In defiance of the reading speed and ever-lengthening reading lists required by academia, I pick out a slow read for each year. This year it was Swann's Way, the first novel of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. How fitting are the last couple of sentences for this time of the year!

So many of my recent pieces for National Geographic would have suffered were it not for my ability to link to the amazing resources supplied by @nasscal.bsky.social. If you are interested in early Christian literature you must check out this invaluable site. www.nasscal.com

What an unexpectedly beautiful mobile reader experience!

My (free) website for learning to read from Greek manuscripts is available. Still some tweaks to be made but it’s ready with 12 lessons, tips and hints, downloadable reports if you use it for a class, and links to lots of resources. Please share and give feedback! xeirographa.com

“A crucial verb for writers is revise. Which means, of course, to re-see.” —Allan Gurganus

Hey #ClassicsBluesky: drop your 2025 publications here ⬇️

Nesting series Natalie Ciccoricco, mixed media www.mrsciccoricco.com/portfolio #art #sculpture

"Each decision was made independently, using different editorial processes and data sets, yet together they describe a single cultural condition. They point to an internet shaped less by meaning and more by signalling."

"Consider the possibility that what you're seeing isn't a lack of humanity, but a form of humanity you haven't been trained to recognise. You might be looking at the result of a different education, a different history, a different standard." - Marcus Olang'

“New research suggests that the illustrations may have been based on “Phrygians,” a tragedy by the Athenian playwright Aeschylus, rather than the “Iliad”” www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/h...

Me next time I'm struggling to write an introduction:

In particular, I'm interested in his view that unlike the sciences, replication is not possible in the humanities. In my review, I give some reasons in favor of thinking it is possible. (I've screenshotted the relevant bits).

The wiki entry for Euripides Thyestes is slightly bonkers pls enjoy

🦴 New research shows Lesotho locals understood fossils long before missionaries arrived, challenging old stories of “discovery”. 📚 theconversation.com/fossil-scien... #ScienceAndTech

"Eurydice" by William Kentridge Animation for the forthcoming production of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” #ancientbluesky #classicalreception #art

Are 16 days of activism against gender-based violence enough? Our survey data suggest not, given how many Africans say men are "sometimes" or "always" justified in physically disciplining their wives. Read our latest piece in @thecontinent.org for more. #VoicesAfrica #16DaysOfActivism #StopGBV

How can we sleep for grief? By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old.

I teach in a country where our universities tend to use English as the language of instruction, even though very few students speak it as their first language. All our ancient language courses are structured on the assumption that students have little to no formal understanding of English grammar.

This essay by @johannawinant.bsky.social is beautiful on what can happen in the classroom, and on the importance of *argument* to literary studies. I especially like how she writes about helping students to "believe in their own significance" www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

even when AI is surveying reputable sources, we shouldn't forget that summarizing and synthesizing are interpretive activities that involve selecting what is most significant or salient to ongoing discussions. even if AI were unbiased, this is creative work that we should be doing.

Five New Roman-Era Theatrical Masks Unearthed in Kastabala, Including a Rare Depiction of an Elderly Philosopher - Arkeonews arkeonews.net/five-new-rom...

This study show that using poems to jailbreak LLMs is... super effective? What the heck.

This review by Ruth Scodel! She cautiously recommends the new accessible history on Homer's world, but minces no words in warning about certain inaccuracies. #ClassicsBluesky bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2025/2025.11...

"Students are highlighting the same sentences in the same passages and writing down the same main ideas and details, producing identical written responses."

Farewell to Textual Criticism? | Bible & Interpretation article by Ronald Hendel

Still can't believe there was a time when I thought ancient Greek vase paintings were boring. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pa...

The German word ‘Pferd’ and its Dutch cognate ‘paard’ are horses of mixed breed parentage. Their common ancestor came from Latin ‘paraverēdus’ (substitute post-horse), a word composed of an Ancient Greek element and a Gaulish one. Zoom in on my new infographic to learn everything about it:

“I tell my students, who believe passionately in explaining the work they’re sharing, ‘You know, when you’re dead, you can’t go around explaining this thing—it has to be right there on the page.’ ” —Louise Glück buff.ly/uXAASEg

Few authors do epigraphs as well as Ali Smith does. Pictured here, the first epigraph from the novel The Accidental.

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

How did artists of the early modern period depict African people? Join our online course (13 Nov–11 Dec) to explore how these images shaped ideas about race and ethnicity in Europe — from saints and magi to portraiture and decorative arts. warburg.sas.ac.uk/news-events/... #ArtHistory

"Yet education’s vocation has never been speed. Its vocation has been the cultivation of reflective freedom, the ability to pause before conclusion." - Sandy Leaton Gray

I was a bit nervous about joining the Septuagint Society of South Africa in 2024 - but the first paper I delivered there has just been published in the Journal of Early Christian History! Susanna Cries: Attending to the Auditory Dimension of the Susanna Narrative www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Visited the Kgodumodumo Dinosaur Interpretation Centre yesterday. 10/10 - truly a fantastically curated exhibition. Paleontological insight and evidence perfectly balanced with Basotho legends and proverbs. Also spotted @amayor.bsky.social's The First Fossil Hunters in the museum café!

An old military maxim often attributed to Napoleon is “an army marches on its stomach” and I feel the same way that a university thinks via its library. The slow and steady financial diminution of research libraries and the librarians who staff them is, to me, a slow-rolling higher Ed catastrophe.

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month www.jstor.org/action/showL...

Don urges African Scholars to embrace Classics as Africa’s heritage - Tribune Online tribuneonlineng.com/don-urges-af...

(21) The Silence of the Frogs - by Armand D'Angour armanddangour.substack.com/p/the-silenc...

It’s the Autumnal Equinox in the UK today. Persephone’s Katabasis, Demeter’s goodbye.

My modest proposal for how to acknowledge AI work is to use the Latin phase "Fieri Iussit," which means "commanded to be made." It acknowledged the Emperor's orders on Roman buildings. You didn't make the thing, but you commanded it be done, so the proper acknowledgement is "Ego hoc fieri iussi."

"It’s true that scholars no longer have the exclusive claim to territory that they once had. But it’s what you do with what you find." Eliot Weinberger, interviewed by Srikanth Reddy for The Paris Review's 'The Art of the Essay'

Trying to channel my inner Yeats: "Months of re-writing. What happiness!"

No poem or play or song Can fully right a wrong Inflicted and endured. -Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy

#Bluesky has become preferred platform for researchers www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty... #researchmatters #academia #highered

Translator's note by Cecelia Luschnig on the necessity of reading aloud in the translation process: "In an earlier version of my translation of Alcestis, I used the word 'pusillanimity,' which is literally unspeakable, as became apparent in a classroom reading." #greektragedy #classicsbluesky

I’m facilitating a (free! Open to public!) reading group in September on Euripides. Register here: libertyfund.circle.so/c/events-ann...

The latest issue of Akroterion, Journal of the Classics in South Africa, Vol. 69 (2024), is now available. akroterion.journals.ac.za/pub

I'm rereading a thesis from 1910 and the -gh simplifications are delightful. Thru instead of through. Tho instead of though. Thot instead of thought - the most jarring one!