"To Better Understand How Gender Norms Underlay Social and Political Organization"

"Until this week's latest dump of the Epstein files by Trump's justice department, I hadn't seen the connection between the two. But now it's as clear as day. The abolition of gender studies is a way of further guaranteeing impunity to the elite men whose contempt for and exploitation of women and girls apparently knew no bounds, whether they actually slept with the women on offer or simply shared Epstein's fantasies in order to gain influence or funding."

Joan Wallach Scott at The Guardian argues that gender studies is "a critical tool for examining–in the case of Trump and Epstein–the predations of toxic masculinity."

"As Refreshing as a Half-Full Glass of Water"

"Though historians—of all people—should know better, we sometimes still talk, and write, as if there is a single national audience for popular history. There wasn't and isn't, at least not any more than there is for a novel or a play. By illustrating the strategies and the successes of these five historians, Witham takes down the heated if not hysterical tone of both historians and pundits about presentism and the politicization of history."

At Boston Review, David Waldstreicher reviews Nick Witham's Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America.

"An Indigenous Creation"

"Today, deconstructive habits of mind within the academy are largely considered not so much controversial as passé. Still, there remains the question of how and why the deconstructive tradition became such a formidable pattern of thought in the United States. To answer that question, Americans might—in an ironic twist—consider the February 2014 protests in France against the legalization of same-sex marriage. Those protestors objected to the equality advanced by the new grade school pedagogy ostensibly inspired by American gender theory, above all that of deconstructionist Judith Butler. 'La théorie du genre,' according to French protestors, originated on the other side of the Atlantic. We might also consider why, as Fredric Jameson noted in 2015, Americans tend to believe the 'good tidings' of theory—including deconstruction—were brought from Europe, while Chinese literary scholars, say, consider theory an American invention. These perceptions of the origin and flow of ideas should give pause to those who consider deconstruction essentially French."

Gregory Jones-Katz in the Boston Review asserts that "deconstructive literary theory was largely" an American phenomenon.