I love my work and have fun doing it.
I have had many opportunities to speak in public about my work at special events. I also enjoy academic administration and am currently serving my second term as Director of American Studies at Boston University. In 2013, I co-founded the American Literature and Culture Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard; I continue to co-organize that group, now with Sari Edelstein of UMASS-Boston.
Social Media has been a productive and fun place for me to talk with academic friends and colleagues. For a long time I was on Twitter, but now mostly I am on Bluesky: follow me at @rezekjoe.bsky.social.
Above: On stage at a “Talk Back” conversation after a performance of Moby-Dick, by Plexus Polaire, at the Emerson College Theater. January, 2025.
Below: In the reading room at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. November, 2024.
With Prof. Nate Wolff at the Harvard Book Store, for a book launch for our edition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, from Smith & Taylor Classics. July, 2025.
My social media fame peaked on November 11, 2022, when BuzzFeed did a list of the “Funniest Tweets of All Time,” to mark the website’s demise after its sale to Elon Musk. This viral tweet of mine from May, 2021, was listed as #68:
