And on Twitter, she posted what she believes were parts of her email correspondence with the editors. In a telephone interview she says she did not contact LARB editors directly.
“I was waiting to see what they would do,” she said.
dr. Ranbaran-Olm is no stranger to battles. In 2019, she made headlines when she stepped down as second vice president of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, saying it encouraged and encouraged white supremacists by refusing to change her name. (The group then voted to rename itself the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England. “The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is problematic,” the board said at the time.)
With “The Bright Ages,” said Dr. Rambaran-Olm, she had written “a balanced review”. She didn’t mean to “take down two scholars,” she said. “It was an open hand gesture to dialogue.”
But over the weekend, in a quickly deleted Twitter thread, Sarah E. Bond, a classicist at the University of Iowa who commissioned the review, strongly opposed the idea of ”killing a review for friends” and accused dr. Rambaran- Olm of giving a selective version of the facts.
“You went out of your way for days not to fully reflect our actual emails or comments because it would show: 4 editors voted down this review, including an editor of color,” she wrote. And, she said, Dr Rambaran-Olm had posted a different version of the review on Medium, while also removing comments from a color editor.
dr. Rambaran-Olm, she claimed, had refused “70 percent” of the edits, resulting in “an impasse”.
“This is not about whiteness,” said Dr. bond. “It’s not about protecting white men. It’s about saying that sometimes reviews and writing in the public spheres don’t work rather than in scientific journals.”
