I wrote on the Parisian lawyer and dystopian theorist Eugène Huzar (1820-1890) as a degrowth theorist at the dawn of the Capitalocene for @nichecanada.bsky.social, grappling with whether adaptation to ecocide can ever meaningfully happen within a system geared towards infinite growth at every level.

Very grateful for the opportunity to present a paper on Eugène Huzar's environmental dystopianism at the 15th London Graduate Conference in HPT

Today's newsletter: I believe we're reaching peak AI, and that the industry is going to crash to Earth as enterprises and consumers realize the limits and lack of utility of ChatGPT and co. And it's all thanks to Sam Altman's empty hype cycle.  tinyurl.com/wyea31824

The worst thing about reading Les Misérables cover to cover is that it still only counts as one book in my Goodreads challenge

TIL James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis's research on the "Gaia hypothesis" was funded in part by Big Oil. @n.b. @ccmmody.bsky.social

Literature recommendations on thinking about linear vs. exponential growth in the nineteenth century?

The University of Kent, self-styled Britain's 'European University ' is phasing out language teaching. Mais tu blagues!

We are going to publish a special issue of History of the Present on "The Future of History in the Ruins of the University" - here is the CFP - get in touch with interest/questions

I am horrified that the University of Kent is planning the closure of many excellent programmes, including Anthropology, and is proposing up to 58 redundancies among academic staff! This further destruction of UK centres of academic excellence is heartbreaking.

I would really very much like you to click on this then click subscribe. It will always have a free option.

Eugène Huzar walked so Graham Hancock could run

PhD application season (ouch) means I'm going down an Eugène Huzar rabbit hole, and did he know how to end a book.

Vivement la COP 29 ! (Par Gros)

To clarify for those not in UK academia: this means no foreigners qualify to even apply for museum jobs, anything in heritage or libraries, junior fac jobs, UK postdocs, all are entirely out of the question. And do that math outside academia- no foreign nurses, teachers, and on and on.

“The minimum salary needed to get a skilled worker visa will rise from £26,200 to £38,700 next year.” Some current salaries for open museum positions: Curator: Hoards (BM): £33,803 Senior Art Handling Technician (Tate): £30,848 National Programmes Manager (National History Museum): £37,230

Considering the news from COP28, I sometimes wish I had the optimism of a c19 catastrophist writer....

Aberdeen plans to remove all degrees and research in modern languages. Utterly disgraceful. Please consider signing this petition www.change.org/p/save-langu...

I'm with @wolvendamien.bsky.social as I believe that we need to understand the religious and occult ideologies that are embedded in technologies, and which motivate their development and application. Moreover, I also believe that we need to recognize the influence of mythoi upon tech as well.

The Royal Historical Society, of which I am a Fellow, has today issued a strongly-worded statement about the huge cuts to History at Oxford Brookes. While I cannot of course comment on the specifics, I would ask you to consider the implications and spread the word. royalhistsoc.org/history-at-o...

Please consider signing this petition to prevent catastrophic job cuts at Oxford Brookes. Arts & humanities are besieged as a consequence of policy changes, among other things. Brookes won't be the last to go through this. Solidarity is essential. https://t.co/mNbElDKP5k

In 1903, the gendarmerie in Esch reported on a speech by anarchist poet and playwright Pietro Gori, held in the People's House in the same city, and attended by 50-60 Italian workers. The visit is fascinating for a whole number of reasons beyond the person of Gori himself. /thread

Please read and circulate this editorial by editors of the journal History and Technology, Amy Slaton and and Tiago Saraiva, which fully vindicates my STS (UCL) colleague Jenny Bulstrode and her paper 'Black metallurgists and the making of the industrial revolution' doi.org/10.1080/0734...

I cannot imagine this will shock anyone who has been paying attention If the mainstream media, like the Guardian, hadn't lapped up the moral panic about free speech, it would have been obvious to them too that this was always a bad faith argument www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

The greatest story ever told

Rather sadly - my first post on here is to let anyone who will listen know that English/Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes is facing massive redundancies - 40% of staff to be culled by January including my own role. Please share and support, we are trying to save our livelihoods #SaveBrookesEnglish

More anarchists in the Grand-Duchy? In 1902, police in the Southern Luxembourgish mining town of Esch compose a report on an "anonymous Italian, apparently from Geneva" who had given a radical talk in a local pub. They learn his identity soon after from an informant: the speaker was Luigi Bertoni.

I am excited to extend a CfP to graduate students for the 2024 Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference (8/9th April). We are looking for submissions relating to the theme 'Signs and Scripts.' Whether that means inn signs, theatre, spiritual signs... is up to interpretation! lnkd.in/eMjihfjc #Medievalsky

Everyone go read this! It's an excellent piece on human-animal relationships from a global perspective! Also it's got piggy banks and puns so what more do you want?

There is something incredibly eerie about people in the mid-nineteenth century sounding the warning bells on deforestation and dangers of CO2-concentration in the atmosphere....

In today's episode of odd 19c guys, meet J. Tacon, a Francophone inhabitant of New Orleans in the 1850s, a mustard seller with a side-hustle as a full-time bookshop owner

When a boring-but-necessary research task turns out to be, well, necessary....

Well, that's a hell of a damning ad.

Anarchists in the Grand-Duchy? This photo shows a group of Italian anarchists gathered around a beer keg upon which they wrote "Evviva l'Anarchia," Dudelange, Luxembourg, early March 1900. One of them, Annibale Gasparinotto, was soon after expelled for having sung anarchist songs while drunk [1/5]🗃

Hier, bei der DKMS registrieren tut nicht weh und vielleicht kann man ein Leben retten. #notallheroeswearcapes www.dkms.de/aktiv-werden...

Meet Pierre François Désiré Debuchy, perhaps the most French man to have ever lived. A French radical, in exile since the 1851 coup, he emigrated to New York around 1855 and lived with Joseph Déjacque at 17, White Street in the late 1850s.

I quite like this brief speculation on the possibilities of alien life in an otherwise quite dry review of Humboldt's 3rd Volume of Cosmos in Le Républicain (11/01/1854), a French republican exile paper based in NYC.

Irony is dead and we have killed it.

"Please sir, I am hungry." "That's a grievance narrative, and it is deeply unpleasant of you to bring it up."

God gives his toughest battles (picking up the suspiciously sticky copy of Being and Time from the library) to his toughest soldiers (Me, I chose this paper voluntarily)

BREAKING: Disney VFX workers have voted unanimously to unionize with IATSE. They become the second ever VFX team to form a union. Marvel workers won their union just last month.

When I die, I do not want my body donated to science. They have enough funding already. Donate my body to the humanities.

I think the really cool thing about studying environmental history is when you come across someone writing about the severe dangers of deforestation to the human race and how it might already be too late to reverse the damage and then the publication date is 1847...