Celebrate Edith Wharton's birthday today by reading @mannahattamamma.bsky.social's insightful account of Wharton's mid-life personal, sexual, and creative awakening.

1/4 Second lecture today on Jeanette Winterson's "Frankissstein: A Love Story." I suggested that the novel asks us to contemplate: "What if general artificial intelligenceis a form of intelligencethat is radically other? How will human beings deal with it?"

1/4 Yesterday in our "Writing New York" class, @waterman.bsky.social gave his second lecture on Ling Ma's novel "Severance." #booksky

1/4 Today's lecture on Jeanette Winterson's 2019 novel "Frankissstein: A Love Story" began with a video callback to a classic queer take on the Frankenstein story: "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," starting, of course, with "Time Warp" ...

1/5 The last text in my "Cosmopolitan Imagination" course is Jeanette Winterson's 2019 novel "Frankissstein," a mixture of historical fiction and speculative fiction. It dramatizes the life of Mary Shelley as she is writing "Frankenstein" and also the experience of a trans avatar named Ry Shelley.

1/5 I began working on NYU's Abu Dhabi campus project in Fall 2008 as part of a committee designing the arts and humanities curriculum and doing initial hiring of faculty members. The campus opened in 2010, and for its first three years, as I served as NYUAD's inaugural Dean for Humanities.

1/2 I was last in Paris on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic. Here's what Notre-Dame looked like on Valentine's Day 2020.

In other words, we dropped most of the c19 content in order to make room for c21 titles that didn't exist when we started doing this.

To give a sense of how it's changed over time, here's a snapshot of the reading list from 2010.

As @cpatell.bsky.social and I wrap another round of our "Writing New York" class (est. 2003) we're inclined, as always, to tinker. We're also thinking about developing another version of the course as a college core/gen ed requirement. What would be your non-negotiables in a class abt NYC lit?

1/7 I really enjoyed writing about The Rolling Stones' album "Some Girls" for Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series. It was published on the eve of our relocation to NYU's campus in Abu Dhabi in 2011, where we ended up spending the next eleven academic years.

1/3 Today I'm remembering this @washingtonpost.com piece by Tommy Orange from 2018.

Orange highlights some of my favorite works of fiction by Native American writers. #booksky

Before discussing "Frankenstein in Baghdad" yesterday in my "Cosmopolitan Imagination" lecture, I added some additional thoughts on "Blade Runner," the subject of last Wednesday's lecture. This photo of the Helix Nebula reminds me of the first "eye shot" in the opening sequence of the film.

Today’s lecture: Ahmed Saadawi’s “Frankenstein in Baghdad,” which won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014. Originally inspired by Branagh’s 1994 film adaptation, the novel uses the frame-tale structure of Shelley’s original to dramatize the woes of the Iraqi body politic. #booksky

And while we’re at it, here are the books assigned in the NYU English course “Writing New York” that I co-teach with @waterman.bsky.social. The syllabus also features films and music. #booksky

This fall I’ve been teaching a lecture course called “The Cosmopolitan Imagination” for NYU’s Core Curriculum. Here are the books on the syllabus. The students were also asked to read some additional essays and to watch several films. #booksky

I’m working on a book about Hamlet and its global legacy. This article is a useful guide to screen adaptations of the play, as well as “Hamlet-adjacent” films that are part of that legacy.

Hello, Blue Sky! I’m a scholar of literature and culture who teaches at NYU. I will be posting here about my current interests, which include cosmopolitanism, technophilia, global Shakespeare, New York literature—and Star Wars. May the Force be with us all in these troubled times.