"La Bamba" an all spanish song was a hit in two separate decades. The racist 80s and the even more racist 60s.

New post! I take an in-depth look at Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, alongside forays into Victorian translations by William Morris and the brilliantly named Athanasius Diedrich Wackerbarth. This is based on an undergraduate lecture I gave at Oxford in 2020. nikolasgunn.co.uk/2026/02/09/o...

If I were a betting man, and I’m not, I’d place money on someone within the debating society at Bangor deliberately having organised the Reform ban fiasco with the blessing of Reform’s PR strategists.

Cool new article from my long-time collaborator (who isn't on here) Matthias Friedrich on the senses and emotions in medieval archaeology. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The miracle tech just keeps on miracle-ing

has anyone ever achieved less with enormous governing majorities in a time of crisis than Keir Starmer

I know I shouldn't swear, being a university professor blah blah blah, but fucking hell these concentration camps where kids are being tortured must be shut down now

Keir Starmer sitting at his desk, knowing that he can struggle on or by 6pm he could be knocking back his second Kingfisher whilst waiting for his butter chicken and plain naan to turn up.

Everyone knows today's young do not get a fair shot Top five words Britons use to describe the next generation's future 👇 Worried (55%) Uncertain (52%) Frustrated (28%) Conflicted (18%) Angry (17%)

Ah, MSCA review responses, so lacking in detail and generalised as to serve to massively fuel one's suspicions about the arbitrariness of the procedure.

Our great @bylinetimes.bsky.social diarist Peter Oborne spotted the problem with McSweeney back in August 2024. Here's 18 months of his coverage of Keir Starmer's Departing Chief of Staff open.substack.com/pub/bylinesu...

Greatly enjoyed speaking on "Rethinking Romanness in the Post-Roman West" at the @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social last Wednesday (I forgot to take a picture!). Many thanks indeed to Gerda Heydemann & Babett Edelman-Singer for hosting me and to the audience for many useful (& difficult!) questions.

Such an honour to be at Nagoya University for this fabulous event, talking about a project I am conducting @dependencybonn.de using data from Connecting Late Antiquities

Democratizing the arts looks like universal income, low-barrier grants for both emerging and working artists, well-funded municipal arts & recreation programs, vibrant third spaces, and a well-funded public school system with progressive curriculum. Not a free pass for corporate-owned slop engines.

Occasionally you have a conversation with someone in our field who cannot conceive working in any other profession and you wonder what reality they have gotten to exist in that means that they’ve never had to contemplate that they might not get to have a choice.

The makers of mobile apps designed to help shoppers identify and boycott American goods say they saw a surge of interest in Denmark and beyond after the recent flare-up in tensions over U.S. President Donald Trump's designs on Greenland.

I do want to shout-out my fellow sociologists, who have collectively created a discipline so woke that not a single one of our introductory textbooks can make it past Florida's censors. Great work everyone.

My hatred for the Deutsche Bahn reaches new depths every year.

Explore Roman Bonn through the eyes of Bassiana, a free Ubian woman living near the legionary camp of Bonna. Our new self-guided digital heritage trail is now online via the free app – with places, stories, and small challenges along the way. More: buff.ly/4QtrLc9 @unibonn.bsky.social @dfg.de

A few seats along from me there is a man on this ICE train talking earnestly about the Völkerwanderung and 'Die Vikinger" as a lens through which to understand contemporary migration processes (seemingly with progressive intent). I thought this was a fiction found only in funding applications!

This ought to have been the main UK news story from the DoJ’s latest Jeffrey Epstein data dump. Peter Mandelson told Epstein he was “trying hard” to change government policy on bankers’ bonuses at his request, months after Epstein paid thousands of pounds to the then Business Secretary’s husband.

Niall Ferguson being in the Epstein files is probably the least surprising thing since my last hangover.

congragulations

I have spent fifty years rolling my eyes at conspiracy theories where all the elite rich people are in a secret evil gang, and thrillers where everyone remotely important has the same Dark Secret, and now sodding look.

A short new piece I wrote for a wider audience: #ConstantinusAfricanus – A North African Migrant Revolutionizes #Medieval Latin Medicine #ConstantinetheAfrican #medievalsky #histmed #medhist #booksky @ddbkultur.bsky.social www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/content/blog...

You learn a lot about what motivates a person's self-proclaimed leftist politics and (nevertheless) correct highlighting of war and violence elsewhere when they pivot to insisting that the Iranian regime's mass murder of protestors must simply be a lie spread by that regime's enemies.

It is difficult to express how stupid it is that Germany insists on handling immigration bureaucracy at a local government level, enabling its processes for contact to vary vastly and its speed and efficiency to be affected by the number of employees and mode of organisation in a given district.

There's no cover image yet, but look what's coming out next year: Do you like bureaucracy? early Christianity? both? Robin Whelan has got you covered: www.cambridge.org/core/books/s...

Gesucht: Studierende der Geschichtswissenschaften der Uni Freiburg mit vertieftem Interesse an Mittelalterlicher Geschichte als wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft. Bewerbungsfrist: 15.02.2026. Start: 01.04.2026 Alles weitere: www.mittelalter1.uni-freiburg.de/nachrichten/... Wir freuen uns!

Suella Braverman remains the only home secretary ever to be sacked for inciting fascist violence

I love Starmerism, it's like "Uh no this guy can't be an MP because people like him. Only people everyone hates can be in Labour." It is so cool and smart.

The end of January brings both joy and trepidation: joy at the end of the teaching semester. Trepidation in that I will soon learn the outcome of several different applications that will determine whether or not I am employed after next March...

"I am a children's entertainer who specializes in face painting," writes a woman now in hiding from the federal government for witnessing a state-sanctioned street execution

Publishing a paper with "agriculture" in the abstract has opened up a whole new world of scam conferences for me to get invited to.

The market manipulation for insider trading purposes is starting to become a little toooooo obvious at this point.

"ratio of chinese to Indian restaurants near military bases" good grief, that's literally a bit from a 1970s BBC sitcom youtu.be/oJ-9R6NCZ0A?...

BREAKING: The European Parliament suspended work on a trade deal between the 27-member bloc and the US following Trump's repeated requests to take control over Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory reut.rs/4bbpqGm

Our leaders ought to stop trying to “handle” Trump and start treating him and the government he heads like the hostile actors that they are.

The Nobel Peace Prize becoming so prestigious that wars are fought over a head of state coveting it is some real monkey paw stuff for Alfred Nobel.

Meanwhile, one of the key front lines in any geopolitical confrontation - the university sector - is busy (1) hollowing itself out and (2) making itself dependent on US tech. Okay guys! Let's see where that gets you. 😬

The idiots in the White House perhaps need reminding that our governments can, and if really, *really* pushed in all likelihood *will*, crash the US economy…

European nations desperately need to end our dependence on American technological infrastructure. For areas such as banking, defence and security as well as many of the basic infrastructural materials underpinning modern IT systems this is going to prove especially difficult, but it has to be done.

Die Europäer:innen werden die Energie- und Digitalabhängigkeiten zu den USA bald ebenso kritisch bewerten, wie man heute auf die Erdgasabhängigkeiten gegenüber Russland blickt. Bundesregierung ist strategisch in der Pflicht, einen konkreten Plan vorzulegen, wie diese rasch verringert werden können.

It will take time (especially as an Apple user) make the technology and other products I own as independent from and non-reliant on American products as possible, but I'm finally getting started trying to do so. Recent events have been an impetus. This website is helpful: european-alternatives.eu

His body might be furiously resisting, but things are so bad that Starmer is growing a spine in real time.

I left university in 2019 with £49,600 of debt. A few months later, I became an MP and have since received a salary that puts me in the top 5% in the country. 6 years on, the repayments from my salary have brought this total to down to £48,600 - just £1,000 less.

A measure of how much is happening that NATO preparing to defend itself from the US isn’t every headline on every news outlet 24/7

There we go, confirmation other European allies are in dialogue to provide reinforcements to greenland. @auonsson.bsky.social

Politicians: don't use AI to make your maps.