Ctl+F this

The scholars yearn for more Lydgate discourse, and who are we to deny them? (Clint Morrison and I are co-organizing. Chris is presenting— I got this wrong in the first post— along with RD Perry, Taylor Cowdery, and Katherine Breen. Response by Bobby Meyer-Lee. It’s gonna be great!)

I feel like "academic hiring" discourse is always kind of downstream of the fact that in the 50s we started building a giant public system to make a college education almost universally available and in the 80s and 90s we started taking it apart to go back to the only-the-rich model

Thanks to an extended layover, I've begun on my syllabus for my digital manuscript studies seminar, which I'll be teaching next year for the first time since 2022 and I can already tell that THE challenge is going to be narrowing down all the excellent scholarship that's come out since then

Today’s wake-up alarm to CatG (coffee at the gate) time at PWM was 35 minutes. Not my best time, but respectable for the season.

Me: "It's the end of term, my grading is about wrapped up, I've cleared two writing projects off my desk, I'm going to binge a show that has nothing whatsoever to do with work or research." Slow Horses s1e6: "The hell you will."

Two things can be true: I genuinely love that we received a box of fancy pears as an early Christmas gift I have no idea how we're going to consume ten pears between now and when we leave town for the holidays

every trans kid brings more value to the world than any chickenshit politician willing to sacrifice them for political points

I've been on 10+ search committees, and my experience is that things operate in tranches. There are meaningful differences-- fit, preparation-- between the top, say, quintile and not. But the differences beyond are minuscule and for most jobs, being in the top 20% doesn't even guarantee an interview

I've been asked for information about UK-based researchers with interest in TTRPGs and Actual Play. I have a half-dozen names off the top of the dome, but would be happy to hear of more to pass along for Schemes.

I would call it a kind of Puritanism, except the Puritans would have hated Santa and everything about Christmas that he stands for

I was not raised with Santa, so I may not be the best judge here, but the instant moral outrage over adults who challenge-- even inadvertently-- belief in Santa on the part of children other than their own is a particularly weird symptom of prevailing forces in our current cultural moment.

Friend of a lot of my friends. She was last seen in Hamtramck. Hamtramck, Detroit, keep an eye out! And please share

Challenge: Megan write something without citing James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 2: 1350-1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution. Level: Impossible.

OK then!

"‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" is not hyperbole

Hi, I love this

I have nine portfolios left to grade, which is coincidentally the same number of tabs with vegan chili recipes I opened while grading the last one. Focus is at a low ebb this morning. (Do you have a favorite veggie chili recipe? Bonus points if involves tempeh)

I got this print over the weekend and am trying to take its wise and challenging message to heart

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-...

Just a man with a fancy hat, cool eyeglasses, doing the devil horns? Well, in fact, there is also a small 🐓 on his hat and the man is riding a giant 🐓 as you will see in this thread. By the way, you see a detail of a satire broadside about cuckoldry published in #earlymodern Europe. 1/3

One argument I used to make to my students about why it was important to learn history (and historical thinking) is that someone was always going to be trying to tell you things were natural or had always been this way and that you needed to be able to see that as an exercise of power.

I could bring this up most any day but in light of today’s events maybe we should figure out marking mass shooting sites, like how the Equal Justice Initiative puts up markers at lynching sites, as some gesture to make sure they don’t keep fading into the ether of Another Mass Shooting

Good news from #Maine

Without getting into spoilers, I am also extremely curious to know what scholars of contemporary American religion make of WAKE UP DEAD MAN. It seems to me a fairly nuanced take for a movie that leans hard into the detective genre and is neither about a crisis faith nor the church as such

Colby-- weirdly-- has a large and very solid Vernon Lee collection, and I love it when students choose to work on something from it, only to discover the rabbit hole runs very deep

Still wild to me that Musk's impetus for going full-on comic book supervillain appears to be the fact that his smart, cool, funny daughter also happens to be trans

God, love a movie where Glen Close and Kerry Washington are both allowed to just have at it and CHEW the scenery

this is like a capsule summary of the problems with a singular focus on quantifiable data

I am enjoying the responses to this post and hope that more of you weigh in. I will also accept your absolutely dug-in contemporary fights on historical issues, eg date of the composition of Beowulf

one of the laziest moves in tech journalism is to presume chronology - a technology is inevitable; human history is a movement from tech to tech. thus I am aggrieved to read, as an opening line in this NYT article about students reading, "In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading."

I want to be writing about Polydore Vergil and John Leland's feud about the historical King Arthur, and it really just doesn't fit in what I'm working on. So tell me: what is your favorite scholarrly/quasi-scholarly feud from your period? Dudes that just absolutely could not stand one another?

I don't have a lot of pictures of myself during grad school actually doing grad student things, but here's a photo of me in the absolutely feral office I shared with Greta LaFleur during our first year of teaching in 2008

As of today, the only person in this Daily Penn visual that hasn't been fined millions of dollars or convicted of a felony is Luigi Mangione, believe it or not

Your periodic reminder that there is a 3.5 hour dungeon synth epic based on the Canterbury Tales: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN88...

Trying to write a document explaining that I should be the one to do a thing, and how do you say "I am a sick, sick person who enjoys strategic planning" in polite academic terms?

Let me tell you, the shitty part about quitting caffeine is quitting caffeine, it has nothing to do with the availability of non-caffeinated options

Workday is foiling my plans to file grades from the bar, but I’m just saying: I could file grades from here

SKULL OF THOMAS AQUINAS: TAKE A LEFT NOW PRIEST: No, the GPS says we have to keep going— SKULL: I KNOW A SHORTCUT PRIEST: Do you remember the last ti— SKULL: FOR THOSE WITH FAITH, NO EVIDENCE IS NECESSARY; FOR THOSE WITHOUT IT, NO EVIDENCE WILL SUFFICE

I am deep in transfer credit and study abroad requests and making sure senior advisees are set to graduate and so this is a reminder to college students: hold onto a copy of the syllabus until you graduate. You probably won't need it after the class is done! But if you do, you'll really need it.

This is stupid and also a great hook for an essay on the enduring use of blackletter in 16c lawbooks and bibles: "A cable dated December 9 sent to all U.S. diplomatic posts said that typography shapes the professionalism of an official document and Calibri is informal compared to serif typefaces."

We’re thrilled to announce that issue 3 is up & features a special cluster on Netflix’s The Decameron!m! The full issue is available here: www.arthuriana.com/tsw-issues! #pubhums #medievalsky #arthuriansky And now, a quick teaser 🧵 of the pieces in this issue… /1

Hey team 19th century handwriting! What does this say? The student working on it and I can make out "Elizabeth Akers" and "But Mr. Ball did not send it to me! How could he bear the thought that I should [something something] it?"

Everything about this story is so very Maine. Two deer inside an SUV! Loaded crossbow in the car! Caught because of fresh tracks in the snow! Charged with night hunting! I also find the scansion of "Brunswick nighttime crossbow hunting incident" very pleasing www.pressherald.com/2025/12/08/t...

If a school won’t fully employ its own teachers why in the world would any student or their family trust them to know a thing about career prep? I hate the vocationalization of higher ed (obvs) but even within that awful frame it seems fair to say: you either take jobs srsly or you don’t.

I myself am not an environmental humanist and only rarely play one in the classroom, but 1) I can attest to the glories of Maine in high summer and 2) getting to see this program grow and thrive under the guidance of my colleagues and become truly international in scope has been an absolute joy

Are you an environmental humanist? Do you like hanging out with other smart environmental humanists? Would you like to do so for a week this summer in Maine? Then I highly recommend Colby's Summer Institute in the Environmental Humanities! (app due 2/6/26) cah.colby.edu/initiatives/...

Grumpy medievalist take, but I am gobsmacked by the cheerfulness with which some scholars working in later fields disclose not having the relevant languages for their research, and also having no plans to acquire them. There are many cases in which you've actually gotta read the Latin, babe!

One of my neighbors has been putting up these fish facts posters. All kinds of different fish, marine, freshwater, deep, shallow, all kinds. This is a good one. “Stg this real fish” took me out. Good work, neighbor.

there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up