And on Twitter, she posted what she said was part of her email correspondence with editors. In a telephone interview, she said she had not contacted any LARB editor directly.
“I was waiting to see what they were going to do,” she said.
Dr. Rambaran-Olm is no stranger to field battles. In 2019, she made headlines when she resigned as second vice-president of the International Society of Anglo-Saxons, saying she encouraged and emboldened white supremacists by refusing to change their name. (The group later voted to rename itself the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England. “The term ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ is problematic,” the board mentioned at the time.)
With “The Bright Ages”, said Dr. Rambaran-Olm, she had written “a balanced review”. The intention “was not to bring down two academics,” she said. “It was a gesture open to dialogue.”
But over the weekend, in a quickly deleted Twitter thread, Sarah E. Bond, a University of Iowa classic who commissioned the journal, strongly pushed back against the idea that she would “kill a journal for friends” and accused Dr. Rambaran-Olm of giving a selective version of the facts.
“You went to great lengths for days not to show our actual emails or comments in full because it would show: 4 editors rejected this review, including a color editor,” she said. writing. And, she said, Dr. Rambaran-Olm had posted a different version of the review on Medium, while also deleting comments from a color editor.
Dr. Rambaran-Olm, she argued, had refused “70%” of the changes, resulting in “an impasse”.
“It’s not about whiteness,” Dr Bond said. “It’s not about protecting white men. This is to say that sometimes reviews and writing don’t work in public spheres rather than in academic journals.