trying to put together an outline for a new monograph, and realizing it's too early to have a clear shape and trying to figure out if it's still worthwhile exercise

". . . there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it." - C.S. Lewis

for those of you who can't stand 'impactful', I'd like to introduce you to 'solutioning together '

this poster hangs on my office walls!

WOULD YOU LOOK AT THIS PROGRAMME 🤩 And more excitement to come in 2026 as well. I often get driven to despair about the health of #earlymodern studies because of how it's deemed 'not useful' and 'unpopular in recruitment' and then I see just how much brilliant and varied work we do despite all that

🌟 On this day in 1970, Pope Saint Paul VI proclaimed Saint Teresa of Ávila Doctor of the Universal Church. He recognized her extraordinary doctrine "as coming from heaven." 🔗 https://twp.ai/ImqA4K #SaintTeresa #DoctorOfTheChurch

Wild early Modern engravings from JHUs Women of the Book Collection

I'm not gonna lie - yesterday I was crashing out and spent a really long time watching "Hamilton climbing out a window" Tiktoks and giggling because how clever of these female creators to riff on how contemptuous H was of his wife.

In 2004 when writing my dissertation, I decided to buy a printer (my 1st); my brother recommended one that was pricey for me - a Brother 5040 LaserJet. It just went kaput. RIP printer. I love that printer, which got me through one dissertation and two books

I've reached the early-middle stage of this project where it feels like the projects is going nowhere and says nothing. Experienced enough to know that's common and not necessarily true, but still not a good feeling

The English translation of Job Ludolphus is sending me. The insults are so good - in reference to another author: "he was one always of Little Judgment, less Faith, and no Honesty." He's a hater and I'm here for it.

All my sources so far have been in Portugese, leading to the question of whether I should be in Lisbon, not Madrid. But Madrid is my city so I regret nothing.

It is absolutely wild to see baroque sacred art complete with lovely estofado work sitting around Madrid antique shops.

Because I didn't learn Spanish until I became an early modernist, sometimes I accidentally use 17th c spellings. Today I wrote 'quatro' and couldn't figure out why spellcheck flagged it. 😆

A weekend of jam making and bread baking (finding peace where I can. This week - back to the nuns and their professiobs.

On my way! ✈️

'Under Philip II, librarians imagined the stocking of the royal bookshelves as an enterprise parallel to the voyages of exploration.' Alberto Manguel on the organiszation of knowledge in the Spanish Golden Age

Happy friday!

humanities major hiring on the rise against the hallucination plagiarism arson machine www.cnbc.com/2025/05/16/c...

First fruits

JHU put required first year writing (called Reintro to Writing) at the center of our curriculum, and our excellent University Writing Program is a leader in what Writing programs can do.

This might win academic bluesky today

I was trying to be cool about the conclave but I confess I'm on pins and needles now

Being in the humanities is wild. You spend years studying how societies construct meaning, only to have people say “lol cute, but what’s the real value?” Bro I’m literally explaining how value exists.

I love this word so much

Few things more magical than mountains from the sky.

A sneak peek at the first book in English on 17th-century Portuguese painter Josefa de Óbidos #earlymodern #arthistory #booksky

Because the bread gods despise self congratulations, this morning while making my loaves, I was talking & got distracted & doubled the water. It was a complicated recipe involving a poolish so not easy to fix. I will light a candle to the patron saint of baking debacles

I finally made the King Arthur Flour recipe of the year foccaccia and it is indeed the best foccaccia I've ever made

I understand why people do celebrations of life with lots of color instead of funerals with black crepe, but am I the only one who wants to cover themselves head to foot in sackcloth and ash, wailing to the gods? Do we hold no space for raw grief in community?

#StTeresaofAvila Professor Jennifer Mann, an expert in forensic medicine from Australia, was in charge of reconstructing the face of the saint. Now, on Teresa's 510th birthday, we see her again. aleteia.org/2025/03/...

AACU CLASS conference with a side of beautiful Puerto Rico (and a bonus Martín de Porres)

This is one of my favorite Caravaggios. I visit it everything I'm in Rome

I travel quite a bit but today I saw something from the plane I've never seen before, a rainbow reflected onto the ocean. You can't really see the colors in this photo but I could in real life

These cuts would be catastrophic for the humanities and for communities around the country - you can contact your reps to oppose these cuts here: p2a.co/DdtlGIT We should be increasing resources for humanities scholarship and programs, not cutting them! 🗃️

In “Challenging Abstraction,” Casey Marina Lurtz argues the “aberration, anomalies, and unruly data” gathered from Mexican municipalities for the 1900 Paris Exposition show that historical statistical practices reveal state-making to be a multisided process. 🗃️

As NIH Pulls Funding, Scientist Worries About ‘Frightening Implications’ The National Institutes of Health claimed that numerous canceled research grants were “antithetical to the scientific inquiry.” A clinical psychology researcher who lost her... #HigherEd #EDUSky #AcademicSky bit.ly/4j1dOpY

Powerful exhibit at the Peale Museum (Baltimore): the future of here: a glimpse of river culture to come, created by JHU students, led by anthropologist Dr. Anand Pandian & artist Jordan Tierney. (I was too busy looking at the art to photo it but here are meditations)

"the future of the humanities is not being hermetically sealed off, as in, 'You're over there and we're over here.' It's making clear that the skills of engineers and computer scientists increase if you include the arts, the humanities, the social sciences." bit.ly/4hJI4EI

My watch and one cell think I'm still in Paris; my work phone and computer know I'm in Portug. I am jetlagged, which means I'm spending an embarrassing amount of time googling "what time is it in Portugal" so I'm not late places. Or early.

Research saves lives. It is a stunning blow to my community, our students, our city, and the health of all Americans.

Even airport quiche is divine in Paris.

This #FrescoFriday we travel to the House of the Golden Bracelet in Pompeii to soak up the glorious detail of some of the panels that make up the Garden Room. The registers reveal a feast for the eyes with birds, theatrical masks, and lush foliage all competing for our attention. #AncientBluesky🏺

I don't mean to brag but after nearly four years in the deans office, I've finally cracked the code on creating a real research day. I did stuff today!

“Schomburg is arguably the most iconic Black bibliophile in American and African diasporic history.”--Laura Helton, author of SCATTERED & FUGITIVE THINGS, joins other scholars to discuss how Schomburg's words influenced their work. on.nypl.org/3XQPXBl @lehelton.bsky.social @columbiaup.bsky.social

y'all amazing and exhausting work today. I found sisters who professed on the same day, traced nuns through time, stitched this book back together. #nuntastic

Listening to a great podcast (against the odds) about a relay dog sled race inappropriate blizzard to get serum to mitigate a diptheria outbreak in 1920s Alaska. And thanking science for the DTaP vaccine. Diptheria is terrifying.

The harms of stopping research are innumerable hub.jhu.edu/2025/02/17/p...

One of the things I realized recently is that my teen uses AI instead of Google. Google like a card catalog requires sifting and weighing, critical thinking, even if less than navigating a library. One of the best reasons to study AI is to understand its effects.

The plane was *upside down*. That's it, I'm done, I don't want to see what's next.