I’m at a workshop in Taiwan and “Journey to the West” is coming up in conversation a lot. Is anyone in North America working on 西遊記? Seems like after Anthony Yu, people avoided the topic? I’m probably just ignorant of the field *apologies*

Call for Contributions to a Sourcebook for Histories of Weather & Weathering teleskopos.wordpress.com/2026/02/05/c... Full details linked and here teleskopos.wordpress.com/wp-content/u... It will be edited by me, @lottaleiwo.bsky.social and Tamara Culkins. Please share! #histSTM #envhist 🗃️📜

Kare 11 local news just read, in full, this statement from Michael and Susan Pretti, the parents of Alex Pretti. "Please get the truth out about our son."

Job Opportunity! We're looking for a Graduate Trainee Archivist. #archives www.trin.cam.ac.uk/vacancies/gr...

We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

CBETA is a place on floor eight.

Kierkegaard:

Welcoming 2026 in Taipei 祝福馬年吉祥，諸事順遂， 祈國泰民安

Yomama is a Christmas movie

all stilled. Jane Hirshfield

It’s been nice to hear from colleagues and friends. One of the strange parts of this experience is noting the world slowly move on, get back to normal. Our world is frozen. Campus is a crime scene. Offices inaccessible. And the grief. The grief. It’s good to not feel alone.

Very rarely does a post warrant all caps, but: SEARCHABLE INTERIM MANUSCRIPTS CATALOGUE. At long last! searcharchives.bl.uk

"Friedberg visited Rhode Island Hospital on Saturday night, where she said she spoke with her teaching assistant, who had traveled there to support several of their injured students." Wow, the TA was present at the shooting and then went with students in the class to hospital to support.

Everyone in Religious Studies checked in as safe. If student reporting at BDH holds up, it sounds like it was a section of the big freshman econ course, folks gathered for a review session before the final. So so sad.

I am safe. All my grad students are safe.

I want to be sad, but who has the time? Xin Qiji, tr. Jon Hansen

Are you an environmental humanist? Do you like hanging out with other smart environmental humanists? Would you like to do so for a week this summer in Maine? Then I highly recommend Colby's Summer Institute in the Environmental Humanities! (app due 2/6/26) cah.colby.edu/initiatives/...

"ChatGPT is Bullshit" has now been viewed one million times! @hikemix.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1... #PhilTech #PhilSky #ChatGPT #Bullshit

Rots on Vietnam whale worship: “how it is possible that residents of an island choking in plastic engage in ritualized littering. Why do animists who worship deities residing in nature pollute the very environment that they—according to the academic theory, at least—should perceive as sacred?”

Richard Davis’ memoir is spicy.

'we write the best history when the specificity, the novelty, the awe-fulness, of what our sources render up bowls us over with its complexity & its significance. Our research is better when we move only cautiously to understanding...' CWB 'Wonder' AHR 1997. Thanks to @hagenilda.bsky.social

This is powerful. An Autobiographical Essay by Caroline Walker Bynum. 'That very summer, with unpacked boxes all around me, I wrote the article that became the title essay of Jesus as Mother and I filed papers to adopt a child as a single parent.' www.ias.edu/sites/defaul...

🚨 journo job! 🚨 Replace me! - after 13 years at the Guardian and six years on the incredible China team, including five in Taiwan, I’m leaving at the end of this year. I’ll get sentimental about it later but for now: Here’s the job ad. I recommend it! workwithus.theguardian.com/job-search/e...

Handing back student work that’s been written by ChatGPT with a 0 followed by the comment “This essay will never stand in authentic wonder before the Beauty of God’s creation.”

Looks like they have created a roadmap to reboot the NRC/FLAS/Hays grants? Makes the wave of layoffs that is currently flowing through area studies and language education programs seem especially meaningless: www.state.gov/releases/off...

ACLS is now accepting applications for Graduate Internships on the Spiritual Infrastructure of the Future: summer 2026 opportunities for PhD students studying religion to work with leading nonprofits and apply their research beyond the academy. Apply by Jan 14, 9 PM ET: https://www.acls.org/GISI

Remember: they used thousands of academic books too! If you’re a scholar, check for your books too. This isn’t just novelists and pop writers, it’s academic books too!

Somehow, somewhere, somewho

This reminds me of another poem from the Book of Songs《詩經》國風：王風 · 黍離 知我者、謂我心憂， 不知我者、謂我何求。 悠悠蒼天、此何人哉。 Those who know me, whisper I bear sorrows; Those who don’t know me, ask what I seek. O distant Heaven, tell me what man (has brought us to this despair).

So this reminds me of one of my favourite WTF moments in heritage bureaucracy, which was the 2018 archaeological excavations just outside the chapel of St Peter at the Tower of London. nobody could decide who, apart from the king, could legally sign off on the project

Oh wow, major work of interest to #MedievalSky #GlobalMiddleAges #EnvironmentalHistory. A new special issue devoted to "Environmental Challenges in Premodern Eurasian and Mediterranean Narratives": journals.uio.no/JAIS/article.... Kudos to the editors for bringing this work so quickly into print!

A colleague is teaching a course on internet and digital religion. She asked about essays she could teach on internet / digital religion in Asia? I thought of, eg, those Thai “cryptoamulets” that were popular a few years ago? Was just reading about the mainstreaming of Etsy Witches in the US.

Thinking about 生態詩學 as a misprision-ing translation for “ecopoetics.” Is ecopoetics about “life”? Is a focus on biota be “bio-poetics”? How to emphasize “the environment” in the more-than-human natural world? Anyway, thinking about: 環境史與生態詩學之間 (Whats between environmental history and ecopoetics)

These terrifying bats are looking forward to #Halloween 🦇🦇🦇😱 Bodl. Library MS. Ashmole 304; 13th century; England, St. Albans; f.47v @bodleian.ox.ac.uk

How did U.S.-led aid transform Taiwan's forests from a site of natural riches to a problem to be solved? 🌳 Come join the Harvard S&T in Asia seminar series for this upcoming talk by historian and geographer Kuang-chi Hung! Zoom: seow.scholars.harvard.edu/STinAsia #histstm #histsci #envhist 🧪

postdoc in Buddhism: protestantstheologischeuniversiteit.recruitee.com/o/postdoctor... #SanskritJobs #PhilosophyJobs

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

check out this amazing piece about Yogācāra relational metaphysics, tif.ssrc.org/2025/10/01/f...

Eliot Weinberger, “The Life of Tu Fu” #smallpoemsunday @tomsnarsky.bsky.social

You can now pre-order my forthcoming book ‘Fairies: A History’ with a discount code at @waterstones.bsky.social! 📚

For the Mid-Autumn Festival, I translated the 17th century failson, epicure, and memoirist Zhang Dai's account of the annual Mid-Autumn singing competition on Tiger Hill in Suzhou. www.burninghou.se/p/mid-autumn...

publication day for my *Documents géographiques de Dunhuang*, a social and cultural history of geographical knowledge, and probably one of the only medieval history books published in France during the ephemeral Lecornu government, which you can freely download here: books.openedition.org/cdf/20307

Coming (quite) soon reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/sons-of...

“It’s not about nostalgia; it’s about making sure we remember.” Photographer Song Zeyi visits the abandoned factories of Mao's Third Front—a movement that had consequences for generations of Chinese workers, including Song's own family. At @sixthtone.bsky.social.

CfP for an exciting animal panel at the upcoming Association of Art History Conference (University of Cambridge, 8-10 April 2026). A great opportunity for Chinese animal / art scholars! 🎨🐝🐸

Call to submit papers to the Environmental Graduate Symposium at Yale University! Link to submit: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

12 Phd/ 17 Postdoc positions (fully funded) in the new Cross-Cultural Philology Cluster at LMU Munich: www.lmu.de/crosscultura... (apply by Oct 21).