Chloe Ahmann
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chloeahmann.bsky.social
Chloe Ahmann
@chloeahmann.bsky.social
2.3K followers 1.5K following 83 posts
anthropologist studying industrial pasts and environmental futures // author of futures after progress: hope and doubt in late industrial baltimore // bingo enthusiast

https://anthropology.cornell.edu/chloe-ahmann
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chloeahmann.bsky.social
Ahem, may I interrupt all the unraveling to share a lil news
Email from the Anthropology Department Chair reads: Dear Chloe, I am delighted to share that I have just been informed that the provost has approved your tenure case. The final step is the board of trustees, but that is just a formality. So you can count on being an Associate Professor with indefinite tenure as of July 1. Congratulations, and good work!!
May 7, 2025 at 8:03 PM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
Apropos of nothing, "Reading Fascists Reading Shakespeare" is now out in Public Culture. We grapple with the surprising glut of Shakespeare references in far-right fiction (so you don't have to) and ask wtf is going on there. The essay starts like this:

doi.org/10.1215/0899...
Screenshot of first page of article in the journal Public Culture. Title reads atop the page in bold font: Reading Fascists Reading Shakespeare: Literary Populism in White Power Fiction. Beneath that, authors: Chloe Ahmann and Devin Proctor Beneath that, the article: Five days after he helped Donald Trump win the 2016 US presidential election, news broke that chief strategist Steve Bannon once penned a rap musical based on William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The play, set amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots, features a grisly war between the Bloods and Crips, who trade poetic spars like, “I’m an OG from the hood,” and “I will return to rep my peeps!” Rarely has Roman tragedy been such comedic fodder. Within weeks, Bannon’s collaborator leaked the script, and choice excerpts landed in the New York Times. By spring, NowThis had staged a table read with seasoned actors. Subscribers to Vanity Fair soon learned that this was Bannon’s second adaptation. During his fabled time in Hollywood, the would-­ be playwright pitched an intergalactic take on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Reporting on the play is, understandably, hilarious—a bit of light within a dark 100 days when brazen White supremacists filed into the West Wing and fractured liberal norms with a ferocious speed. As newspapers mourned democracy’s demise and prophesied fascism’s rise in the United States for the first (but not the last) time in this century, stories on Bannon’s Shakespeare fandom broke from the seriousness of it all. What made them funny?
March 22, 2025 at 3:57 PM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
This. When we speak out in defense of the university, let it not be the university as it existed on Jan 19, 2025, which was a deeply authoritarian space. Let it be the one our students brought to life against all odds and for which they continue to be criminalized.
Post from the bad place that says: “Columbia didn't cave--administrators are using this crisis to implement the draconian measures that *they want*” Paired with a screenshot from an article, with this line highlighted: “Additionally the school believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands.
March 22, 2025 at 12:36 AM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
Join us for a teach-in this coming Monday on (gestures) all of this. Learn what the f@%# is happening. 5-7 pm eastern time, hybrid event, deets in poster. Please share!
Poster for teach-in event at Cornell, Monday 3/10 from 5-7pm. In person in Goldwin Smith Kauffman Auditorium and online via the QR code. Topics include: executive orders and the courts; attacks on LGBTQ+ rights; the rise and fall of DEI; immigration and deportations; higher ed and academic freedom; the end of American democracy?
March 7, 2025 at 2:24 AM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
This is normal behavior for a democracy right 🫠

legiscan.com/US/text/HR26...
Text from house resolution designating Antifa a “domestic terrorist” group
January 26, 2025 at 12:11 AM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
Here’s a short excerpt:
Excerpt reads: The university's callousness about the effect of its policies on vulnerable students in Ithaca is mirrored by its investment in industries that destroy the conditions for inquiry around the world. Cornell prides itself on being a “global university” which fosters “high-impact international research” that “makes a world of difference.” Many students and faculty pursue this mission by engaging in research that questions global power structures and bears witness to their effects. The university’s entanglement in war fundamentally undermines their scholarship. In the anthropology department, we are experiencing this firsthand. The same week one of our students was suspended for opposing Cornell’s cooperation with the weapons industry, another was fleeing Lebanon, the site of their research, which is currently being bombarded with material support from institutions like ours. This is what a threat to the university looks like: not participating in “disruptive” chants, but sustaining investments that make us complicit in destroying the very worlds that we insist we are trying to create. How does the penalization of dissent further the goals of “exploration across boundaries” of both discipline and state? Or the kind of “free and open inquiry” essential to pursuing knowledge? “International experiences and cultural exchange” that make Cornell “at home in the world,” even a space of “refuge” for scholars who have fled their countries in conditions of “duress?” A “community of belonging” based upon the founding principle, “any person, any study?”
November 18, 2024 at 11:39 PM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
Hey team — especially anthros — if you happen to find yourself (in two or three dimensions) at #AAA2024Tampa next week, a few cuties are doing a virtual panel on everyday and emergent ecofascism. Friday 10:15am eastern time. Link TBA. Should be… timely! 😬😬😬
Poster with black text atop a background that fades from orange to teal. Text reads: Anthropologies of Everyday and Emergent Ecofascism. American Anthropological Association 2024 Annual Meeting. Zoom link TBA. 11/24. Speakers: Chloe Ahmann, Mona Bhan, Alexandra Cotofana, Radhika Govindrajan, Julia Leser, Zeynep Oğuz, Yuka Suzuki, Noah Theriault.
November 16, 2024 at 4:10 AM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
Lots of bad going around BUT ALSO a few of us are hosting a book party at the #AAA2024Tampa at earth & bone studio. Friday from 8–late. We'll have food, drinks, music, and catharsis. Good vibes only. Come hang! 📚🥂💃🎉
Poster with six rectangles on top of a bone-colored background. Text on the bottom reads in black: "DRINKS / FOOD / BOOKS / MUSIC / VIBES." Give of the rectangles are book covers, with titles, "Futures after Progress," "Excited Delirium," "Petro-state Masquerade," "Voice and Nation in Plurinational Bolivia," and "A Burdensome Experiment." The sixth rectangle reads: "Join us for a book party. Friday, November 22, eight til late. Earth & Bone. 108 N 11th St."
November 9, 2024 at 5:02 PM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
Holding something you’ve lived with and worked toward for 14 years is a surreal experience. Grateful to the folks at UChicago Press, to friends and mentors who helped shape me, and to dear ones in Baltimore who taught me everything. Happy 📚🎉 day everyone!
April 16, 2024 at 10:02 PM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
Our agenda features:
White text on red background lays out the schedule for the anti-conference. THURSDAY: PLAY: join us at the textile museum, where we’ll make art together // 55 centre ave // 5-8 pm. FRIDAY: REST: join us inside the conference center for a “nap in” // circa front street entrance // 12-1 pm. SATURDAY: ORGANIZE: join us at a palestine solidarity event // details TBA.
November 13, 2023 at 12:32 AM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
I took the cover photo in 2016. It was a weird year for the United States. The book captures that, too. But mostly it’s about local efforts to realize a good future after industry, and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors. May the next book about this place…
Text reads: A powerful ethnographic portrait of South Baltimore, a place haunted by toxic pasts in its pursuit of better futures. Baltimore is a city where promises of progress have revealed themselves to carry lethal costs. In Futures after Progress, anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on Baltimore’s far southern edge and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Focusing on the community of Curtis Bay—one of the most polluted places in the country—she also follows local efforts to realize a good future after industry, and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors. Text reads: Examining tensions between White and Black residents, environmental activists and industrial enthusiasts, local elders and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground where some lives are written off as the cost of doing business. But this is a story of hope, too. Rigorous and moving, Futures after Progress offers insight into the deep roots of our ecological predicament, giving us a glimpse into what lies ahead for a country beset by dreams deferred and a planet on the precipice of change.
September 27, 2023 at 1:28 PM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
…from industry or government. Yet. Organizers continue to carry the weight of pushing for a future without this deadly imposition. Just yesterday residents broadcast this demand, using the same iconic image.
Two images stacked on top of one another. The top image shows a playground in South Baltimore, with a massive open-air coal pile in the background. A speech bubble from a child reads, “We won’t live with millions of tons of coal 1,000 ft from our homes anymore…” The second image is the same, but with the coal pile vanished. The pair was broadcast in September 2023 by organizers in the neighborhood.
September 27, 2023 at 1:27 PM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
📣 We have a COVER!

I am so grateful that my book is coming out this spring with @UChicagoPress. It’s the product of relationships going back at least 12 years, when I landed in South Baltimore to teach. Longer if you count my family’s ties to this place over generations. 🧵
Book cover for “Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore, by Chloe Ahmann. Black title text sits in the pale blue sky above a playground with red bars and a dark yellow slide. Large open-air coal piles can be seen in the immediate background.
September 27, 2023 at 1:26 PM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
Deets:
- Friday October 6th from 2–4pm UK time
- In person at the University of St. Andrews School 5 Lecture Theatre and on Zoom
Text reads: Time is political, and honing a sharp analysis of time can mean wielding political power. Honing an analysis tuned to the exigencies of a moment can mean wielding more, but this accommodation has its costs. This talk unfolds on Baltimore’s industrial edge during a moment on the edge—the late Cold War—considering how residents made sick over years of toxic exposure and anxious for a buyout of their homes learned not to politicize slow violence. They chose instead to dramatize their imminent demise in the event of an industrial disaster: a studied response to the Cold War US state’s fixation on apocalypse. In the sense that they eventually secured a buyout, this argument was a success. But it hinged on an agreement to limit charges to the hypothetical. It proceeded as if the gravest obstacles to life lay then, in the devastating future, and not now, ambient and tedious...
September 26, 2023 at 8:41 PM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
📣Hey Bluesky! I'm honored to be delivering the inaugural keynote for the Anthropology of Time Network next week. My talk will be called "TIME BOMB: Toxic Disavowal in the Shadow of Apocalypse." And there's a virtual option! DM me for a zoom link and peek the abstract in the comments.
Black and white image depicts an elderly man walking into his South Baltimore row home. He wears a uniform from his factory job. In the background, at the end of his residential street, sits a giant oil tank marked with a "TEXACO" sign. Text on top of image reads: "TIME BOMB: Toxic Disavowal in the Shadow of Apocalypse. Chloe Ahmann" and "Public keynote – live and online. Details in the comments."
September 26, 2023 at 8:40 PM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
me, an americanist, tonight:
handwritten note from my former first-grade student reads: Why Did you Pick this Job
August 24, 2023 at 2:22 AM
chloeahmann.bsky.social
This Barbie has a new piece out in CulAnth - and an image on the cover. ✨✨

Come for the analysis of rumor as theory and tactic in a late industrial environment where conspiracy abounds. Stay for my absolutely bumbling journey chasing clues up, down, and around…

journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...
Cover of Cultural Anthropology’s August issue shows a black and white photo of a playground in South Baltimore. Enormous open-air coal piles look in the backdrop.
August 22, 2023 at 12:06 PM