"He continued, “Whatever your chosen profession is, please don’t let AI rob you of the fun part of it. Your generation’s upcoming battle won’t be humans against AI [...]… It’s going to be people with substance versus people with shallow knowledge. It’s going to be mastery versus faking it."

An update on this. Bilgi students rose up and forced the regime to recind the order to close IBU.

One mildly interesting thing: Blair's recent essay is a total repudiation of Blairism. It doesn't at all resemble what he did as PM, especially on tax and spend. And yet 'Blairites' are largely applauding it as a serious document (it isn't). Maybe it really is just vibes all the way down.

It is fun when a new, major popular interpretation in your field implies that you argue something entirely the opposite to what you do.  Cf. Higham, 2026 vs Harland 2021, p. 139. I don't mind being disagreed with but I'd prefer to be disagreed with on what I actually argue rather than straw men.

On the cusp of being forced out of a profession that neither appears to want you nor resembles the one you thought it was anymore. Is this what being a craft labourer felt like in the early nineteenth century?

"My emotional response to all this is hard to describe, something between disgust and despair. Was it always the case that half of our students would cheat if it were easy enough? If they knew that it would be hard to prove? It’s hard to consider that and not despair."

Congratulations to Catherine-Rose Hailstone, whose book is now available to pre-order from Edinburgh University Press! *God, Demons, and Fear: Emotion, The Self, and Self-control in Gregory of Tours* edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-god-dem... @caterose.bsky.social @imems.bsky.social

I'm this very semester teaching a class spanning the turn of the 2nd to 7th Cs AD, sources including settlement arch., Egyptian papyri & ceramics on top of the usual historiography. Another spanning the 4th-10th centuries, sources including burial archaeology & Old English poetry on top of the usual

Blair’s political outlook is structurally identical to the assumption that the pop/rock music of one’s teens and early twenties is objectively the greatest music ever made: what worked in the late 1990s and early 2000s *must* be the only sensible approach.

As a historian by trade I do generally, I think we can reasonably assume, know the difference between a century and millennium, so what's going on when I mix the one up for another when rapidly hammering out a tweet. Is this a dyspraxia/[probable] ADHD thing?

I always find it very odd that hiring committees have a habit of treating late antiquity, a period span of c. half a century, as a period which can be done on the side by either ancient or medieval historians rather than a time frame that requires specialists in its own right.

I think this is a central point. One technology makes life better for everyone and everything; Blair only endorses the one that doesn’t.

The only public platform on which I want to see Tony Blair's face again is in the dock at The Hague.

Somewhat incredibly, Tony Blair has chosen the week that the UK's temperature record for May has been smashed by more than 2C to reiterate his hot take on net-zero Job done, though, as all the UK media is now leading with him saying "drill, baby, drill" rather than the exceptionally extreme weather

Watching the Pope be more attentive than some theorists to the brutal, material dependency relationships that shape the digital economy and the so-called fourth industrial revolution is quite something.

“To defeat the scourge of populism, the government should do a procession of things that sound suspiciously like the populist’s manifesto, but crucially filtered through the economic priorities of the people paying me to write this”

A related point is that even peripheral proximity to a great many professions makes it rapidly obvious that connections and the appearance of output are rewarded just as frequently as actual hard slog and quality, so you can hardly blame some people for taking the easy route in those circumstances.

One of the many sources cited in the new papal encyclical is... Gandalf

I think people are severely underestimating the extent to which AI slop butchering the content of our research is now getting pumped out onto YouTube and getting tens of thousands of views to make ad revenue.

Bilgi was a wonderful university… beautiful campus, lively student body, excellent academics. No wonder the Erdogan regime couldn’t stand it. Yet another devastating blow for Turkish academia and society. Solidarity with all faculty, staff and students! ✊

Shocking news from Turkey where Istanbul Bilgi University was shut down — without any rationale — today by Presidential decree. I have many friends from my years living in Istanbul who taught there. It is an excellent institution. Terrible assault on academic freedom.

It's clear there are many people in the Labour Party who do not share the assessment that chasing the cultural-war right while pursuing centre-left economic policy has proven economically, culturally, and politically disastrous. I desperately want to know what they think their current problems are.

Here’s the assistant editor of the Sunday Times recognising the political and economic programme of the last five decades has created a deep democratic disaster and that much of it urgently needs to be rolled back: news that will come as a big shock to anyone who read his paper during that time.

Super excited to have so many people interested in Roman royal portraiture from my last thread. While I have you, let’s keep talking about Nero’s portraits and modern people who want them to be Polaroids. /1

and expensive. This is not a simple breach of contract. In an academic job market in which peer review publications count significantly more than non-peer review work, this policy devalues the work of scholars in a way that is beyond careless and can only be called predatory. /

Jesus. This isn't good. My book was with AUP and now belongs to Routledge, and it went through a rigorous and detailed peer review process. It's depressing that T&F can't be bothered to do the same.

Durch KI wird wirklich alles besser, man kann jetzt viel schneller sehr viele mäßige Texte produzieren, die eh niemand mehr liest, und gleichzeitig kollabieren alle Verfahren zur Selektion und Qualitätssicherung, sodass auch die guten Texte mit untergehen. 👍

The RI OPAC now lists over 3 million titles! We’re celebrating this milestone with an interview @mittelalterblog.bsky.social with the founder of the database, Dieter Rübsamen, who has been involved with it for over 23 years. mittelalter.hypotheses.org/39926 #medievalsky

The person who originated this claim (Gregory Clark, 1986) walked it back when it was revealed that he came to this conclusion was because he was uncritically reading 13th century manorial records What those record actually reflected was labor *owed to the lord*, not the peasant's total labor

That's a tremendous amount of telling on yourself. Yes, I wrote some scientific papers; no, I never cited anything I haven't personally read and found to be relevant. If you are out there on main just telling people that OF COURSE academics make shit up, someone better take a look at your pubs

Someone once expressed shock to me that I took this attitude to marking student work (yes, it matters that the things student cite have been read and say what the students claim they say) and this was pretty much my own quiet reaction…

It must be emphasized that we need powerful, robust ACADEMIC history IN universities to sustain history OUTSIDE universities. If we can’t employ people in higher ed to train future generations of public historians, we will not have future generations of public historians. 🗃️

AI's not fucking up your citations, you are.

You could just read scholarship before you cite it and only coauthor pieces with other people who do the same.

Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was difficult and time-consuming to do rigorous work, that totally excuses the errors

If you claim to be a “researcher” and can’t be bothered to double-check your citations nobody should ever take you seriously, the point of research isn’t to pave the way for your next career step and speaking gig

I have now spent 2 classes in a row trying to use problems of textual transmission of late antique sources (in one lacunose papyri, the other lacunose Carolingian mss of late antique legal codices) to illustrate why LLMs can’t be relied on to summarise historical knowledge. Let’s see if it sinks in.

i cannot. I CANNOT.

I don’t know what to tell you, man. I’m a medieval historian, and, in my field, if you don’t check your sources (and your sources’ sources) you are just asking to be taken for a ride by some bored 19th C. aristocratic English antiquarian with a penchant for inventing history.

📢 The BCDSS invites applications for 3 Doctoral Positions/PhD (65%, TV-L E-13, for 4 years) from 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2030. Application deadline: 5 June 2026 ℹ️ For all details regarding the application documents and process, please see here: buff.ly/t0fVXcb @unibonn.bsky.social @dfg.de

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

But now, for a big new announcement: the radically new edition of Nauigatio St Brendani (Brendan's Voyage) with English translation, just after being published by the School of Celtic Studies @scs-dias.bsky.social at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies @dias.ie. /2

The fact that a neo-Nazi teenager who attempted to behead a Kurdish barber in Bristol last year has just been sentenced to almost 20 years in prison isn’t *national* news is enormously telling. It’s really not just a South West story, is it?

Quite apart from the million other reasons why Streeting would be the worst possible choice for a Labour prime minister, I think it's worth pointing out that he currently holds his constituency with a whopping majority of 528 votes, and he'll likely lose it to the Greens in the next election.

This was a once in a generation chance to make sweeping, positive change. But we got just nothing at all, and now the party will split and squabble and burn through useless leaders, and then we will be hit with an emboldened right-wing government in 2029 with nothing improved since the last.

This government could have enacted anything it wished, acting in total defiance against Con and Reform, and demonstrated how socialist and left-wing values result in immediate benefits for most Britons. But instead they sit on their hands and try to do feeble Farage impressions. I hate them for it.

"Land and Power in the Later Roman World " #Conference 📆 29 June to 1 July 2026 📍 Tübingen 🔗 View details: bit.ly/4tsST40 Please send enquiries to Dr Giordana Franceschini, [email protected] #AllWelcome

Since the second year of my PhD (ten years ago now...!) I've known of the existence of another J Harland with a PhD from York who works on medieval archaeology, hence why I've always published as "James M./JM Harland". I see you've now joined Bluesky, so hello @jenharland.bsky.social !

My new article has now been published in the 2025 volume of Traditio. I use a little examined episode on the lower Rhine in the late 350s with the aid of agricultural archaeology to reveal fiscal dependency relations between the Empire & Barbaricum, & the consequences of their rupture. #medievalsky

Annual Hobsbawm Memorial Lecture, 18 June 2026, 18:00-21:00 at Birkbeck: Toby Green, 'History at the 'End of History': Inequality and Discourse in the Age of Reimperialism'. #Skystorians