Rails thrum with trains that never arrive. Limbs made phantom by branch line butchery become ghost grooves for steam-powered spirits to move across the land. No aspect of what was once modernity is immune to temporal shading, is immune to being haunted. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts

The current REF system really encourages temporary staff to burn down their own careers - either you complete research because you need it for your CV, but an institution can claim any resulting outputs before making you redundant so you've nothing to take elsewhere, or...

Every time discover a new piece on the dangers of LLMs, particularly for research and teaching, I add it to a Zotero library. I figure that I might as well share it, so here's my library of Cautionary AI Tales: www.zotero.org/groups/62758...

I wrote about Roman curse tablets in Ancient History Magazine - available now! www.karwansaraypublishers.com/en-gb/produc...

I've restarted Hades. For some reason endlessly and fruitlessly trying to climb out of hell felt like a good activity for Right Now.

Here's your annual reminder: whether you received A-level results today, years ago, or never, there's space for you at the @openuniversity.bsky.social!

We're 300 followers away from 70,000. 300 more would be really nice. But you know what would be even better? 300 plus 30,000. Bluesky: help a museum out

A useful reminder to permanent academic staff. Many of you may have temporary staff joining your departments soon. It's nice to at least pretend to think they are people - why not learn their names and their field of interest, to develop this basic level of polite collegiality?

One like, one Thucydides opinion.

I'm knackered after a full day of travelling yesterday, so let's do this. One like, one curse tablet.

This is Mark Fisher's Hauntology - we are haunted by a future that never materialised. "We’re all dreaming of a better time from the past, since there is no future. We’ve stopped dreaming about building – now we dream of recreating."

4. Every other discipline thinks they can do history but they often cannot

Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What's Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions theonion.com/histori...

Immortal fame.

Black Sabbath's Ozzy Osbourne dies aged 76. An immortal legacy. Rock on Ozzy \m/

Today I am collecting demons, much like all those evangelical Christians thought we were doing playing Pokémon in the 90s.

Maybe just because I want to see magic everywhere in the Roman world, but I love the idea that these were apotropaic. Can guard dogs protect against evil spirits?

As a student of the classics I *already* have a degree which involves asking questions of oracles who are high on drugs or fumes and interpreting answers which have precious little basis in understanding the topic.

OMG this is exactly the book I need at this precise moment - DEMONS

It's the earliest written evidence for beekeeping in Britain!

One of my summer research projects is an article about DEMONS!!! Mostly it will be me looking at old line drawings of course tablets thinking "what the heck is that"?

Calling all archaeology folk! Do you wish there was a stronger community around career support both in and out of the field? PastForwardHub are setting up just that, and they need your input. Their first community survey is open until October, so make your voice heard.

Classics departments are being shuttered all over the place. Our response cannot be to hide in our libraries and pretend the world outside doesn't exist, and that our subject has nothing to say about it.

Next year I'll be teaching a full Latin module for the first time, so one of my summer jobs is scrubbing up. I'm using the Cambridge Latin course's online resources and they are so so good! myclc.co.uk

Hello everyone who studies the ancient world, here is Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine, calling archaeology the “ideological scaffolding” of apartheid. Some of us have been trying to say this for years in the face of a discipline that believes itself “apolitical”.

archaeo hive-mind: does anyone know of good archaeological contexts from the ancient Mediterranean in which coins were found within the structure of a multi-part monument? (e.g., between an inscription and its base, or between multiple blocks of an altar)

When I worked with unemployed graduates, most of them had degrees in computer science or engineering and they were much harder to get into work than the humanities grads. Hard tech skills are harder to transfer and go out of date quicker.

What we're doing in the uni sector is shutting off routes for kids with Bs and Cs to do key (and prestigious) subjects, and closing down the ability of young people to go to the local uni just when it becomes ruinous expensive to go way. Will have incalculable consequences for social mobility.

Whenever I read a reference to the Limes Congress part of my brain will always jump to citrus fruit, and at this point I've given up trying to stop it.

Roman Historians, this is our time

This whole thread is full of truth. ECRs are the single-use plastic of the UKHE sector and no-one is doing a damn thing about it.

This needs to be a wake up call for the whole sector. HE is still something Britain does incredibly well and we're watching it being destroyed in front of our eyes. www.ft.com/content/d9ea...

Truth.

This is everywhere. Every academic institution I know is held together by some exhausted woman in her early 40's who waits until the old white male professors have finished their vague rants and says, "alright, so concretely can I propose the following next steps..." She makes half their salary.

Another kick to the academic career ladder. It's completely impossible.

Doubling down on non portability absolutely screws people like me, who have been told for *years* to focus on writing our books to get a job, even when no workload (support!) given to do so, and now find those books are not useful for future departments and so were basically pointless. I'm furious.

No no no no no no no

This is a hell of a thing to read.

Really awesome first session of the Magpie Theory Reading Group earlier, wandering our way through Derrida's Spectres of Marx. Not too late to join us if you fancy it!

Random book rabbithole of the day: Can anyone point me towards scholarship Roman soldiers and wills?

Oh and the news from AHRC about PGR funding is absolutely part of the story. The wagons are being circled around established scholars, leaving junior researchers to the wolves bsky.app/profile/chri...

A demonstration of how the bottom has totally fallen out of an already dire academic job market: this is my tracker for 2025. As last year, I applied for pretty much all the relevant UK jobs in my field.

I don't want to sound grim, but today might be a good day to check in on your precarious academic friends who are in the process of mourning their careers because there are no jobs and the market is being flooded with more senior candidates anyway and there's just no hope anywhere for them.

Excited to see what people on the Liverpool list think about BMCR's new English-only policy. I'm sure it will be totally sensible.

Stop Forcing A.I. Into Every Fucking Thing!

I've got too much marking for this career anxiety, please come back after the deadline.

Sad news. John North's work was a huge reason that I got into working on Roman religion.

NEW #TRAJ research article by Anthony King, Grahame Soffe & Kate Adcock 'Processional Routes, Orthopraxy & a Political Sacred Island: Exploring the Iron Age & Roman Religious Landscape of Hayling Island & the Chichester region' traj.openlibhums.org/article/id/1... #Archaeology #RomanArchaeology