though I think we might inquire about what it
means if you have different ethics for reading one kind of text than
another—but a problem of misrecognition of our own thinking and
reading.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

amazing that acls can write in a single straightforward paragraph what not a single university or group of them together can find the juice to say out loud

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

you will absolutely *love* this book TWB, i guarantee it 💜

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

Thinking in Time (Response), by Kathy Alexis Psomiades

www.cambridge.org/core/service...

Thinking in Time
KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADES
Duke University, North Carolina, United States
I
T is an extraordinary pleasure to be read so carefully by people whose
work has shaped your own. The people I read are always the imaginary
audience in my head—so to have some of them as a real audience is
amazing. And they have made me see my own work in a new way,
particularly the things about it that are odd, things I’ve lived with for so
long that I don’t really notice them.

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

A World Without Fathers, by me

www.cambridge.org/core/service...

A World Without Fathers
NATHAN K. HENSLEY
Georgetown University, Washington, DC, United States
“CAN ideas transcend their spatial and temporal origins”? This
question opens the most recent book by Martin Jay, the seminal
historian of the Frankfurt School.1 You perked up when I wrote “seminal,”
and I chose that word because the fraught distinction between genesis
and validity, in Jay’s language, or history and theory, in Kathy Psomiades’s,
is common to these two projects. But the fatherly aspiration to confirm
proper conceptual patrimony—to secure the origin of ideas—is precisely
the impulse Primitive Marriage thinks against.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

Time for Sex, by Talia Schaffer (not open access, alas; @taliaschaffer.bsky.social)

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage argues that Victorian thinkers used consent as the turning point of history, changing our reading of the marriage plot.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

Primal Scenes, by Zach Samalin (@zachsamalin.bsky.social)

www.cambridge.org/core/service...

Primal Scenes
ZACHARY SAMALIN
New York University, United States
A MONG its many achievements, Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage
complicates and enriches our understanding of the theoretical
inheritance of the nineteenth century. The book’s central claim is that
the Victorian anthropology of marriage had an outsized effect on the
development not only of later cultural and structuralist anthropology but
of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Foucauldian historiography
of sexuality, feminist theory (including Marxist feminist theory), and
queer theory as well.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

Modernity Stories II, by Ian Duncan (not open access, alas)

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Abstract
Primitive Marriage analyzes the conjectural history installed in Victorian anthropology and taken up by novelists, in which sex drives a civilizational progress from domination and force to liberal relations of exchange, contract, and consent. Kathy Psomiades’s act of critical reflection doubles fin-de-siècle anthropology’s reflexive turn upon its own investments in symbol and representation. Her argument models an ethically and politically responsible criticism that restores the difference of past cultural formations, viewed as unfinished, potential, and manifold in their bearing on our present.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

Modernity Stories, by Mary Jean Corbett

www.cambridge.org/core/service...

Modernity Stories
MARY JEAN CORBETT
Miami University, Ohio, United States
I
T goes almost without saying that Primitive Marriage is a considerable
achievement, long in the making and well worth the wait—but I’ll say it
anyway. For the deep dive it makes into the emergence of an
anthropology of marriage around 1860; for its brilliant revisioning of
the marriage plot in both anthropological and fictional registers; and for
its ambitious rethinking of key terms in fiction, anthropology, and
feminist theory, important terms such as “consent” and “contract,”
Primitive Marriage warrants our close attention.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

Introduction: Primitive Marriage in Modern Times, by Kristin Mahoney (@kristinmahoney.bsky.social)

www.cambridge.org/core/service...

Special Cluster: Primitive Marriage in Modern Times
KRISTIN MAHONEY
Michigan State University, United States
INTRODUCTION
I
N Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual
Modernity (2023), Kathy Psomiades shows us how Victorian novels
and Victorian anthropology theorized modernity in sexual terms, using
sexuality, as Psomiades puts it, to “tell what time it is,” locating cultures
within histories of progress according to their visions of marriage and
consent.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

"Caring about thought in time means caring about scholarship."

Please allow yourself the pleasure of reading Kathy Psomiades, reading a bunch of other people, reading her award-winning book, *Primitive Marriage* (cluster of response-essays now out in VLC)

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

The chairman of COP28 was the managing director of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC)!

Patrick Galey @patrickgaley.bsky.social · 1d

A hill I will die on was that ADNOC implanted industry language verbatim in the negotiated COP28 outcome, painting gas as a "transition fuel"

This is, as I warned, now being envoked by petrostates as diplomatic cover for doing what they planned all along www.climatechangenews.com/2025/10/01/r...

Russia justifies fossil gas use by citing contentious COP28 loophole

In Dubai two years ago, Russia pushed for a clause on "transitional fuels" which its new UN climate plan uses to justify gas consumption

www.climatechangenews.com

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 2d

hey a few days ago we did a walkthrough of the @navsa2025.bsky.social hotel —the Omni Shoreham, in Woodley Park— and it really is a gorgeous, art deco monument (built 1930). Can’t wait to see a bunch of smart Victorianists here in November 🤩

navsa.georgetown.edu

Main lobby of Omni Shoreham hotel Washington DC

Restaurant w view of patio, Omni Shoreham hotel in DC

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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Maebh Long @maebhlong.bsky.social · 2d

Auckland university is hiring a Lecturer (that’s Assistant Prof for all you Americans) in English, specialising in the long nineteenth century, to a permanent position commencing before Semester 1, 2026 (or by negotiation). Focus is nineteenth century fiction - details below!

Lecturer - English

Company Description: Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of AucklandThe University of Auckland is New Zealand’s pre-eminent University, with a turnover of $1.1bn, including research revenue of over $...

jobs.smartrecruiters.com

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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 3d

Resolution of the University of Virginia Faculty Senate (thus not institutional policy and entirely non-binding, but still inspirational):

Resolution Opposing the
"Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education"
WHEREAS the United States Secretary of Education has requested that the University of Virginia enter into a "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education", and WHEREAS the Compact contains provisions antithetical to the mission and traditions of the University, and
WHEREAS the Compact contains provisions which endanger the independence and integrity of the University, and
WHEREAS the compact likely violates state and federal law, and infringes upon the constitutional rights of members of the University community, and WHEREAS the University of Virginia exemplifies American academic values of the highest standard, including universal right to free speech and the cultivation of academic freedom; therefore
BE IT RESOLVED that the Faculty Senate of the University of Virginia firmly opposes this Compact as written and calls upon Interim President Mahoney and the Board of Visitors to also reject this Compact outright as well as any similar proposal compromising the mission, values, and independence of the University.
Feature Date:
Friday, October 3, 2025

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d

i love this ! 💙

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d

I would read the hell out of that book!

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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Johanna Winant @johannawinant.bsky.social · 3d

it's nice to think of the genre of the gothic generally -- that we live among ruins because of state divestment, except now everything and not just abbeys -- as actually a possibly a home improvement show

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d

I love this idea, Johanna— the neoliberal gothic. You gotta write that up!!? So long as my boy JR can get a mention

Page of Kelmscott Press edition of THE STONES OF VENICE by John Ruskin, from Wikimedia Commons, showing chapter “The Nature of the Gothic”

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d

A beautiful but flawed thing that burns down and seems almost irredeemably damaged can be rebuilt, maybe even improved—useful allegory for our times!

Penny Fielding @penfielding.bsky.social · 3d

Notre Dame has spruced up pretty well

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