CFP: Mid-career workshop for early modern British historians at USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Instutute Jan 2027. Applications due 31 July 2026.

Too many of my friends and acquaintances have recently lost jobs teaching in higher ed; too many of us never had chances to build teaching careers in the first place. When academics say someone is "beginning to lose their trust" it opens the important question of just _whose_ trust matters now.

"We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify. ... If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for #literacy deliberately." – Tyler Jagt #education #reading #learning #teaching #AI www.chronicle.com/article/my-s...

i think it is politically critical to show that a republican can be beaten in texas and morally critical for the country to show that a good person can win against a bad one

Rather than rubberneck at the inevitable implosion of the Platner campaign in Maine, I'd urge everyone to focus on another swing-state or even red-state Senate race that we might actually win. Ohio and Michigan are toss-ups and we have a fighting chance in Iowa, Texas and Alaska too.

historians have doubts about whether the moment depicted actually happened.

Good 🧵👇. FWIW, those of us fortunate enough to be employed in this area also have an obligation to share the hard truth with our students so that they have realistic expectations if they embark on the dream of becoming a college prof, *and* so they can join the fight, as encouraged here.

If you ever wonder why academics roll their eyes at "viewpoint diversity" hires is that when you pick a scholar for their ideology and politics over the actual work, this is the kind of clown show that results.

Lot of good fodder lately for my fall semester AI-policy. "In accordance with the Vatican and UC Berkeley Law, this class will..."

If you’d told me 15 years ago that in 2026 Donald Trump would be the Republican president and that I would be reading papal encyclicals muttering “fuck yeah, this Pope really gets it,” I would have laughed in your face. And yet here we are.

I've done a big update to the 'Against Generative AI' bibliography, including a link to today's papal encyclical. Enjoy! catherinedenial.org/blog/uncateg...

If I’m not evolved enough to understand it, then why did they have to steal my writing to train it?

UC Berkeley Law creates new AI policy that bans AI for "conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit" or exams because "thinking remains the sine qua non of good lawyering (and of a quality legal education)." That's what I'm talking about.

This is incredibly dumb: cross-national collaborations are part of what makes science great. No country has a monopoly on good ideas.

On AI and doing history: I often ask my students what we owe to the dead, especially if their stories have not yet been told. I don’t think it’s the truth, since we can’t fully get at that. I think what we owe them is a recognition of their humanity. And that, a non-human entity can never give.

This is insane. The terms of DOJ's slush fund appear to transfer control of $1.8 billion beyond US government entirely. Unless I'm misreading this, that would circumvent Congress *entirely* and put the money outside of *any* constitutional and/or legal constraints ofany kind. Straight up theft.

Always worth remembering: ChatGPT isn't a tool, it isn't a companion. It's a product -- and everything you type in that box is data you are sending to OpenAI.

Rawbraining it

This coming Monday! Very excited to have teamed up with the French History seminar for a discussion of Mélanie Lamotte's By Flesh & Toil: How Sex, Race, & Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (@harvardpress.bsky.social) MON, 18 May, 17:30, zoom & in person @ihr.bsky.social #EarlyModern #Skystorians

"For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence..Many ideas that enjoy enormous popularity among billionaires—cryogenic immortality, disregard for punctuation, the Antichrist—have scandalously been excluded from our labs and classrooms."

Ceci n'est pas une golden calf.

I'll just note that critical race theory predicts quite a lot about the current racial retrenchment and for being *correct* it was pilloried in the press and by some academics.

Who could have imagined turning over campus instructional infrastructure to a private equity backed for-profit firm would have a downside? Not like this is the end of the semester with students studying for exams that start tomorrow. And all their course materials are inaccessible. 🤡

"So we noticed that most professors are NOT voting for the party that's defunding higher education, canceling grants for political grievances, banning books, attacking entire fields, placing professors on 'watch lists,' and pushing pseudoscience." "Well, clearly that is the fault of universities."

Here we go again. Every so often tech makes an incursion into history, completely ignores that history is a rigorous discipline with a methodology, and then claims that a mystery or issue that historians have grappled with can be solved with an algorithm. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This:is 💯 correct. The vast majority of Section 2 litigation (and settlements made under the threat of litigation) have been at the local level. Callais will gut minority representation in city councils, county supervisors, and school boards across the county.

“Political violence” is a nearly meaningless phrase in an era where grave harm is so routinely caused by political institutions that it doesn’t trigger an ounce of introspection

We’ve become way too inured to the constant violence because of all of the people in power who revel in it. What a joyless, artless, sexless, rudderless country we became so fast.

The attack on education in the US is not new, but the slow fuse that arguably started with Reagan is now setting off detonations across K-12 and higher education that are going to be incredibly difficult to walk back if we don’t treat this like the urgent crisis it is.

(insert Historian's rant about why the American people desperately need better religious literacy)

Incredible exchange on a number of levels.

I'm very excited to announce the launch of our new book series Radical Histories. We can't wait to hear about any relevant projects. Get it in touch! Find out more: manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/blog/2026/04... #RadicalHistory #History

Remember, Democrats have repeatedly advanced measures to ban partisan gerrymandering and Republicans have voted against them time after time. This is the game Republicans wanted to play. OK, then.

So much false equivalence in media on gerrymandering in Texas vs California & Virginia. California and Virginia maps approved by the voters. That's a huge difference not enough people pointing out

This is glaringly obvious to everyone except for the faces of corporate media, who desperately want to walk a red carpet

'Texas A&M philosophy professor Martin Peterson is leaving the university after administrators told him in January that he couldn’t teach Plato’s Symposium in his philosophy class; they said the ancient Greek philosopher’s work violated the system’s restrictions on gender and sexuality content.' 1/3

yeeahh there's a reason why he's targeting places like Detroit and Georgia www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735353...

I was at a dog-friendly bar in NW Portland tonight and a table behind me started singing Happy Birthday and then I realized it wasn’t for a person but a really old dog who was wearing a crown and he was old and fucking adorable and I love this city

📢 This week, i'm joined by @mikkibrock.bsky.social to talk about Elizabeth I's "magician", alchemist and all-round strange person, Dr John Dee - who talked to angels, demons and might well have invented the British Empire! 🗃 🎧 ⬇️ #history podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

Between the Trump as Jesus/Doctor memes and Pete Hegseth quoting the “bible”/Pulp Fiction, I don’t think I’ve laughed this hard since Four Seasons Total Landscaping. A golden age of gallows humor, truly.

one of my oldest friends sends totally random monday memes. i thought the skyline would appreciate yesterday’s:

What if we just cleared Congress of all the abusers and sex pests this week what is stopping us who cares what party they are in

This is why we need public scholarship. As soon as the @cbsnews.com.web.brid.gy newscaster asked about Trump saying the image was him as a doctor, @candidamoss.bsky.social cites the 2000 years of historical iconography that indicated to everyone that the AI image was meant to cast Trump as Jesus.

Woohoo, here's my essay with my fav co-author on 30,000 fellowship wins across the Guggenheim, Stanford CASBS, NAEd, National Humanities Center, RSF visiting scholar, and Harvard Radcliffe. Spoiler: it's the people working at prestigious universities www.publicbooks.org/who-gets-gug...

As a medievalist whose work has spanned the 7th through the 16th centuries, it is genuinely wild to see the general public and the United States government in particular discovering just how involved the Pope can get in international politics.

How do you even perform this during Model UN?

This is a great illustration of @larryglickman.bsky.social's point about how "backlash" framing lets the right play the victim.

In general, (re)orienting education wholly or chiefly to specific perceived market needs is always going to produce disaster once the near term passes. It also eviscerates institutions that might otherwise help people weather change, intellectually and in other ways

Everyone please welcome CBS News Immigration Analyst Viktor Orban.

even the most tenacious autocrats have a difficult time denying a landslide result against them