Thank you for sharing and for the collaboration. I could not have wished for a better series editor than @woolf-atthedoor.bsky.social

My book, Things of the Past: A Modern Yearning, is now available for free download from CUP, until November 13. It offers a short global history of our longing for historical artefacts, discussing Asia, Africa, Europe, South- and North America. Please share and comment!

After a decade of History of Humanities as a new discipline, the moment has come to take stock. How has the field developed across the world? Join our digital round table on December 5, to discuss this question. We have speakers from all continents! www.historyofhumanities.org/2025/10/15/d...

My workplace ...

Sad story. The University of Chicago is, or was?, a unique institution. In related news, their program in history of science has just paused accepting new graduate students. Maybe they should make some spots available for studying the recent history of the University of Chicago?

Lost El Dorado. Figure of ruler of the Muisca, bringing gold offerings to the Gods on Lake Guatavita. Photo from the collection of Salomón Koppel and his wife, Bogotá, around 1880. The figure was bought by Adolf Bastian and disappeared in a warehouse fire in Bremen. Museo Nacional de Colombia.

Ph.D. scholarship (by international standards, very well paid) available in my department. If anyone, or anyone's student, should be interested, please let me know. I would be especially happy supervising topics relating to the history and theory of humanities.

Are you interested in the entangled history of humanities and science? Then join us at the Vossius Center of the University of Amsterdam. Applications for fellowships in 2026 are now open. Deadline: 1 June 2025 vossius.uva.nl/shared/subsi...

Beware of your Greenlandic dreams. Ruins of Medieval Church at Qaqortukulooq, in one of the Scandinavian settlements. After hundreds of years in Greenland, the settlements died out in the 15th century, for unknown reasons.

A PhD student at CambridgeHPS has been putting “artwork signs” up all around our department next to “ordinary things” and they are brilliant. They unfailingly make me stop and smile and notice the wonderful strangeness of the world ✨ Best workplace spirit-lift hack I’ve seen in a long time 🙌

Exiting! New volume of History of Humanities, with introductions to texts that you can use to teach the history of the humanities in Africa. www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/hoh/curr...

Schicksale der Theorie

Time and history. The story of an abusive relationship in 8 parts. Once time and history worked together revealing the past. 1

Just started this pack on researchers who work with the philosophy of history broadly understood (including the history of historiography) - please let me know if you want to be added. We're not many and we're spread quite far and wide, so anything helps. go.bsky.app/NoGHFec

Cultures boxed-in and removed from history. Map of “African Tribal Art”, divided according to the “One Tribe, One Style” principle. Produced for conference at Indiana University, September 28-30, 1961.

Marc Bloch, historien et résistant, va entrer au Panthéon, annonce Emmanuel Macron

Our interview with Dr Ikhlas Abdel Latief, Sudan’s director of Museums, about the recent looting of the Sudan National Museum theconversation.com/sudans-natio...

Why do we hold on to things of the past? A short piece with some thoughts on Napoleon's hat, published in the delightfully odd CANOA project and its ‘enciclopEdia arbitraria’ earlier this year. www.canoageopam.org/post/napoleo...

A philosophy of history for an industrial age. The Three-Age System - Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age - at the World Fair in Paris in 1889. (Picture from the Danish National Museum).

Online talk on the making of national heritage in the Department of Archeology at Cambridge this coming Wednesday.

I started a History of Humanities starter pack. Let me know who else is here or maybe would like to join: go.bsky.app/DtJP68h

For those who are in Copenhagen (and know Danish), on 25/11, I will give a lecture on ethnographic storage under the British Museum and how it reshaped the view of African history. The event will be in the inner city. People working in the storage in 1962.

In 1786, captain Antonio del Rio visited the Mayan city of Palenque and convinced himself that the ancient Romans, Greeks, or Phoenicians had visited. Among the evidence sent to Madrid was this stela from the throne of King Pakal. What did he see that I don’t?

‘At the root of the march of progress in the West,’ the Japanese scholar Kume Kunitake noted, ‘is a profound love of antiquity.’ I am currently working on a book, trying to explain this odd passion (and modernist conviction). The Egyptian Room at the British Museum, visited by Kume in 1872.