I will be in conversation about my new book, The Future That Was, with Professor Brandon Terry at Harvard Bookstore on March 30th at 7 pm www.harvard.com/event/durba-...

News alert! New study from @oii.ox.ac.uk and the University of Kentucky finds that ChatGPT amplifies global inequalities. Researchers find that large language models reflect historic biases in the data sets they learn from whilst shaping how people see the world. More here: bit.ly/4bF4K9B 1/4

This is an absolutely beautiful book, with abundantly illustrated essays by @nancyum.bsky.social, Nancy Steinhardt and other great people. And at $70 HB it's a steal!

Brilliant round table online ahead of print from @frenchhistory.bsky.social on “Colonisations: notre histoire”, a history in reverse of France and empire, written by 268 contributors (!!!) doi.org/10.1093/fh/c... 🗃️

"Tribal leaders and members who live in the greater Minneapolis area say Indigenous family members, friends and neighbors have been stopped, questioned, harassed and, in some cases, detained solely on the basis of their skin color or their names." www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

In the pre Christmas corset madness it looks like I forgot to post pics of this when I finished it. #Shetland navigation chart #screenprinting on calico fabric then painted a bit and sewn a lot. The coastline of Shetland was particularly tiresome, but worth it in the end!

Hello! I am sharing information about my @researchireland.ie project Locating Loss: histories of infertility in landscapes and spaces. I would love to connect with researchers/ practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines, so please share widely! @nursingclio.bsky.social

VERY excited we get to discuss Mélanie Lamotte's book @ihreurope1500.bsky.social with @lrhodges.bsky.social & @juliehardwick.bsky.social and Mélanie herself! 18 May, 17:30 @ihr.bsky.social Get your copy @harvardpress.bsky.social: www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067... #EarlyModern #SkyStorians

Archaeologists: D.C. Capitol May Have Once Been Used For Legislating https://theonion.com/archaeologists-d-c-capitol-may-have-once-been-used-for-legislating/

PROGRAMME FOR THE TERM UP! Exciting papers coming you way, on zoom & @ihr.bsky.social, #EarlyModern #SkyStorians: sacred spaces, epidemics, and corporeality. Sign up here: www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

Probably more important than his rambling speech. They’re going to strip people of their citizenship.

Huge loss for the whole research triangle. Centers cut are the the Carolina Asia Center, the Institute for the Study of the Americas, and the centers for European Studies, African Studies, Middle East and Islamic Studies, and Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies Total of 14 will be cut :(

Flagging #HigherEd news that has gone under-reported: the axing of Title VI National Resource Centers. These provided instruction in rare-but-important languages (like Kreyòl!) and allowed scholars from different disciplines to collaborate on a shared area.

Context: Last night, on the 252nd anniversary of the Boston Tea Party -- residents assembled at the Old South Meeting House -- listened to several rousing speeches -- marched to the Harbor -- and yelled "Huzzah!" as protest leaders dumped hundreds of pounds of ice into the water

Just say women. This is taking forever.

The hidden histories of empire, told through the haunted afterlives of colonial migrations. Julia Stephens' Worldly Afterlives is now available (10 Feb UK pub). Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... #History #BritishEmpire #ReadUP

Let me understand you correctly, governments can care that people are being murdered?

💔 The library was achingly beautiful in this morning's snow. 1/

OMG these poor students and TAs

I picked up my daughter from the school bus on the day of Sandy Hook, fighting back tears with parent at the bus stop. Her dad, sister and I marched together after Parkland. Tonight she’s texting with friends at Brown to make sure they are safe. What country have we made for you, my dear girl?

One of the reasons I'm grateful to have spent so much of my PhD abroad is that I haven't had to worry about being shot, or trying to save my students from being shot. We didn't have active shooter drills when I was growing up. I wouldn't know what to do. The US is so messed up.

BREAKING: At least 10 people shot, 2 killed, at Brown University in Rhode Island, mayor says. Suspect not in custody

Each semester I go in my classroom and I try to figure out what we would use to block the doors, if it would be safe to crawl out the windows, where we could hide if there was a mass shooter in campus. It’s such an indictment of this country how we have normalized these preventable tragedies.

Amsterdam in the seventeenth century is a city where women are the true backbone. They keep the city running while men are at sea or abroad – as labourers, businesswomen, caregivers, regentesses, artists and also as sex workers. #Amsterdam #newcanon #amsterdam750 www.amsterdam.nl/stadsarchief...

“‘The lawsuit is our last resort,’ Carol Quillen, National Trust’s CEO, said in an interview. ‘We serve the people, and the people are not being served in this process.’” [gift link]

This -- a model bill to effectively decimate non-STEM research by requiring 3-3 teaching loads outside of "STEM or Americanism and western civilization" -- seems...extremely bad but also quite plausible.

someone should invent a thing that's like a university but it's goal is to facilitate learning

I generally don't think everything should be remunerative, but I do think often about how many humanities scholars and departments could have been sustained by being paid even a fraction of what their work was worth to academic publishers, and instead ended up as pure profit to people doing nothing.

“The device was…a special” smart watch that ICE “had mandated the woman wear at all times, allowing the agency to track her” “she panicked” when the device was cut off for safety reasons during her c-section “nurses do not know what happened to the woman after she left the hospital with her baby”

So pleased to see this new volume, Shopping in Eighteenth-Century Europe published in our Routledge series. Congratulations to My Hellsing and Johanna Ilmakunnas for putting together such an interesting collection of essays! #skystorians #c18th 🗃️

Greetings, new 18th-century and Material Culture pals! I offer to you my favorite (non-gravestone) 18th-century artifact: Staffordshire teapot (ca.1760-65) from the Met bonus: it was once owned by a guy named Cecil, Lord Revelstoke, which is a great #romance name www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

It's wild that there appears to be more current concern for the Lost Library of Alexandria than for the British Library. The BL's crisis exemplifies the accelerating destruction--through apathy as much as by design--of human knowledge & learning. I'm not even being dramatic.

I wish a notice like this wasn't necessary. www.icrc.org/en/article/i...

Adored seeing “The Land Sings Back” today at the Drawing Room. Incredible range of artistic responses to histories of environmental destruction and colonial botany. Still on for another week ✨🌱 drawingroom.org.uk/exhibition/t...

My employer, Dartmouth College, today boasts it's 1st Ivy "to launch AI at an institutional scale." It is doing this by partnering--"more than a collaboration"--with Anthropic, a company that stole the books of many faculty, me included, which many of us are suing.

In case you didn't know how out of touch the British Library management is, here is a health and wellbeing newsletter they shared with staff advising them not to purchase gifts this holiday season! Workers have to put up with this sort of gaslighting all the time 😡🎅 (Via @pcsunion.bsky.social)

Kavanaugh stops.

“She showed up as scheduled, and when she arrived, officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled.” www.wgbh.org/news/local/2... @gbhnews.bsky.social

Thinking of my New School friends whose programs have been closed (~30 of them), whose PhD programs have been indefinitely halted, and who are now receiving invitations to resign + accept severance payments — with the threat of 🪓 if not enough folks take the offer. A ✨-if-imperfect place ruined 😥

“Two years ago, Lia was a talented young swimmer at Middlebury; now, her name is almost entirely absent from the college’s athletics website, and her roster profile has been removed entirely.”

RFK Jr: "Two weeks ago we ended, under your leadership, a twenty year war on women". Three out of five men in this shot have been accused of sexual misconduct, harassment or abusive behaviour towards women. A fourth signed into law a near-total abortion ban in his state as governor.

I'm very excited to share my new book's cover design: www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501... It is bloodstain-inspired because species-of-origin bloodstain testing is a big part of the story. Out on 15 April 2026 & Open Access as part of the Corpus Juris book series @cornellupress.bsky.social

For any interested #earlymodern #skystorians: I've the pleasure of speaking at the Moved Apart Project's seminar series this coming Monday at 9am GMT/10am CET! The talk (ca. 30 mins) will be 'Time Apart in the early English East India Company', and it's entirely online! All welcome!

Super bummed there's no Past & Present fellowship this year. :/Anyone know why?

At this point, our intro comp/first-year English course has been so heavily revised, it no longer includes a novel, or "extended reading" of any kind, no "specialized" or "historical" reading, mostly in-class assignments, no research essay...and we are still seeing a 40-50% rate of AI misconduct.

When Columbia, Cornell, and Northwestern send material asking for donations, do they include links to a Trump SuperPAC so donors don't have to bother with a middle man?

I'm thrilled to have received the Natalie Zemon Davis Award from @sfhs.bsky.social for my paper on Tamil consumers, caste, and mechanical timepieces in 18C Pondicherry. NZD is such an inspiration to early modernists and it's a huge honor to receive this award!

Time again to share this amazing turkey content:

Next it will be naturalized citizens (my husband). Then American-born dual citizens (my kids). No, that's not legal. Neither is this.

'The government will charge universities £925 per international student for each year of study from August 2028, in a blow to cash-strapped higher education institutions.' 1/3