Tag: #medievaltwitter

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Life After Twitter

I began using Twitter in 2012. My first tweet was about the death of the unconventional Inquisition historian Benzion Netanyahu and I joined the site because I wanted to share the news, knew that none of my Facebook friends would particularly care, and had a vague sense that academics hung out on Twitter.

It’s been just over ten years, and my time on Twitter is evidently over. While I was setting up my (gloriously purple!) new iPhone, I accidentally disconnected my account from the two-factor authentication app that I have been using since Elon Musk limited 2fa-by-text message to paying subscribers. I’m locked out of my account, the three employees left at Twitter can’t verify my identity, and that’s that. 

Early on, Twitter was a lifeline for me. The #medievaltwitter community really helped me conceive of myself as a medievalist rather than as any of the other things my odd-duck, interdisciplinary, multilingual self might be.  I met folks who were supportive and encouraging as I raced against the clock to finish my first book and earn tenure. And it was a huge privilege to be able to listen in on and begin to participate in conversations in other corners of the wide academic medieval world. 

Transformative as it initially was, those benefits didn’t last. I grew increasingly frustrated with folks in the English-medieval world who have come to believe that the myth of the magic medievalist (which holds true for teaching — we can teach absolutely anything we’re asked to at the undergraduate level, and we’re often asked to teach everything before the 18th century) holds for research as well, and that being an Anglophone medievalist qualifies you to pronounce ex cathedra on everything from Arabic paleography to Ethiopic chronicles, even if you don’t read the languages. It ranged from disappointing to despair-inducing to watch my own hard-won expertise and that of my colleagues totally denigrated and disregarded because any medievalist can do anything that any other medievalist does. 

By the time the Musk-induced mass exodus from the platform began, I’d already bowed out of most of the #medievaltwitter conversations by now, mostly enjoyed the platform for enthusiastic recommendations of new-to-me books, and had begun branching out into following poetry twitter. My view wasn’t as apocalyptic as some; I don’t imagine the site truly going under any time soon. But all the same, I’m out.

Forty-eight hours off the site have been pleasantly quiet. I might create a new account and try to recreate my community of readers with fascinating and wide-ranging taste, and of Arabists, who never doubt the importance of actually being able to read Arabic before having an opinion on what a text says. But that won’t be at least until the fall, if at all. Right now I’m enjoying the quiet. I’m increasingly burned out, both because of changes in the pastoral care responsibilities we have for post-pandemic students and, mostly, because of the increase in electronic communication that the pandemic forced. I’m happy to have one less thing to check, one less set of notifications. 

I’m also happy about the prospect of returning to longer form writing here. I’ve been thinking for a long time about returning to blogging more seriously, but between Twitter for short things and trying to do more public-facing, proper, edited, in-a-periodical publishing for longer things, I was at a loss for how to use this space. So hopefully that will become clearer. 

It’s the end of an era for me, but between the Musk takeover and a lot of changes that I have coming down the pike in my personal and professional lives, it’s a good moment to mark and make a change, even if it was all because of a tech glitch. 

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Richard Wagner, Michael Camille, and Me

I edit my CV down. Nothing I did in grad school is there anymore. The undergraduate senior essay prize I was so proud of came off when I got my first job. Talks I’ve given in more minor circumstances or that I’ve given more than once aren’t all there anymore. I keep a running complete list in my own files, but nobody looking at my vita needs to be bored with every last conference presentation I’ve ever made, and now that I’m (shudder) a mid-career academic, the things I did very early on just don’t matter that much anymore.

I’m editing my CV now for the end of the academic year and in anticipation of being able to share a new accomplishment when it’s announced publicly in the coming days. It’s a good stock-taking exercise, too. I realized that this year is the year that my book reviews all spiraled out of control into full-length essays, which has occasioned a chance to think about the kind of work I want to do and how I might situate myself as a historiographer as well as a cultural historian.

Soul-searching vis-a-vis the field of Medieval Studies and its history and implication in the current edition of the culture wars has returned to the fore in the wake of a NYTimes article published over the weekend that presented issues of race and white supremacy in and around the field as a series of social media spats as much as anything.

In the wake of this, I’m in New York to see the first half of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Met Opera. (The logistics are complicated; I had initially planned to be back to New York from Michigan by now and bought my tickets based on that assumption. I’m not, but I was able to schedule some meetings on campus in conjunction with a workshop I co-led at Cornell over the weekend, such that the timing worked out for me to be able to at least see the first half. Be that as it may.) Wagner is, of course, all kinds of implicated in genocidal white supremacy. But I love the music and, as Ernst Bloch (whose Avodat Kodesh I also love), I’m not prepared to cede it to the Nazis. The Ring is not particularly subtle, which is part of why I like it. It’s big and bombastic. It’s also very obvious the ways in which it originated in German nationalist folklore and how and why it appealed to Hitler. I can appreciate the music while utterly renouncing the convictions of the composer and the ways in which his work was put to political use. That’s what I meant when I wrote this tweet:

I was almost immediately questioned aggressively by the two directors of an open-access academic press who tweet in the voice of a corporate “we” that I find oddly disquieting. My interactions with them in the past have begun with equal measures of bombast, self-righteousness, and aggression. It, as the kids these days say, escalated quickly.

I’m not sure why this press feels that it is the position to paternalistically “offer” me the “opportunity” to explain myself or is entitled to an answer, what one of its editorial directors hating Wagner has to do with it, or why my disinterest in talking to a hostile, disembodied, corporate “we” in 280-character bursts means that I’m a white supremacist, but here we are.

As much as white, Christian progressives in my field are signing onto a kind of “cancel culture” that demands renunciation of works of art created by despicable people who hold views inimical to their individual lives, I don’t have that luxury. If I were to give up every work of literature written by an anti-Semite, the horizons of my written world would become small and impoverished. (Don’t tell, but I love T.S. Eliot, too.) I’ve written, too, about how as an Arabist I don’t have the luxury of not using a dictionary that that was written for the express purpose of translating Mein Kampf into Arabic. As a Hispanist, I don’t have the luxury of not dealing with archivists and librarians who held positions, and gladly, in Franco’s government. It’s easy and satisfying, I’m sure, to renounce all of these things and be done with them. It’s harder but more necessary to live in the world as it is, working to mitigate the harms of reality.

I was really proud to have been awarded the Michael Camille Memorial Essay Prize in 2014 for work I did on the only surviving manuscript of Judah ibn Tibbon’s ethical will. To me, receiving an award named after an art historian affirmed the interdisciplinary nature of my work and my ability to speak to scholars trained in many fields of study, which, as the odd-duck Arabist in the back corner of a Spanish department, I have always seen as an important part of my academic portfolio. It was rewarding to have that work and those skills validated publicly. But the award is made by the journal Postmedieval and the Babel Working group, both of which are adjacent to Punctum Books and have heavy involvement from one of its editorial directors. As proud as I am of that award, I don’t really want a prize awarded by a body headed by someone who will so quickly and inaccurately fling about accusations of white supremacy, and fling them at me. So at least for the time being, in this round of editing down my CV, I’m going to remove that award. I already have tenure. I don’t need to prove myself through my CV in the way that I used to. In this instance I do have the luxury to be able to stand on principle now.

Lucky her she’s not a medievalist, but Roxanne Gay posted this recently:

If I could find a way to write this all up without making it sound simultaneously bonkers and like nothing more than Twitter-gone-wrong (as if a Twitter spat were the telos) I’d write to the editorial board and, five years on, decline the prize and return the money that came with the award. I’m still thinking it through, and I don’t know that I have the rhetorical skill to pull it off; Twitter truly warps a person’s thinking and writing when it all comes to this. The state of play right now is crazy-making. Instead, as it stands, I think I will handle this by making a contribution in the amount of the Camille prize, in Michael Camille’s memory, to an organization that I have worked for and support regularly that fights discrimination from within my own broader religious community directed at non-Orthodox Jews and, especially, Jews of Color.

I try to take seriously the responsibility of honoring the memory of the scholars who shaped my thinking and my work. (And in fact, another piece of my complicated appreciation of Wagner is due to the fact that he was the favored composer of one of my teachers, who not only taught me how to be a cultural historian, but also a human being. And so I listen to Wagner for myself, but also in honor of her memory.) Part of the reason I was so proud to have received an award in his memory is because it was his book on the 19th-century renovations of Notre Dame (it’s really all coming crashing, coincidentally, down in the last few weeks, no?) that introduced me to the ideas of medievalism and reception history as fields of inquiry. But for right now, I think that the best choice I can make is to take the award, and his name as it is associated with bad actors in the field who seem invested in maligning me, off my CV for a while and hope that better days will come when I can return it to its place.

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Twitter and Tenure

This is a long-form reflection on my short-form commitments. In other words, while I’m not disappearing from Twitter altogether, I’m going to be cutting back significantly on my usage of the platform. I took a break from academic social media — from #medievaltwitter and from the Facebook groups populated by medievalists — as some of the discussions over the role in Medieval Studies of scholars trained in Arabic and Islamic Studies became infuriatingly narrow and dismissive of the kinds of expertise that my most immediate colleagues and I have spent long and difficult years cultivating in favor of more overarching (and, theoretically, unifying) theoretical approaches. The zenith of this break was a week I spent out of the country with no access to the internet whatsoever. After the better part of a month more or less away from #medievaltwitter and its ancillaries, my mood was dramatically improved and my head far clearer. Even as those fractious conversations have slipped down everyone’s timelines, I realize that even before that the medium was taking a toll on me.

I’m finding that medieval social media has become tedious (with a few notable exceptions, always) even as the Middle Ages and its pursuit have grown more topical and relevant of late. The people with whom I very much agree politically have been reduced to saying the same thing over and over again. This is not to say that those things don’t need to be said to the wider world — they clearly do — it’s that as an in-group professional conversation, the constant repetition of the same rhetoric has lost its interest for me. I’m ready for a space to explore new ideas not only about my scholarship but about how best to use the popular interest in medievalism to help to support a liberal vision of civil society; I’m frustrated that #medievaltwitter is becoming a space where political agreement is coming to signify and require intellectual agreement and streamlining.

I didn’t initially think of my withdrawal from social media as a consequence of earning tenure, but upon reflection I think it’s connected. (Actually, I think it says something that both of my post-tenure trips were to places where I was completely cut off from internet access for a week at a time. I didn’t just need a break from having been living at my desk nonstop since 2010, but from all of the social consequences of that.)

I suspect that my post-tenure self no longer needs the instant gratification that can sometimes come from being a part of a social media-medievalist peer group and can instead feel a part of a medievalist community that is a better fit. #medievaltwitter very much reflects the fact that the field of Medieval Studies is fundamentally allied, in disciplinary terms, with English literature. There’s nothing wrong with English literature, it’s just not my scene.  My participation in that community made sense when my primary concern was earning tenure, when the main thing taking up space in my head was academic per se rather than the subject of my work, and when the people I saw as my closest colleagues were those who, ironically, were at a remove from my work and could be supportive because they wouldn’t be adjudicating it. In stepping back from Twitter I lose that unique sustained immediacy of discussion that can sustain a person in the isolation of the tenure track and the instantaneous approval of a global cheering section of colleagues. But with tenure I don’t feel like I might be losing a tenuous grip on my professional and intellectual relationships by not having them reinforced daily. I have an easier sense of who my colleagues really are; they are not in English literature and they’re not going anywhere. They’re the Hispanists and Arabists who speak the same intellectual language I speak (and speak and read the same human ones). They’re the ones I’m looking forward to talking through my next project the next time we meet, whenever that might be, on the project’s terms and on ours; and they’re the ones with whom I can brainstorm productively about how to use our specific kind of expertise to help reach out to and educate the public.

I am so grateful to the senior colleagues who handle their social media presence with real grace, passion, and anti-hierarchical collegiality, but by this point I think that I have learned what I can from them in that arena. Junior tweeps, if you need anything read or need job market advice or anything, don’t think twice about asking. I’m still around. If you need another voice in your cheering section, just say so and I will lend mine. I want to continue modeling the best of #medievaltwitter that I’ve learned from the senior tweeps, but for myself I need to hang back from the daily fray.

I think that from here on out I’ll be doing more retweeting than tweeting. And I’m going to treat the platform more like a Sunday long-read that I’ll catch up on intensively once (or twice or so) a week. Even with the new expanded character limit, I don’t find this platform to be conducive to thoughtful discussion anymore. I expect that I’ll treat this as a space for checking in with tweeps who really have become my friends over the last few years, for a little banter, for sharing news and articles; but it’s not going to be my discussion space going forward. That’s not a comment on how I read medieval marginalia (just to preempt that accusation, that is sometimes thrown around when others have come to similar conclusions…) and it’s not to say that it can’t be a useful platform for that for some people and for some conversations — it’s just not working for me anymore. I don’t expect I’ll jump in for long, involved conversations with either academics or lay people.

My head, post-tenure, is clear enough to be ready for narrative rather than for a series of salvos and my internet usage is going to begin to reflect that. Vale.