This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now humanities academic-at-large, on interesting #academictwitter accounts to follow.
If you’ve considered getting on Twitter, summer is a great time to take the plunge, and we’ve still got a few weeks left! If you’re already on Twitter, and are looking for some new academic follows to enrich your timeline, here are a few recommendations. Our favorite academic Twitterers mix subject-specific tweets from their disciplines with observations about current events, politics, and policy as it affects academia.
Thirteen years after Twitter was founded, and two years into the Trumpian hyper-speed news era, many people have gotten great at this art of the mix; these scholars really have it down.
Dan Drezner (International Affairs, Fletcher School, Tufts University): A high-volume account with over 100K followers. Politics (lots of politics!), baseball, foreign relations, GIFs and jokes.
Tanya Golash-Boza (Sociology, University of California, Merced): Golash-Boza tweets on academic writing, the future of sociology, and diversity in the academy. Her insights on immigration are particularly key in 2019.
Sara Goldrick-Rab (Higher Ed and Sociology, Temple University): Essential account for coverage of the intersections of class, money, and higher ed.
Kevin Kruse (History, Princeton University): The dean of viral history Twitter regularly publishes long, primary-source-laden threads on historical matters related to the news. Kruse also retweets other historians who write in this mode, which means the account is a great discovery machine for further follows.
Trevon D. Logan (Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara): Logan offers coverage of race, diversity, economics, history, and culture. We regularly discover important new papers in the field via this Twitter feed.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (Sociology, Virginia Commonwealth University): This account ranges far and wide, over topics like race, class, money, diversity, higher ed, for-profits, pop culture, and food. Cottom is an accomplished writer, and her tweets are informative, opinionated, and funny all at once.
Mark Anthony Neal (African and African-American Studies, Duke University): Neal’s account places a heavy emphasis on historical content, with wonderful use of vintage visuals, music, and film.
Raul Pacheco-Vega (Political science and geography, CIDE Region Centro): Pacheco-Vega started the discovery hashtag #ScholarSunday, and has made his account into a hub for conversation on academic writing and pedagogy.
Jeffrey Sachs (Political science, Acadia University): Sachs tweets about politics and the finances of higher ed in Canada and the United States, and offers extensive coverage of campus “free speech” debates from the left.
Real Scientists (Group account): Because we’re working in the humanities, we have less of a sense of what’s going on over in science Twitter. This account rotates among working scientists, who have a week to share their work, so you can find plenty of new follows as time marches on.
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