Arielle Zibrak
@zibrak.bsky.social
2.5K followers 1.3K following 540 posts
feminisms, projects, pop culture 📚 | Literary Tour of the US, The Great Courses | 12 Stories by American Women, Penguin Classics | Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures, NYU | Writing Against Reform, UMass Prof @ UWyo - views own 👐www.ArielleZibrak.com👐
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zibrak.bsky.social
Here's what I'm up to these days. SO EXCITED to write this book and talk about how the history of positive thinking in wellness impacts us all. Grateful for my agent @babedylan.bsky.social and my new editor Maria, who rocks.
Announcement of a deal report from Publisher's Marketplace that reads:
American Studies scholar and host of The Great Courses’ Literary Tour of the United States Arielle Zibrak’s WISHING OURSELVES WELL, a compelling look at the origins of the women's wellness guru archetype and "manifestation" movements through the complicated history of the 19th-century American women who pioneered the big business of alternative healing, from Mary Baker Eddy (the founder of Christian Science) to Dr. Alice Bunker Stockham (a sexual pleasure activist and eugenicist), to Maria Goldverg at Liveright, by Ayla Zuraw-Friedland at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency (USCOM).
zibrak.bsky.social
Come hang with us! I am going to show pictures of "Live, Laugh, Love" art and explain how Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poetry impacts your own personal and specific life.
A photograph of the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, a white woman wearing a white dress and holding a wreath garland on top of her head.
Reposted by Arielle Zibrak
longlead.com
Two survivors — George Takei and Jo Anne Naka — recall living in the horse stables at the Santa Anita racetrack before they were moved to their incarceration camps.

Read THE AGE OF INCARCERATION to learn more about Japanese American incarceration from some of the last survivors of it.
Japanese American Incarceration Survivors Remember What the US Forgot
During WWII, President Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act and incarcerated 125,000 Japanese Americans. Eighty years later, some of the camps’ last survivors reflect on lives scarred by injustice.
age-of-incarceration.longlead.com
zibrak.bsky.social
Lovely to see my book reviewed alongside Faye Halpern's in a review essay on realism by Melanie Dawson in ALH. (Two scholars I so admire!) Unfortunately I don't have institutional access yet. Can anyone out there DM a pdf?
academic.oup.com/alh/article-...

#academicsky
Realism’s Vexed Relations with the Popular
Abstract. This essay assesses the centrality of popular idioms such as sentimental sympathy (discussed by Faye Halpern’s The Afterlife of Sympathy) and soc
academic.oup.com
zibrak.bsky.social
Is Christine Baranski literally just the reincarnation of 19th- century New Thought novelist Clara Louise Burnham?
zibrak.bsky.social
Catch me at the Mahindra center next month! The first lecture in the series by Kendra Field was extraordinary. This will be ok. If you can't make it and want to hear about eugenic feminism and positive thinking, invite me to your spot.

mahindrahumanities.harvard.edu/event/ariell...
Arielle Zibrak: Exceptional Thinking: Eugenic Feminism and the Poetics of Positivity | Mahindra Humanities Center
mahindrahumanities.harvard.edu
zibrak.bsky.social
I think we've all had way too much screen time and should be made to play outside for the rest of the year.
Reposted by Arielle Zibrak
Reposted by Arielle Zibrak
milleridriss.bsky.social
I wrote about the groypers and the Fuentes-Kirk fight years ago, in Hate in the Homeland. Cautioning here that there is still a lot to know about the shooter’s motivation, I’m sharing these two paragraphs here to set the history of this fight in context:
zibrak.bsky.social
What reading would recommend of yours or anyone else’s on these topics?
zibrak.bsky.social
Historically, in the United States, has a conservative activist (unelected) been publicly assassinated before?
#academicsky #historysky
zibrak.bsky.social
#academicsky #blacksky
zibrak.bsky.social
Very excited to be a part of this series and looking forward to all the talks this year.
rezekjoe.bsky.social
Thrilled to announce the 25/26 schedule at the American Literature and Culture Seminar at the Mahindra Center at Harvard. Please join us if you are in town for any of these events! Many thanks to my co-organizer @notsorry-sari.bsky.social, and to all our presenters!
American Literature and Culture Seminar, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard
2025-2026 seminar schedule (all events are in-person at 12 Quincy Street, 6pm): 

September 17:  Kendra Field (Tufts/Hutchins Center); response by Tiya Miles (Harvard)

October 15:  Arielle Zibrak (U-Wyoming); response by David Frank Holland (Harvard)

November 12:  Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern/Radcliffe); response by Christopher Pexa (Harvard) 

March 24:  Bonnie Costello (BU); response by Carrie Preston (BU)

April 15:  Sven Beckert (Harvard); response by Kaveh Yazdani (UCONN)
zibrak.bsky.social
People teach it so much, no one wants it out.
zibrak.bsky.social
If you're thinking about Spring adoption already, please consider adding some stories by American women. Grateful for this lovely review by @davidataylor.bsky.social
zibrak.bsky.social
Also @sarahebull.bsky.social seriously cool cart. I'm maybe jealous.
zibrak.bsky.social
Look how happy we humanists are with so little. A mere cart to transport our books and puppets by. How came we to be so vilified?
sarahebull.bsky.social
I’m teaching my book history class across campus this semester, so my wonderful dept bought a giant steel work cart. This is going to make the whole mobile book lab thing so much easier! (Some of my colleagues also use material items, e.g. puppets, for teaching, so useful all around, I hope).
A picture of a very large red steel Milwaukee service cart in my department’s hallway, filled with materials for today’s class (less unwieldy than materials are for some weeks - a baking sheet, clay, aprons, clean up stuff, a bag containing chopsticks and gloves for people with sensory sensitivity, scrolls, wax tablets.
Reposted by Arielle Zibrak
zibrak.bsky.social
Autism will definitely keep asking, though.
atrupar.com
“We’re coming up with the answers for autism” — Trump
zibrak.bsky.social
The whole Wharton/James canon needs to be adjusted for inflation.
Reposted by Arielle Zibrak