This is called 💫RESEARCH💫

Our tribute to Natalie Zemon Davis, in the Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte. Please share widely! www.degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/...

if you’re an academic who uses AI to crank out research, you should have to give up your position to one of the more worthy candidates who didn’t get a TT job

Academics are making the decision to shove unpublished original research that isn’t even theirs into the plagiarism machine. I can’t.

What you have all be waiting for...interesting stories from and about languages students. Enjoy reading them! www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/oxford-polyg...

Behold: the first-ever list of news outlets that have banned generative AI in their reporting. As of today, this is literally information that you cannot find on Google. My goal is to fill the starter pack, so please send over suggestions with supporting evidence! go.bsky.app/8cn1XfT

🎉 Today I defended my dissertation and passed with summa cum laude. The title is "Dependent Lives In and Beyond Archives: Enslaved People in Sephardic Jewish Households in Early Modern Bridgetown, Barbados (1654-1800)." The abstract is below, and I hope to publish it soon.

Not all #earlymodern prints are publications. These are unused key labels intended for 1 of the 11 locks guarding Antwerp’s 14th-century privilege chest preserving charters for centuries. The Officina Plantiniana probably had to produce these ephemeral prints as the city’s official printer.

CERL internships 2025 – Huntington Library Studying the 'life' of Spanish incunabula at Huntington Library (San Marino, California) By Iván Pérez Marinas Huntington Library, San Marino, California Hola! My name is Iván Pérez Marinas, Curator of Manuscripts and Incunabula at the National Library of…

Blog post by me on a manuscript book I found during my Folger fellowship this summer. I was interested in what it had to say about widowhood and remarriage but it also took me down a recusant book history rabbit hole!

Today's @thetimes.com is reporting that this new book published by Springer, on sale for £180 hb, contains 'footnotes that cite scientific publications that appear to have been invented....' Who'd have thought it! www.thetimes.com/uk/science/a...

Enjoying that Oxford Press allows you to search their Global Middle Ages books through an interactive map. More of this, please! blog.oup.com/2024/06/the-...

Very rarely does a post warrant all caps, but: SEARCHABLE INTERIM MANUSCRIPTS CATALOGUE. At long last! searcharchives.bl.uk

this field biologist does a great job highlighting the insidiousness of AI editing these one-click AI edit buttons are incredibly appealing to many photographers, amateurs and professionals alike, and are framed as innocuous this is worth sharing and educating people about

Next semester is already looking quite busy with RA work, part time teaching and ploughing on with my book. But if you have transcription or archival (London/SE area) needs please do drop me a line. My rates are now on my webpage. #MedievalSky #EarlyModern joanneedge.co.uk/freelance-wo...

For avoidance of confusion, that’s just about all academic staff, excluding Heads of Dept and- of course - Senior Management Team.

New! We worked with the Public Interest Research Group to test a bunch of LLM-driven toys ahead of the Christmas. That sexual talking teddy bear wasn't a one-off; it turns out disturbing behavior is deeply built into these toys across the board.

Palaeographers: you definitely should consider applying to this illustrious fund:

The ad for the second postdoctoral position on our @leverhulme.ac.uk Britain’s Early Medieval Letters project is now live. We’re looking for an Old English specialist (who also works with Latin). 32-month FT post. Deadline for apps is 16 Jan 🙂 jobs.kent.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

great 🧵. We wouldn't cut up all the texts from archives and send a pile of individual words to Google to save for us. the shift from the archive to the "large language model," where words become parameters and lose their contexts, and where accessibility is nil, is NOT=transparency for humans

I'm very proud of the work we did on this medieval gold seam in collaboration with TNA. Not only can you use this material for financial and economic history, there are so many tantalising glimpses of people's lives and relationships on the island. #TNAConnections

Anglicans, Catholics and others from liturgical traditions ‐ check out image 7 for a special treat ⚓️

BLOODY AI,a thread:so, I saw a picture online of the Towers of Perugia by a Renaissance artist, Benedetto Bonfigli whose other work I know a little bit. Here is the image 1/n:

The point is: lots of people will have accepted the first image because it looks kind of right and it's on an art page. The doctored image is already turning up in search results. We are cooked if we don't start to push back against this stuff. AI is poisonous to human endeavour, pass it on <end>

📢 Excited to announce this Call for Papers for ‘Clio Reframed’, a conference at Oxford on 18-19 June 2026 exploring early modern women as writers of history. @engfac.bsky.social @oxfordcems.bsky.social Abstracts due by 28 Feb! clioreframed.hcommons.org/call-for-pap...

I particularly liked seeing a skill we train: source criticism, used, here, to unpack how cooked the 'data' in the 'AI jobs' report actually was. The report's definition of what we do, and what 'history' therefore can be, is pathetically, obviously, insufficient.

This is very good and goes in front of my MA students next term for sure. It's a lot better than the various medium posts I've written but it's reassuring to see so many people arrive at the same answer after checking. No, AI is not capable of "replacing" historians. Not even close, wrong timezone.

Needless to say I’m delighted about this. It was super to work with Simon Neal, who re-catalogued more than 70 volumes; to collaborate with Eamonn Kenny @adaptcentre.bsky.social who knocked the data into shape; and to incorporate it into the Knowledge Graph we’re building, based on @dib.ie entries

Interesting-looking new book from OUP by a former colleague of mine: #earlymodern #bookhistory academic.oup.com/book/60681

‘No one seems to care’: scholars decry plight of British Library Historian Peter Mandler said it was “a sorry state when a major piece of public infrastructure like this is hit so badly and no one in authority even seems to notice, much less care”. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-c...

So much for all that 'Look at how China is leading the world in solar' stuff.

This appears like yet another callously autocratic move in the much-beleaguered Church in Wales. To propose to sack ⅔ of your choir without discussion, then sack their director when he & they protest is very poor management (both of staff and reputation). The 'inappropriate song' was Ps. 94:1-11.

What a crap headline. Should read: “Cathedral bass sacked after protesting over job losses in song form.” This makes it sound like he did the Monty Python Penis Song at Matins…

Very excited for this conference next summer! #CFP (deadline 28 Feb) Clio Reframed: Women Writing History, 1500-1750 at Oxford 18-19 June 2026. #earlymodern 🗃️ clioreframed.hcommons.org/call-for-pap...

My colleagues & I (who work/have worked with translation into English) have been saying this for years: translators are vital. Now there's this false belief that gen-AI (only useful as a probability machine) can replace them. No, humans still do language best. universitetslararen.se/2025/12/04/a...

What on earth is going on at the BL?

Breaking: Second wave of strikes at British Library announced Union says lack of stable leadership after chief executive’s departure has “undoubtedly undermined staff confidence” www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-c...

A blast from my past - the Medieval Soldier database takes nearly 300,000 military service records from 1369-1453 and makes them available as a searchable database. An invaluable resource for understanding medieval warfare, society and the English medieval state. Learn more in the link. 🗃️

The worst thing to happen to academia was the emergence of a nomadic administrative class like the one in corporations who just move from institution to institution setting fires and walking away. Say what you will about the flaws of faculty governance, but at least they believe in the mission.

The future of healthcare if assisted suicide becomes legal.

This should surprise no one.

Now that Amazon has my book back in stock at last, it's the best-selling book on opera again. Let's keep it there! 😁

Now available online! www.cambridge.org/core/books/h... 🌿📚💚🪲

Read our full response to the news from University of Nottingham ⬇️

Protest over future of University of Nottingham language courses George Torr,East Midlandsand Heidi Booth,Nottingham Heidi Booth/BBC The protest has received letters of support from the Spanish and Cuban ambassadors to the UK Students and lecturers held a protest over the potential future of…

TODAY! I'm looking forward to speaking about my book **Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature** at 5.15pm GMT - come along online or in person (Queen's College, Ox) @obs1922.bsky.social

Our next @bodleian.ox.ac.uk #maps blog by @stuartackland.bsky.social features the "false" map of #Oxford from 1644. Look at this and be prepared to be confused! blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/maps/. When is north not north? And who was Anthony Wood? @bcsmaps.bsky.social @ox.ac.uk @bbcoxford.bsky.social

I’m so happy that it’s publication day for my monograph! As I’m on leave atm, there’s no book launch (yet…) but I’m celebrating with my little mascot who says it’s almost as good as their favourite Peekaboo Moon, which is towering praise from this fairly fierce book critic.