Wednesday, November 25, 2020

November 25, 2020: Book Thanksgivings: Keri Leigh Merritt and Twitter

[For this year’s Thanksgiving series, I wanted to share a few words of appreciation related to my forthcoming book Of Thee I Sing. I’d love to hear what y’all are thankful for in comments!]

Getting blurbs for a book is roughly 20% nerve-wracking (especially because reaching out to folks feels very own-horn-tooty) but 80% one of the best parts of the whole process, as it’s a chance both to let other scholars know how much their work means to me and (when it works out) hear some kind words from such awesome folks about my own project. For Of Thee I Sing, I’ve been honored to get blurbs from Teresa Bergman (whose book Exhibiting Patriotism was a very influential one for me as I thought about this topic) and the amazing Keri Leigh Merritt. Keri Leigh is one of our very best public scholarly voices, and exemplifies the range of forms through which such work is now able to be produced—still books and articles to be sure, but also podcasts (on which more tomorrow), documentaries, and, yes, Twitter. It was in that social media space that I first connected with Keri Leigh, so I’m very thankful for public scholarly Twitter, as well as for amazing folks like Keri Leigh to whom I’ve been fortunate enough to connect and whose blurb for Of Thee I Sing means the world to me.

Next Thanksgiving tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What are you thankful for (other than the approaching end of this damn year)?

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