I'm teaching a grad seminar on early modern British history for the first time in 7 years in the spring. I usually do a mix of "classics" and newer stuff. What new-ish books would you recommend? 🗃️

Report: You To Be Fired For Reading This Headline About Charlie Kirk

We cannot make the headlines blunter people www.theverge.com/policy/77979...

“it seems probable that the few historians who will still be able to have meaningful academic careers in, say, ten years’ time will all be able-bodied, childless British citizens from upper-class families.” This is so real. The situation really is this bleak.

Now reading 200+ pages of Ulhoa's correspondence while in Amsterdam, and found one surprisingly relatable 1662 passage to great Jewish financier Antonio Lopes Suasso: "My lord, you must have known that chocolate is my sustance..." - goes on profusely thanking Suasso for a large chocolate delivery.

We’re at the post WWII inflection point: the state created for survivors of the most notorious genocide in history itself commits genocide. At the same time, 100,000 Britons march for fascism in London. Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, UN commission of inquiry says www.bbc.com/news/article...

📣Call for Papers 📣 I am delighted to announce that 'Speech/less in the Early Modern World' will be held 23 April 2026 at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. Please share far and wide and do consider submitting a proposal! 🙊 Link to PDF version: bit.ly/4lZz80R

Some personal news: I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Thread incoming. substack.com/@karenattiah...

🚨Call for Papers🚨Delighted to share the CfP for next year's meeting of @frenchcolonial.bsky.social which we will be hosting in Maynooth June 25-27. The theme is "Après la tempête: Afterlives of Colonial Crisis and Conflict". Deadline for submissions is November 14 frenchcolonial.org/annual-meeti...

Pious Labor (@ucpress.bsky.social ) reviewed in the AHR by @farinamir.bsky.social . I've been fortunate that the book has been read by several thoughtful and generous reviewers, and I'm especially thrilled to see this one. academic.oup.com/ahr/article-... 🗃️

UC Berkeley betrayed their own faculty, including Jewish academics like Judith Butler, to the Trump administration www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

We're hiring! The History Department invites applicants for a full-time, tenure-track position, at the Assistant Professor level, in Early Modern European history. The successful candidate will have defended the Ph.D. thesis by the time of appointment. Learn more & apply: apply.interfolio.com/173465

A pleasure to be back for a few more months

There is so much that is terrible in what has been reported. But among them is the student’s reference to “our president’s laws.”

For a state that constantly claims to want as many “high ranking universities as California”, Texas is really do the exact opposite of what it takes to either attract or retain any educators/scholars of quality.

People say Boston is a white city because they don’t know Boston is a city in a majority minority metro where the Taiwanese American mayor succeeds in part because she campaigns in Haitian Kreyòl

Texas A&M’s President just removed a dean and department head from their positions after they supported a professor whose lesson on gender was challenged by a student. www.kbtx.com/2025/09/09/a...

CBS News is giving up the power it has to hold “Face the Nation” interviewees to account. Following pressure from Trump, it has agreed not to edit interviews, even to remove false statements or propaganda uttered by political operatives and officials, or add explanatory context.

“Residential fellowships are a vestige of a time when academic families lived on a single income, when life revolved around the career of this breadwinner, and when scholars were overwhelmingly men with stay-at-home wives” Also: some fellowships barely pay enough to cover the cost of the move+rent

yes i am sure

Finger ring with built-in clock 2nd quarter of the 17th century by Johannes Butz, Augsburg (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Kunstkammer)

Okay. I just came back to this and you aren’t calling these efforts resegregation yet, you absolutely should be

My op-ed in the @chicagomaroon.bsky.social on the University of Chicago’s appalling plans to gut the humanities and possibly eliminate the South Asian studies department chicagomaroon.com/48353/viewpo...

The first step towards crawling out of this deep dark hole is to recognize the truth: We are now living in a competitive authoritarian regime. Only be being honest about where we are & how we got here can we fight to restore (& improve upon) the liberty we deserve. #polisky #civmilsky #democracy

WASHINGTON (AP) — Trump extends control over Washington by taking management of Union Station away from Amtrak.

Just received a very alarming DC ICE alert as they were spotted outside a local elementary school waiting for parents. Masked men with weapons waiting outside a school on the same day a a mass school shooting.

What an image (J. Scott Applewhite, AP)

The President of the United States sat in the Oval Office and said "a lot of people are saying maybe we'd like a dictator" and that is not even a top story.

It is hard to emphasize how fucked up it is that other countries will not send packages to the US now. Even our ability to receive mail from abroad is under attack: www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Pritzker: To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story.

trump does not intend for the next january 6th to fail www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Me teaching my British history survey then: I think I should focus less on monarchs vs. Parliaments. Me teaching it in 2025: all monarchs vs. Parliaments all the time.

We have hit the "Degenerate Art" stage of things

So, here it is. Thanks to a new state law that was NEVER DEBATED, Indiana University has committed itself to abolishing majors in African-American/African Diaspora Studies: American Studies; Art History; French; Italian; Religious Studies etc. DOZENS of majors. www.ipm.org/news-section...

the crisis in which the University of Chicago is now engulfed -- one entirely of its own making, and which has led to the (hopefully temporary) suspension of admissions into numerous PhD programs in the humanities -- represents I think a seismic event in the history of American higher education 1/

📢 Nouvelle publication ! « Mercantilisme animal. Contrebande de races animales, diplomatie du mouton et géopolitique du capital génétique dans la France du XVIIIe siècle » 🐑🌍 www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #histoire #animaux

Another fabulous day working at the Yale Center for British Art

New job: Assistant Professor of Art History The American University of Paris jobs.h-net.org/jobs/68994

ICE getting routed in my old DC Columbia Heights hood. Public, viral, resistance is the only way to prevent them from selling the idea that we love our red state military occupation are it’s a solution to urban ills Trump/Bondi/drunk Pirro are lying. Here’s how to expose the lie.

A massive attack on several humanities units (Arabic Studies, Judaic Studies, Holocaust Studies, Classics, Religion, German & Scandinavian, Russian/East European/Eurasian Studies) *and* tenure now unfolding at the University of Oregon (a blue state!). Closure of units and faculty layoffs threatened.

We are outraged and deeply distressed that armed federal agents came onto our campus—making arrests on the very ground where, in 1942, Japanese American families were forced to board buses bound for concentration camps. It was a deliberate act of provocation and intimidation.

New — I wrote about the violent assault on a DC delivery worker this morning by masked federal agents, and how these agents have made the disturbing turn from quiet thugs to playing for the cameras.

Considering getting this passage from the NYT article printed on totes for our art history majors. Too much?

Our August issue, 29.4, is now available online! This issue opens with an open-access article by Yonatan Glazer-Eytan and Giuseppe Marcocci, "Material Culture and Early Modern Archivality: A Dialogue." brill.com/view/journal...

We’ve said it repeatedly — the Trump assault on the Department of Education is an assault on kids with disabilities. This Ohio district is violating the clear letter of the IDEA but with the Dept of Ed eviscerated and the courts turning a blind eye, parents are on their own.

This isn’t an impoverished regional school – this is the University of Chicago. Devastating.

Situation on 14th St and W St. NW, with federal agents -- no specific agency identified -- pulling cars over for checks. They arrested a Black woman in this car. BIG crowd of people shouting at police. "Fuck you!" "What is wrong with you!" "You don't need to terrorize people like this!"

No words