Forgot to take a picture of myself but in September I had the honor of speaking at the International Walter Pater conference at Cornell. I’ve given a talk at Cornell! It was really a dream come true. Met so many nice people too!

And just four months later I’m at a graduation myself as a professor. It was crazy! Go Tarleton, the graduates, and most of all my colleagues who I have the pleasure to work with!

I’m going to give this BlueSky thing another shot.

Allow me to reintroduce myself.

I am, now, Dr. Justin Rogers, my specialty is 19th Century British literature. Specifically Decadence and Aestheticism’s use of the supernatural in fiction.

Pleased to tell you all that my very first publication is out! (Also I’m back!)

libjournals.mtsu.edu/index.php/I1...

I successfully defended my dissertation today!

And my dissertation will hopefully be coming to an end and in the summer I’ll work on making articles out of it so you’ll all get a chance to read the last… four years of my life. *sigh*

Art and Abyss: Aestheticism, Decadence, and the Supernatural in Late Victorian Literature

I got invited to do an article to a special issue on Lafcadio Hearn. I put his writing on art and how you can see it at work in his fiction alongside another writer’s art criticism and fiction to show how Hearn can bring a lot to the conversation as a European who moved to Japan.

I got an “accepted with revisions”. My article is on this children’s book The Enchanted Castle (1907) by Edith Nesbit and I argue that in it she anticipates cognitive science regarding imagination in children and how they harness their imagination to reach higher order thinking.

My To Be Read pile going into 2025.

I found an old copy of Carlyle’s best works and proceeded to go on a journey to get it rebound. The finished product has arrived!

My weakness for a deal came in!

It all really started with Oscar Wilde. We went over The Importance of Being Earnest in class, I read Dorian Gray and Salome on my own. I was fascinated that in Wilde’s world people talk to each other but no one hears each other. They look at each other but are not seeing the other.

Two more!

Maybe a visual representation will help.

Bluesky hasn’t seen my new office where I now read, grade, have meetings, and continue to dissertate.

Teaching a Lit & Film class atm and might have taken it too literally but I’m having a great time. It’s over Studio Ghibli films. We read source material then watch the animated film. Had them read Hutcheon on Adaptation Theory. Just finished How Do You Live? Now to watch Boy and the Heron.

I got invited to contribute to a special issue in Volupté on Lafcadio Hearn. Sent in a draft, got a laundry list of feedback, made changes, now it’s going to reviewers. I think I got to an interesting place with it but we’ll see. Very much pins and needles. It would be my first academic publication.