Alarming amount of folks apparently don’t seem to know that translation is a political act because translators are people, and people have biases.

RIP to John Blanche, the best to ever do it. Before Warhammer was even Warhammer he understood what it was: weird, gross, unsettling, maximalist.

University staff say €4.55bn research fund ignores arts and humanities. Almost 2,000 sign open letter criticising Research Ireland for favouring industry and commercial interests. www.irishtimes.com/ireland/educ...

Throwback to when a TV station in Iceland accidentally aired an episode of Teletubbies with subtitles from the Sopranos 👌🏼

My book, "The Middle Ages in Computer Games" is out in paperback tomorrow (2 Jun). If you've been waiting to get hold of it, now could be a good time! boydellandbrewer.com/book/the-mid...

Ok this is a truly great tweet

Biggest comeback in history? 999: Icelanders convert to Christianity & ditch Norse myth↩️ 1200's: Snorri Sturluson uses the power of euhemerism to make Norse myth biblical↩️ 1930's: a very Catholic Norse scholar pilfers the edda for character names↩️ 2026: Pope quotes a character called Gandalf 🇮🇸👑

"Most surprisingly, the Norman Conquest of 1066 appears to have been largely an elite process." Scientists once again riding to the rescue of historians, who had previously assumed 1066 was a largely peasant-driven enterprise. theconversation.com/beyond-anglo...

The underlying assumption is that Manchester students are rich enough not to be already working. My own university is bringing in compulsory placements: one of the issues not raised AT ALL is that nearly every single student has a job already, quite often full-time. Are they meant to quit?

'The University of Hertfordshire’s decision to “suspend” five humanities undergraduate courses is a further stark warning about how readily higher education has jettisoned its former commitment to such subjects.' 1/4

"Dating from c1290 to 1310, the manuscript contains texts from the Old French Lancelot-Grail cycle – the foundational myths of King Arthur, Merlin and the holy grail – and 126 miniature illustrations, including a rare depiction of Merlin as a stag." #MedievalSky www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

The temperature in Delhi is 45 Celsius/113 Fahrenheit. The government is telling people to stay indoors, but that is not a viable option for millions who need to work and move about outdoors. And its supposed to get hotter. www.bbc.com/news/videos/...

A friend of mine who was TA’ing for an AmLit course found a copy of Moby Dick a student had left behind. It had only one marginal annotation, around page 100, that simply said “whale is important.”

The stairwell of Mousa Broch on the western shore of the Island of Mousa in the Shetland Isles. The broch was constructed in the Iron Age in around 100 BC. 📸 My own. #StairwellSaturday #Mousa #Shetland #Archaeology

23rd May 2026 05.08

Thesis I would like to see written/write myself if I had unlimited time and money: Detectorists, This Country, and Gone Fishing: politics, nostalgia and the British screen pastoral in the 2010s.

“What this analysis shows is that trans people’s wellbeing & public attitudes towards trans people have worsened since 2017, in conjunction with the rise of an organised GC movement.” New analysis by Amnesty International exposes how UK media enable transphobia. media.amnesty.org.uk/documents/Li...

Teaching myself Python for textual analysis and having much more fun than I expected.

The Society's President and Council have released the following statement on the proposed closure of undergraduate degrees at the University of Hertfordshire, in #History and the wider humanities bit.ly/4dmV5oO This comes at a time of further bad news from Essex and Nottingham #Skystorians

Map of early medieval ship burials across northern Europe. Monumental expressions of maritime mobility, culture rooted in sea travel connected people around the North Sea and created new elites that, in time, formed kingdoms. 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... #MedievalMonday 🏺 #Archaeology

I was talking to someone in the AI industry* who is fuming about this dynamic. 'These guys are just begging for our industry to be regulated out of existence'. *Or as they would immediately correct me, the LLM industry.

guy who is mad at Nolan’s Odyssey because it depicts the sea as blue instead of wine-dark

Great thread. The best example of this for me is Gandalf’s “a far green country under a swift sunrise” speech, which repurposed some of Tolkien’s most gorgeous prose from the beginning of Fog on the Barrow Downs.

"Dave, the hard man, the fierce man, the fist-man" really got me good.

'The key findings were said to be “surprisingly simple”: “a good student academic experience ultimately comes down to quality teaching, access to in person interaction with teachers and a strong sense of belonging”.' 2/3

"As long as financial pressures and current student recruitment trends that vary sharply between different providers continue, course closures and cold spots will grow." @britishacademy.bsky.social updates its 'Cold Spots' mapping of SHAPE subjects with 2024-25 HESA data bit.ly/4uKAXCX #Skystorians

Today’s Education Select Committee report on higher education is the best report on HE to come from Govt/Parliament in ages. It takes a rounded view of the whole system, moving away from the more atomistic or narrow accounts we’ve seen 🧵 committees.parliament.uk/committee/20...

Thank you @englishassociation.bsky.social for sharing this research on the power of young people's narrative writing to increase empathy & reduce political polarisation. A very important message for schools in our times & with a new NC in English under construction. www.psy.ox.ac.uk/news/new-stu...

Pet peeve: talk of millennials, gen X etc is silly. A better qn (if you want one) is Napoleon's: how did the world look to someone aged 20? One born in 65 saw mass unemployment at 20; one in 1980 had a boom, internet & mobile phones. Yet both are called gen X. This is daft.

It’s remarkable in this day and age to hear a politician anywhere say the following: “Support for a diverse, rigorous and accessible body of historical scholarship should be a much greater priority for democratic governments even at a time of stretched budgets.“

Love this poem. Is it a sonnet?? Does Melville think it is? If so, it's got to be the most formally radical sonnet of its century? Sure, nowadays it wouldn't be a reach to read it as a sonnet -- 14 lines in two stanzas, snazzy rhyme scheme, so why not? But in 1859? (QTing bc replies are disabled)

We’re very pleased to share news of this research fellowship position, working with our wonderful CECS / English Literature colleague Prof Mary Fairclough @maryfairclough.bsky.social on the collected works of Mary Wollstonecraft: 🔗 www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRL782/r...

Just arrived in the post 👍

Very cool find: the Old English version of Cædmon's hymn turns up in a ninth-century manuscript of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica from Italy. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/a...

Whether I'm there or not next year, here are the things that have been replaced by a generic skills module including 3 weeks on Using AI: 1. My linguistics colleagues on accent and dialect change, and atittudes towards the local accent. Led by the accents in the room.

Your annual reminder that William Shakespeare was born in what is now Turkey, never visited England and almost certainly could not read or write in English.

their slender means J.H. Prynne, ‘Against Hurt’

Sumer is icumen in! And with it, the unfurling leaves of more Guild events! 🌱 Join us for more Making Space sessions, and a special workshop on modular haiku comics. Not a member yet? Join us (for free) via out website: www.guildmedmak.com/join-the-guild

Palantir are about six months away from ordering their employees to leave audio logs scattered around their offices

Ancient Exchanges have finally managed to re-upload their archive of past issues after moving website host. This means my translations of the Old Norse visionary poem "Sólarljóð" and Old English lyric "The Wanderer" are now available again: exchanges.uiowa.edu/ancient-exch...

Going to get some great images from NASA in the coming days. Here’s a couple of post-splashdown snaps of actual heroes.

all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant

'[...] the canon takes on a malleable, almost organic quality, like a network of cells that keep self-replicating.' Our latest Meet a Medievalist Maker blogpost is by the creative writer and performance artist Dr Clare Mulley, who writes about her experience responding to Völuspá 👇

i guess those celebrating soras death didnt get the memo that some of us need daily personalized greetings from james bond—for mental health

This week over 100,000 ALCS members will receive their share of £34m. Let's celebrate the value of human creativity, something that isn't going anywhere 💡📖🌳

The University of Essex has proposed to discontinue most of their undergraduate language provisions as well as the Languages for All programme as part of large-scale restructuring. Sign their petition to urge the Executive Committee to reconsider the proposal: docs.google.com/document/d/1...