What follows is a polished version of remarks I delivered at the Conference of Nineteenth-Century Americanists last week. Many thanks to Tara Foley, Christopher Black, and my co-panelists for building space for NTT faculty; to my fellow members of the Membership Committee, Lori Merish, John Hay, and Camille Owens; and to our President Jennifer James, Program Chair Martha Schoolman, and the rest of the executive committee for organizing such a vital gathering in dark times for scholarship. I wrote and delivered these remarks entirely on my own. I then used Claude Opus 4.6 to help polish this version for publication in my newsletter.

A preface. I have found it hard to write this at a purely professional level. The catastrophe we are facing—in the profession, in our institutions, in our political environment—is so much bigger than us and our hurts. My desire is to build solidarities and trust, to speak across the isolation that has been foisted on us to disempower us. But the heartbreak and the fear is so intensely personal. It floats beyond our classrooms into our whole lives, our communities, our families. I keep stumbling at the line between what may be idiosyncratic attachments, bitterness, and anxiety, on one hand, and what is genuinely shared, on the other. So, with apologies, I won’t try to separate them. My perspective is contingent—like my job—and of great specificity: a single, not particularly special, combustion of my map of futurity in this inferno of democracy and rights.

I write on romanticism and abolitionism. I have long felt a deep affinity with the struggles of these writers against the politics of their time. They lived through the authoritarian crisis of the 1850s; it radicalized them, for a time. I love this generation for being flawed, for not knowing how to respond, for making mistakes of judgment, even for taking too long to finally find their voice on the issues of the day (Emerson, I’m looking at you)—and for still being relentlessly committed to thinking, writing, editing, publishing. I find solace in this, and in my other shameless intellectual love, existentialism, for the same ferment and flaws through the authoritarianism of the 1930s and the crisis of colonialism. In teaching, I always focus first on the humanity of all this: on the activity of thought as a social and political vocation in times of crisis. Not the achieved correct theory, but the messy ferment. The blind spots, the sudden awakenings, the hurts of history felt in the tumult of a text. When DC came under occupation by the National Guard as cover for deployments of CBP and ICE and kidnappings on the street, the textual objects of my classrooms never seemed more important—even, and especially, in our newly exposed vulnerability. So I want to briefly articulate how my position as non-tenure-track faculty, and the personal and professional impacts of the authoritarian moment, have shaped my thinking about the classroom and the profession.

Let me raise a question—one others have asked, but one that has been burning a hole in my skull for months. How do you respond to a liberal institution betraying its liberal values when you have never experienced your working conditions there as structured by liberal rules and norms? I’m not saying it has always felt authoritarian. Contingent faculty are commonly saved (and damned) by neglect. But you know the condition, with a sort of creeping unease: that your job, your speech, your research have no protections. In other words, what does it mean to work and think through these threats of authoritarianism at a university that, when you’ve rubbed up against its power structures, had already bared its authoritarian teeth?

I had written quite a bit of evidence for this claim—that the university was already authoritarian. Details of brutal union fights; the contempt of universities for labor organizing rights; the vindictive retaliation I and others have experienced; the priorities of the institution as a real estate developer terrified it might lose access to capital over too much democracy on campus; the long collaboration and mutual investments of the university with extractive surveillance capitalism; the increasing merger of commercial surveillance data with state repression; and the use of AI to target students, courses, and research. I’ve been on something of a hobby horse about why we should stop using commercial learning management systems and use alternatives, or build our own. (Having recently built my own student-data-privacy-focused digital course architecture, I’m happy to share that process and the tools I used.) But I want to keep things short. And this is where the bitterness might take over.

So let me move instead to some gestures at answering my question about authoritarian contexts—or at least to filling it out. The historian Steven Hahn, in his recent book Illiberal America, offers a useful breakdown of the fate of liberalism in the field imaginary of American studies. The creation of a “liberal tradition” by Cold War liberals has long been exposed as both fantastical—it never existed—and as something to be criticized: a false universal legal order encoding race, class, gender, and sexual oppression. But having been such a persistent object of critique, the liberal tradition has been entrenched, as Hahn puts it, "less by its defenders and beneficiaries than by its critics on the right and left." We live in this contradictory place. We know liberalism does not exercise normative force, perhaps never has, that the rule of law does not constrain power—and yet we continue to direct enormous critical effort against liberal empire, or other liberty-coded banners like settler-colonial republicanism. Hahn’s intervention is to insist that we take more seriously that an illiberalism of the right has also exercised normative force on our institutions and government. He is part of a growing movement in American history and political theory to examine authoritarianism as a constitutive feature of the United States—and I am pleased to say, after a few days at this conference, that more of us in literary and cultural studies are joining that examination.

What would it take to start imagining and thinking both our field and our profession within the context of an illiberal political order, and to really take seriously that we, like the writers we study, operate within illiberal institutions? Or at least within contexts that were always sites of contested hegemony rather than of settled liberal laws and norms, or even ideological masks? How might we organize differently, speak differently, occupy our classrooms and libraries and faculty senates differently? How might we deal with the messiness of liberals sounding increasingly radicalized—like Emerson in the 1850s, or some of our colleagues in other departments today—and radicals sounding more like liberals—say, the shifting relationship with the state through the careers of abolitionists like Douglass and Delany, or myself on the occasion of discovering liberal attachments and fantasies that stubbornly persist despite knowing better? How might we trace the tumult of thought in crisis? The faltering attachments, the hurts of a history unfinished, where there have never been substantial commitments to even flawed, formal versions of liberty and equality?