Why are the #humanities dying? Why is enrollment dropping precipitously, why are departments shutting down from lack of funding and support? A 🧵by a former English professor: The answer: the humanities are becoming more and more irrelevant, and its stakeholders are refusing to critically address its irrelevance.

In my past life as an academic, one of the things people would do is examine my tweets for subtext whenever they were trying to say 💩 things about me to discredit this in some way. But the funny thing is as my friend @jessifer said to me when he encountered those folks, “Have you even met Adeline? She already says all the things she’s not supposed to say! What is the need to look at subtext?” 😂😂😂

Things I do not miss about academic discussions now that I’ve left, a 🧵:

- In most discussions I’ve been in I see that participants are often barely listening to one another. They are just waiting for their turn to speak and show off their brilliance. It’s why these are often not real discussions, because participants rarely deeply engage with one another. It’s mostly peacocking.

This is something I’ve wanted to say to well-meaning liberal white women who are in senior positions for a while. I’m saying it now because my voice has been freed after winning the book award recently. Dear liberal white women: I know that often you try to support and promote women of color as part of your commitment to #antiracism. It is great that you do this, but:

I ugly cried when I first read this email from my book publisher @EileenAJoy about Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, upon learning that my book with @dorothyk98 won the @AmerStudiesAssn #digitalhumanities book award: a thread 🧵 The recognition with the prize has been really healing. The toxicity of my field caused me a lot of mental health stress and started a debilitating depression.

Origin Story: How and why I started this book with @dorothyk98 that just won the @AmerStudiesAssn #2022ASA #digitalhumanities Book Prize - a long thread 🧵 + When I started this collection about 8 years ago, digital humanities had just started getting a lot of attention after years of not being taken seriously as “humanities computing.” Suddenly a ton of money was being poured into this field.