Congratulations to Gavin McDowell on his new book The Rewritten Bible in Late Antiquity, which is available open access www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

JOB Assistant Professor in the History of Knowledge Pre-1400, University of Cambridge www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/assista...

Next Tuesday (5 November 2025, 17:00-18:30): A talk on "The Specificity of the Political: Georg Lukács’s Political Thought in the Post-Stalinist Ferment of Ideas (1956-1971)" @uni-konstanz.de Colloquium of Modern History.

“If human beings would learn to stop insisting on their distinction from animals, perhaps they would no longer need to humble themselves so before the angels.” —Adorno (1944)

35 years ago today, the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist and its territory was absorbed into the Federal Republic. If you want to learn more about the rise and fall of the GDR on this auspicious #TagderEinheit, you can check out my new book: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/german-de...

New conference program just dropped! Go check it out! marxistiskestudier.com/wp-content/u...

Couldn't ask for a better person to undertake this adventure with 🥰

[1] This study by Fabian Goldmann, presented in the Jacobin article below, analysed 4,853 German headlines on Gaza and Israel (Oct 7, 2023 – Jan 19, 2025). The sourcing imbalance is staggering — and has arguably contributed to distorting how the German public understands the war.

Forthcoming De Gruyter Release – "Already her correspondence shows that Du Châtelet was at the very center of the scientific movements in Germany and of the intellectual elites of France and Europe."

“A magician was expelled from his city. He froze time in it and decided that the city shall not be allowed to return to life until its youth destroyed its ancient ramparts.” —Kanafani, “Man & Principle” (mid-1950’s)

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1/9 Reminder, we do medieval history! "Violence and Order: Past and Present", a SI edited by Warren C. Brown (Caltech‬), @rorycox.bsky.social (St Andrews‬), & Jennifer Jahner (Caltech), explores medieval "meanings of and relationships between violence and order" www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

@hernandez-sau.bsky.social (CHAM – Universidade Nova de Lisboa) reviews "Gender and Cultural Mediation in the Long Eighteenth Century: Women across Borders" (Palgrave, 2024) edited by @mboluferp.bsky.social, Laura Guinot-Ferri, & Carolina Blutrach www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Congratulations to Rosemary Sweet and @RichardJAnsell! Their #OpenAccess book No Country for Travellers? published today. Read & download free at: bit.ly/4kJYgIl #TravelWriting #EighteenthCentury #Spain #Portugal

Every word of this. These outlets can't be allowed to escape their complicity in this, the stigma must stick to them just as it will stick to Israel's Channel 12. It's so important they have been named to an English-speaking audience: that is to say, outside the bubble whose discourse they dominate.

Reading the intro to Les Temps modernes by Sartre: "The writer is situated in his time; every word he utters has reverberations. As does his silence. I hold Flaubert and the Goncourts responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because they didn't write a line to prevent it."

Two weeks ago: “The Committee to Protect Journalists is gravely worried about the safety of Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza correspondent Anas Al-Sharif, who is being targeted by an Israeli military smear campaign, which he believes is a precursor to his assassination.”

Comparing press coverage on Gaza (today, Dutch public news NOS and German public news Tagesschau) always yields the same depressing result - that German journalists will lend credibility to false claims by the IDF when everyone else has stopped.

Leute wie Döring belehren Leute über Werte der Aufklärung und moralischen Universalismus, und unterstützen gleichzeitig offen einen Völkermord. Eine Schande für die Disziplin. Wird sich die @DGPhil_eV äußern? Oder wird so etwas von deutschen Philosoph:innen toleriert?

Unser Buch ist endlich da! Lest es, wenn ihr mehr über den vergessenen Schwarzen Aktivismus der 1970er, 80er und 90er erfahren wollt.

📣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

'Today, the opacity of the mechanisms by which sanctions work secures the impunity of those who impose them' - Jessica Whyte (2023)

Not an AI writing assistant in sight, just a guy and his hand wings

the rules based international order

Der Theorieblog hat einen ganz schönen Schwerpunkt zu Fanon gemacht, mit einigen guten Beiträgen von bspw. (my girl and comrade) Jeanette Ehrmann, Ina Kerner und Nicki K. Weber. Ich durfte auch einen Beitrag zu Fanon und Antifaschismus beisteuern: www.theorieblog.de/index.php/20...

'I have always wanted not merely to survey such battlefields but to join the battle myself' - Quentin Skinner in our recent article when I asked about his use of battle metaphors & the Nietzschean indefinability of historic concepts. Find the full dialogue here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Just two more weeks until you too can get a copy in paperback! www.bloomsbury.com/uk/german-de...

Adam Knowles reviews A Social History of Analytic Philosophy in Radical Philosophy @radical-philosophy.bsky.social www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/mark...

Jeremy Kessler's 'The Problem of Authoritarianism in Marxist Legal Thought' presents a series of vignettes which capture five moments of Marxist encounters with authoritarianism: 1. Marx & Engels 2. Lenin & Luxemburg 3. Pashukanis & Stuchka 4. Neumann & Bloch 5. Poulantzas & the Neue Marx-Lektüre

The Cambridge Centre will be awarding a number of Prize Research Grants for the academic year 2025-2026. Applications are now open. Submission deadline is 4 September 2025. Click below for further information, eligibility and how to apply. www.histecon.magd.cam.ac.uk/prize.html

now published: The Socialization Debate Revolutionary Confusion after the German Revolution of 1918 Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume 46, Issue 1, 2025, Pages 93-122 doi.org/10.5840/gfpj...

Ai Weiwei was invited to contribute short reflections on “What I would have liked to know about Germany earlier" for an upcoming issue of Zeit Magazin. His submission was first shortened and edited, then immediately cancelled after a review by the Executive Editor. Ai shared his reflections anyway:

"Living in Gaza now requires a choreography of absence. We don’t walk; we drift. We don’t eat; we search. We don’t sleep; we remain alert, ears tuned to the sound that will send us running. Survival is a ritual of adaptation in a world that offers none" – Alaa Alqaisi www.e-flux.com/notes/678338...

It's exhilarating to see de Beauvoir's existentialism getting taken seriously again. Ever since reading Ethics of Ambiguity in my undergraduate years, I have been convinced of its absolute centrality for navigating the complexities of political and personal life, despite the fashionable criticisms.

So excited that my book has a cover. Michigan's design people have outdone themselves in their styling of Mr. Murder Mittens (a massive Roman temple key from Switzerland). Full details here (the e-version will be open access come the publication date): press.umich.edu/Books/S/Stea...

This is an amazing way of writing “most of the world”

Excited to get into Ethan Kleinberg's new contribution! Confronting the epistemic challenges posed by conspiracy theories, revisionism and post-truth claims, Kleinberg traces a historiography adequate to the peculiarities of our present.

on the one hand we should want people to change their mind so we can stop what's happening now. On the other hand there need to be costs for the ghoulish behavior that got us here, as these people absolutely will do this again given half a chance

Entstanden unter dem Eindruck einer inflationären Rhetorik der DDR-Gleichsetzung, ganz frisch erschienen und hoffentlich nicht nur für pädagogisch Tätige hilfreich und interessant: unser Band zur „politischen Instrumentalisierung von DDR-Geschichte“ im @wochenschauverlag.bsky.social. 1/2

The German Democratic Republic: The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State. Available now as an Ebook! (print copies will start shipping in a month)

Call for Papers – Voltaire in the Baltic World: Circulations, Receptions, Legacies Our colleague Sophie Turner is organising this exciting conference in Tarttu, Estonia, next year, which the Voltaire Foundation is supporting. www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/news-item/ca...

#CfP: Conflict, War and Violence in the Early Modern World Exeter, 30-31 October 31, 2025. Abstracts by September 5, 2025 @earlymodernwar.bsky.social #Skystorians #EarlyModernEvents #MiseryOfCivilWar www.rensoc.org.uk/event/confli...

From Nasser hospital in Gaza, Prof Nick Maynard (consultant surgeon at Oxford university hospital who has been travelling regularly to Gaza for 15 years): I’m witnessing the deliberate starvation of Gaza’s children – why is the world letting it happen? www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

A horrifying statement published today by the Editorial Committee of the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency. "Without immediate intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die" Translation from French to English by @cnorristrent.bsky.social:

On Sunday, Israeli forces killed 115 Palestinians in Gaza as 19 people starved to death.

Frantz Fanon would have been 100 years old today! Although I love his two classic works, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, I encourage you all, on his birthday no less, to get to know Fanon better. Read his letters, his psychiatric writings, his speeches and his plays!

More than 14,000 "Islamic" coins (coins produced within officially Islamic polities) were buried by VIKINGS on a Swedish island in ~850-900. Numismatists can easily overwhelm me with detail, but boy when they know big things... they're big! #FollowTheMoney en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spillin...

‘Humanists knew that they were imitating the ancients when they sat and talked in libraries. But they knew little about what these lost collections looked like or included.’ Anthony Grafton on Renaissance libraries: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

This is really interesting, and I’m glad these are now available. Scanning this list, I feel like we might well need a new set of interviews to show how much the nature of history, and who can be a historian, has changed. If there was a new collection, who would you like to see interviewed?

When I set about seriously investigating G.W.F Hegel's youth in Stuttgart, Hegel-Studien, the scientific journal attached to the Hegel-Archiv and the modern critical edition project, served as an indispensable treasure trove for my research. It's an honour to finally be published in its pages!