All of this bad “centrist” stuff rests on a foundation of lazy right-wing higher ed myths: - there’s lots of waste - the liberal arts part doesn’t matter - college is purely vocational school - the cost problem is about everything <except> decades of cutting state funding Do better, Democrats.

Grateful to Hannah Bailey for this thoughtful review of my book:

now thats an anecdote with a punch, from Gillian Tett www.ft.com/content/c0ae...

Absolutely devastated for these lovers separated from each other two and a half millennia before i was even born. From the book, "Cut These Words into My Stone: Ancient Greek Epitaphs" (Wolfe, Michael)

This is sooo cooolll!!! I’m spending my free time for the rest of today reading the journal article about this.

Also if you're a trans medievalist, apply for the Trans Travel Fund, also offered through SMFS ! More details here: smfsweb.org/trans-travel...

I'm also thrilled that my article inspired the choice of cover image, Henry Justice Ford, Crossing the River (1911), for the story “Malchus the Monk,” in The Book of Saints and Heroes, by Leonora Lang, ed. Andrew Lang (London: Longmans, Green, 1912)

Excited that my new article, "Just as We Read Anywhere: Type Texts, Intertexts, and the Earliest English Lives of Malchus," is out now in Modern Philology! Free access to the first 50 readers here (or email/DM me!): www.journals.uchicago.edu/eprint/X9HPY...

I am a PhD sociologist who works outside academia and I approve this message.

Getting a PhD and then working outside academia is dope. My advisees who’ve done that are more or less uniformly happy and feel that they’re using the skills they trained on. (I talked to one today who just landed a great gig). Just wanted to convey that to anyone it might benefit.

This makes me so happy and proud 😭

Grateful to Alice Jorgensen and JEGP for this lovely review of my first book: muse.jhu.edu/pub/34/artic...

The MLA Old English Forum is now accepting paper proposals for the 2027 annual meeting, 7-10 January. We’re accepting 300-word proposals for two guaranteed sessions until March 15, 2026 for 15-20 minute papers. Please share widely!! And don’t hesitate to get in touch with any questions. (1/6)

Please help spread the word on this, especially to those who may be feeling cold winds towards their research. We’ve opened the call for our International Fellowships, enabling early career researchers to work for two years at a UK research institution www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...

Feeling immensely grateful at the end of this tough year. I got tenure, was humbled to receive generous recognition from colleagues, and got some exciting professional news in the last few weeks. There's so much work to do but most of the people I get to do it with are pretty great.

This came out earlier this week! Thank you so much to Yale University Press for all their efforts getting it to publication.

Oh well. I am making my claim and every author should.

RIC - it's not huge but it's incredibly efficient, honestly makes life so much easier flyrichmond.com/richmond-int...

Check out this excerpt of the brilliant @addieisunwieldy.bsky.social 's monograph, "Straight White Men Can't Dance," forthcoming from Bloomsbury in September!!

(the black hole here, too, is how can you possibly evaluate the analysis that your LLM produces if you are not trained to interpret, analyze, historicize?) everything is amazing if you know nothing

The Kool-Aid Man is often depicted with a smaller pitcher of Kool-Aid: himself. This recursive image invites a layered semiotic reading destabilizing the boundaries between subject and object, container and contained, body and commodity, to highlight a profound paradox in capitalist symbolism of

Harvard is offering 558 free classes, including but not limited to "We the People: Civic Engagement in a Constitutional Democracy", "American Government: Constitutional Foundations", and "U.S. Political Institutions: Congress, Presidency, Courts, and Bureaucracy." Thank you Harvard!! 👏👏👏

Why is it that BlackRock is doing a better job defending the value of the liberal arts than most actual higher education administrators?

One of the happiest updates I’ve written since I started following this story. 12 students back in status and maybe more to come. Across the country, students are saying their SEVIS is back. www.dailycal.org/news/campus/...

Glad to see that it's not too hot today, nor too cold - you really only need a light jacket #PerfectDate

Literary Form in Early Medieval England - free to download for five more days! Please share! doi.org/10.1017/9781...

I don't know who needs to hear this but the Disco Elysium soundtrack is fantastic for grading.

My newest book, Literary Form in Early Medieval England, is available open access for the next two weeks! Come download it for free! This is part of the Cambridge series Elements in England in the Early Medieval World. www.cambridge.org/core/books/l...

We need to keep the cuts to the NEH at the forefront of national, local media attention. I just had a convo today with someone from my local Mass state rep's office about how the cuts to the NEH & NSF etc. and the broader war on higher education will have destructive effects locally.

the pinnacle of human achievement

Hi all! Just a reminder to send in abstracts by this Friday, 3/15!!

Grateful to Barbara Newman and Modern Philology for this thoughtful review of my book: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

National Science Foundation suspends salary payments, leaving researchers unable to pay their bills www.statnews.com/2025/01/30/t... Story by @ericboodman.bsky.social

The MLA Old English Forum is sponsoring two panels at the 2026 MLA Convention in Toronto, Jan 8-11. Please share the following widely! (Please note that all accepted presenters must be members of MLA by 7 April, 2025) (1/5):

On @projectmuse.bsky.social in Journal of English & Germanic Philology 123.4, @jenlorden.bsky.social argues that Andreas can't displace suffering because he is a secondary character in his own story. cc: @ndiscenza1.bsky.social https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/34/article/939567

Not just the National Institutes of Health, now the National Science Foundation is put on pause. Reminder: research is a multi-step process. Pausing the peer review panels by itself creates months of delay.

NIH appears to have canceled/postponed all of its study sections—the independent review panels that approve federal grants for health research. Such grants fund the work/salaries of 300k people at more than 2,500 institutions

So delighted to see my strange Andreas article out in the world!!

Two genders for everybody to share is just unsanitary. Genders should be changed regularly, you have to at least let them air out before you put them on again 💅🏻

Universities need to work out how to deal with what precarity has meant when they increasingly rarely hire people into permanent jobs: people with family, children, dependents, permanent homes…

Goals, tbh

I don't know who needs to know this, but Pro Publica has an online thing that will format a letter to your US health insurance company to demand the records behind a claim denial. (which the insurance is then legally required to provide in most cases) projects.propublica.org/claimfile/

Writing is thinking. It’s not a part of the process that can be skipped; it’s the entire point.

Honored to talk to the W&M chapter of Phi Beta Kappa about medieval poems last week!

"University should be concerned with encouraging rational inquiry and the free play of the intellect; it is not about the creation of useful drones and it’s unfortunate that tuition fees have made the experience to some degree transactional."

Heading into the last week of an intense semester like

When I take a quick peek at what's happening back on that other site:

All right, I wrote the thing on that CHE essay. Not sure if this is the form I'll pitch to the Chronicle, but I wanted to get words out. And the fact a dubious Megatron the Cat is my default site image seems appropriate for this one.

At the stage of writing where I have added "The Gospel According to (the) Luke(warm)" as a subheading in this article draft, might delete later.