VT just closed its religious studies department.

Something I’ve been thinking about: History as a profession has long relied on affiliation. Your university or museum pays your salary, and in return, you give time to edit journals, peer review articles, write book reviews, consult on exhibits, and volunteer for institutional support. 1/

If you have two followers, you are ahead of half of all Bluesky accounts. If you have 400 followers, you are in the top 1%. bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Dear friends and colleagues, I'm trying to compile a list of upcoming events on South Asian religions that will be live-streamed for students in my S. Asian religions class this quarter. If you are speaking somewhere or know of relevant events please drop a link below! Cheers! :D

I'm sure you saw this one posted by @persianatesociety.bsky.social Prof David Lelyveld (William Paterson University), A Reflection on Muslim Identities in South Asia 24 Oct (Fri) 2025, at 18:00-19:30 (JST) Pre-registration required for online participation. forms.gle/Mn2z2HJ4rG78... by 23 Oct

Dear friends and colleagues, I'm trying to compile a list of upcoming events on South Asian religions that will be live-streamed for students in my S. Asian religions class this quarter. If you are speaking somewhere or know of relevant events please drop a link below! Cheers! :D

Why is this horrible for Universities? Just about everyone who isn't a citizen or green card holder already who's hired for a tenure track faculty position is hired through an H1B and then, after 3-5 years, applies for a green card. This is literally "No more foreign professors can be hired"

Watched Hamilton for the first time last night. Really feels like a relic of a different (and far more optimistic) time…

Today, at long last, is publication day for @bloomsburybooksuk.bsky.social's Cultural History of Magic. I contributed a chapter to the volume on the Enlightenment, which features a case study on the prosecution and decriminalisation of magical acts in Lithuania www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cultural-...

Back to work day. Paternity leave officially over. 😢

Glad we have this kind of searingly insightful analysis from the good old NYT…

that said, any city that allows rights on reds is not serious about pedestrian safety

The oldest Jewish cemetery in the UK, dating back to the Norman Conquest, was just discovered. www.jpost.com/history/arti...

Are there any historians of Patna out there who know how the Shāh kī Imlī maḥalla (the King's Tamarind [?] neighborhood) got its name??

A short documentary challenging radicalizing far-right myths about "no-go zones" in British cities. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/vide...

An early example of testimonials in Urdu advertising! For the homeopathic treatment Amrat Dhara, which will help you with "any struggle in life," in a 1931 edition of Sadaqat (Kanpur). The advertisement features "a few letters of the 36,000" that they claim to have received from users 👀. 🗃️

Why are serious ‘news’ outlets publishing this stuff. Hard to imagine an equivalent headline for any other industry. ‘McDonalds CFO says people must eat more Big Macs or starve to death.‘

Indiscriminate is surely the wrong word…in fact such a headline completely inverts the thrust of the court’s ruling which overtly allows for specific kinds of discrimination (ie perceived race) @nytimes.com

Having taken both the UK and the US driving test, it is striking how much easier the latter was. That must surely factor into the massive (5x!) discrepancy in the no. of deaths/100k.

Every. Single. Day. History will judge all of you very harshly who stayed silent during this genocide, or tried to avoid any negative consequences of taking clear ethical stand by equivocating with some both-sider version of "but its complex." It's not complex. It is genocide. It is occupation.

See also: Brexit referendum 2016

I couldn’t have done a PhD on Central Asian literature in the UK so I did it at IU Bloomington where I crossed paths with author Amanda Lanzillo in CEUS our paths have diverged but we both owe a huuuge amount directly or indirectly to US govt support for less commonly-taught languages &c.

In @insidehighered.com I explore how area studies have positively reshaped the humanities & social sciences in the US since the 1950s. Their loss would impoverish knowledge production across our universities, and our universities must step up to defend them. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

Brilliant - and sadly necessary - defense of the value of area studies from @amandazillo.bsky.social www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

I made this mistake when I first moved to the US in 2013… 🥲

Parents’ counterpoint: no weekend should be three days.

Thanks to widespread literacy, exchange of letters now is seen as matter between the sender and the addressee. But in 15th century, it likely involved four different individuals: the sender, the writer, the recipient and the reader. scroll.in/article/9805... ✍️Aparna Kapadia #WorldLetterWritingDay

Driving a pickup is woke

My op-ed in the @chicagomaroon.bsky.social on the University of Chicago’s appalling plans to gut the humanities and possibly eliminate the South Asian studies department chicagomaroon.com/48353/viewpo...

This is how I feel every time I talk to someone about these cuts and feel this implicit expectation that I have to convince them by defending the importance of language learning. Just because the world has gone mad doesn’t mean I’m the one who has some explaining to do.

Daisy Rockwell on the threat to humanities at UChicago, in particular the attacks on language instruction: “Why is there an ardent hope that it will no longer be necessary to learn how to speak new languages or translate literature?” chicagomaroon.com/48353/viewpo...

Watching my children strewing chaos and listening to their gleeful destruction.

Fun initial, from the anonymous ‘Lytell treatyse called, the myrrour or lokynge glasse of lyfe for comfortyng of the soule’ (?London, ?1532). From the library of University Librarian Henry Bradshaw & now @theulspeccoll.bsky.social Syn.8.53.108(3).

Here's our CFP for the Forum again, with ALT text

Can anyone help me with downloading a book from Rekhta.org? Please DM me if possible...

There will be many casualties from UChicago ending ('pausing') PhD admissions in Humantities, but one which I am keenly aware of: this is close to a death sentence for teaching cuneiform in the United States (esp. Sumerian, Hittite, Elamite, Eblaite, Luwian) and it will affect the whole world.

“Fiscal crisis” has become a pretext for far-reaching changes that are not necessary so much as desired by uni leaders. “The tragedy…is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.” ⬇️ www.chronicle.com/article/they...

JOB: The University of Cambridge Faculty of Divinity wishes to appoint to an Assistant Professorship in Buddhist Studies (Mahayana) from 1 September 2026. The postholder will be based in the Faculty of Divinity, West Road, Cambridge. urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

This is absolutely catastrophic for U.S. higher education, and for U.S. global leadership. Just the latest in a series of senseless acts of self-sabotage by a malevolent administration bent on making the United States weak and poor.

This should be headline news - the implications are horrifying …

Has anyone else started using the date filter function on YouTube to block out anything produced post 2023? If I don’t do this, the sheer amount of AI slop is becoming overwhelming….

Looking at you UChicago…

The digital version of Indian Alchemy is out!!! Hard copy in October. I’ve got three chapters in this baby and I’m so proud of them.

This decision, if it stands, will decimate graduate education in the US. Which is the point presumably… www.cnn.com/2025/08/28/p...

This is a defining moment. Far right activists are seizing the best opportunity since WWII to redefine Englishness as white nativist hostility to black and brown people seeking asylum. We’re at the edge of a precipice. We either condone or resist that definition. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Reform will have to reselect in Croydon, as their initial candidate for Mayor had been dead for 6 months when they selected her, Inside Croydon report Being dead is one way to pass the social media vetting but was likely to get noticed eventually insidecroydon.com/2025/08/27/f...