Mañana, how exciting! #earlymodern #history #goa #architecture

Our special issue #30.1-2, "Reflections on the Global Early Modern," is now available online! It opens with an introduction by Zoltán Biedermann, Giancarlo Casale, and Molly Warsh, "How Early? How Modern? Reflections on the Global Early Modern (Part 1)." brill.com/view/journal...

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Kind of surprised that this hasn't been bigger news. It's finals week for a whole lot of universities, and yet, Canvas (a learning/grading platform used by ~9,000 schools globally) is currently inaccessible because of a pay-or-have-your-data-leaked hack. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

ATTN DMV art fans: the V&A Great Mughals exhibition is traveling to the Richmond VMFA this summer (May 9 to Aug 23). Absolutely worth the drive from DC! Also worth seeing the VMFA's permanent collection in South Asian art, one of the best in the US. www.vmfa.museum/exhibitions/...

so excited to see this!

I wrote about Karan Johar’s and Manish Malhotra’s capes at The Met Gala 2026 and what that means for Indian art history and artisanal labor. www.deepthimurali.com/textiles-talk/2026/5/making-labor-visible-wearing-india-loudly-craft-capital-and-contradiction-at-the-met-gala-2026 #metgala2026 #india

NEW today in the New York Times: In the face of unprecedented authoritarian attacks, the AAUP is building a powerful and militant resistance movement in defense of American higher education, the freedom to learn, and our democracy. Join Us!

I’m looking forward to presenting my paper on sensory loss in the British Civil Wars at the ‘Speech/less in the Early Modern World’ conference this week! Organised by the wonderful @oliviaformby.bsky.social at @camhistory.bsky.social! #earlymodern #skystorians

This administration is just hell-bent against generating knowledge about the world. www.notus.org/health-scien...

JOB: Associate Editor, The John Dickinson Writings Project Looking for someone with a PhD in early American history, ideally with previous experience working on a similar project Presented with the usual caveat about staff salaries here....

Happy 420. Here’s an article I wrote on cannabis in Sanskrit medical literature, with a little sidebar on jazz terms for the gañj. www.academia.edu/119332545/Ca...

Umm, this is NOT what I mean when I say that I LOVE LIBRARIANS! But if any #skystorians want to watch a Hallmark channel meet-cute romcom (crossed with Tom Stoppard's Arcadia) between a historian & archivist - in Philly, just in time for the 250th! - please report back.👀 decider.com/2026/04/18/t...

"In a country without the NEA, NEH and IMLS, hundreds of small local #arts groups would likely cease to exist entirely — and with them, the community, education and enlightenment that underpin our increasingly fragile, fractured society." @jessicagelt.bsky.social in @latimes.com

Always such a restorative gathering of excellent people! And October cannot come soon enough @universitypress.cambridge.org www.cambridge.org/gb/universit... #earlymodern

It has been really disturbing to see some people pay tribute to Dr. Cerina Fairfax’s killer without even mentioning her. The victims of domestic violence matter more than their husband’s political careers. www.13newsnow.com/article/news...

Dream positions: 3 (!!) PhD placements at the Prize Papers with emphasis on finding students with the following language skills: French, Spanish, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages. (Of course, I emphasize the Dutch language!) www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/professional...

Happy Friday to all, but especially to the new Journal of Mughal Studies. 500 years after the empire dawned... first issue coming soon. escholarship.org/uc/journalof... #Mughals #India #history #scholarship #highered

New reporting reveals Trump will finance his arch by taking $15 million in taxpayer funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Our colleague, Dr Oliver Finnegan, records specialist for the Prize Papers at @nationalarchivesuk, holds a workshop on 'Practical Archival Skills Training (PAST) Workshop on English High Court of Admiralty Records', more info below & tickets can be booked here www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/practical-...

The window blinds are drawn at CBS Chicago News station near Daley Plaza as the march passes by. Coverage of the Artemis II mission is playing on the news screen.

More than 2 million low-income Americans, overwhelmingly women, access birth control and STD screening through Title X programs.

NEW: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has taken steps to block or delay promotions for more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four branches of the military, according to nine U.S. officials familiar with the process.

“The last night I was a pediatric resident, a child came in with Hib and promptly died by the next day. I didn’t work for 50 years to have everything destroyed by one man.” -Dr. Kathryn Edwards, Vanderbilt University This is what RFK Jr. and the anti-vaxxers have wrought.

Timeline cleanse

US-Israeli bombing destroys the Pasteur Institute “Established in 1920, the institute is the first and oldest public health center in Iran—where staffers pioneered vaccine development and research on the prevention of infectious diseases.” www.cnn.com/2026/04/02/w...

Sauer just had to say that slaves had an "intent to remain" in the US. Motherfucker WHAT??

A new statue, a toilet spray painted gold and set on a faux-marble pedestal, is the latest in a series of protest artworks and installations taking aim at President Trump and his administration that have popped up in Washington, D.C. https://wapo.st/484QCUB

NEW REPUBLIC: “Republicans are eyeing massive cuts to health care spending in order to scrounge up $200 billion for Donald Trump’s reckless war in Iran.” newrepublic.com/post/208342/...

Hi, here's a CFP for anyone interested in talking about the "After Lives and Other Lives of South Asian Images" at the Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison WI, this October. Deadline for abstracts: 3rd April, 9pm PDT. forms.gle/cEJ1dgZxxA6s...

Two of the journalists assassinated in South Lebanon this morning by Israel were Lebanese correspondents Ali Shoeib and Fatima Ftouni. They become the 252nd and 253rd journalists killed by Israel in the last two years. Unprecedented. (📸 Cradle Media)

As of this fall you’ll be able to major in English at UNT, but it will no longer exist as a dept. Its faculty will be split across 3 different “schools.” There will be no more department chairs. Interdisciplinarity at its worst: mush. No real exp as to how any of this addresses the deficit, ofc.

HBD to the DC Metro! In its honor I will revive an old favorite from Curbed web.archive.org/web/20240302...

@profchrisadams.bsky.social and I remember two remarkable scholars, Elborg Forster and Patricia Ranum, "faculty wives" who never held formal positions but their generative scholarship made contributions to the field of French history. www.societyforfrenchhistoricalstudies.net/in-memoriam

Since the Metro opened in 1976, DC has consistently had some of the highest transit use among any big US city—higher than Chicago, Philly, or SF. The share of residents using cars to get to work is the lowest in the country outside of NYC. That's been made possible thanks to Metro.

Happy birthday to the Washington Metro, which opened 50 years ago today with service on 4.6 mi of Red Line between Rhode Is. Ave & Farragut N. System now serves 130 mi. The DC Metro shows that, with good planning & enough investment, the public sector can succeed & build something extraordinary.

Biggest comeback of the year just dropped

Some very disturbing questions from the Republican-appointed justices in today's Supreme Court arguments—definitely several votes to strike down laws in 30 states which count mail ballots that arrive shortly after Election Day, as long as they're cast by Election Day. Not what I was hoping to hear.

Here's a news clip about it. youtu.be/a81l1CwBwiI?...

A new front in Trump's war on history: documentary videos about historic cotton textile mills removed from Lowell National Historic Park. www.lowellsun.com/2026/03/10/w...

This is a national disgrace and it should cost Bhattacharya his job at NIH. It should result in him being ostracized from academia for the rest of his career. www.vox.com/future-perfe...

Another university getting rid of things you could only ever do at a university and replacing them with stuff a 13-year-old can do on a phone

Secret tricks to get much better results out of the very dreadful 'Google search' these days, plus other search engines for specific things. Statospherically useful for researchers. open.substack.com/pub/cardcata...

“Under the Trump administration, democracy has been rolled back as much during just one year as it took Modi in India and Erdogan in Turkey 10 years to accomplish, and Orban in Hungary four years." Fast moving in all the wrong ways—

Your tax dollars at work: here's a section of NEH's new Collections Stewardship grant opportunity:

Today, at Duke History, I will be speaking on "Gender History in the Time of Gender Ideology," reflecting on the 40th anniversary of Joan Wallach Scott's "Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis" (1986) and the work of gender history now. history.duke.edu/events/gende...

Re-reading Emma Flatt's Courts of the Deccan Sultanates and very much appreciating this piece of advice, from the 11th century Qābūsnāmah:

A Frenchman in London gets brought into Bridewell having been "taken in women’s apparel", but they let him go after his mistress and neighbours swear "that he did it upon a merriment to fetch oysters and without any other cause".

OMFG. Check out the one on ‘Explorers and Conquerors’. WVU should be embarrassed to teach such dated bullshit.

My Ides of March fun fact is that the place where Caesar was stabbed is now a cat sanctuary, and I think it’s beautiful that creatures with tiny knives on their feet live there