'Despite all their difficulties, universities remain an enormous and irreplaceable national asset. As well as educating millions of people, they generate about £24bn in export earnings, which is about 1% of GDP – more than aircraft manufacturing and legal services combined'. 1/2

Tomorrow at 3pm: David Edgar's brilliant play, the New Real, airs on Radio 4. It offers an origin story of far right populism set in Eastern Europe. It was a joy and privelege to play a small part in this project by doing some translation. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

"Higher education generated £24bn in export earnings for the UK in 2022-23, far above aircraft manufacturing with £12bn, legal services with £9.5bn and telecoms with £8.8bn." #HigherEd www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Universities continue to brand themselves as 'global' and chase international students whose culture and languages they appear uninterested in. Take a min to save modern langauges at Uni of Nottingham! www.change.org/p/stop-the-r...

People of Oslo! Come about my book on the invention of the Slavonic alphabet next Wednesday at 4.15pm. Details here: www.hf.uio.no/iakh/english...

nearly thirty years ago Bill Readings published this prophetic book The University in Ruins. Essential reading today as the sector is on the brink of collapse.

"LLMs don’t learn except by going through a whole new training process. ChatGPT doesn’t learn from any of the millions of exchanges it has with human users. It can’t afford to [...] it is frozen to prevent it being contaminated by any new knowledge.." www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Loved this review of Lea Ypi's new book Indignity by @lilylynch.bsky.social - on class, communism, and family in Albania's twentieth century jacobin.com/2025/10/lea-...

Istanbul folk - @drvukovich.bsky.social and I will be hosting a workshop on the Byzantine and Ottoman heritage of the Balkans in a few weeks at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul! Come join us and our amazing speakers!

"To generate knowledge in the context of hunger is to think through pain. To teach students who have not eaten and still tell them their voices matter. To insist, against all odds, that Gaza still thinks, still questions, still creates."

Hello UK friends - please, please could you sign this petition against the job cuts at my place of work - 1 in 4 us will be out of a job by August next year if we don't stop the cuts. And once you've signed it, please share. We need your help! www.change.org/p/stop-mass-...

Excited on route to York for a workshop entitled Multilingual Lives and organised by @emiliekmmurphy.bsky.social and Purba Hossain!

For BBC Future, I wrote a piece for about the Soviet plan (it never happened) to reverse some of the country's great rivers, diverting them south to Central Asia: www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic...

Intimidating bunting is back at JW! @sheffielducu.bsky.social

"the funding freeze has had a devastating effect on civil society in Central and Eastern Europe" Excellent on the various agencies and media organisations fighting for civil liberties and rights in Eastern Europe which have been shut down by the USAID cuts. briefeasterneurope.eu/p/march-31-2...

Fascinating YouGov poll shows over half of americans 'dislike' the Middle Ages; they like the Renaissance, even more than the Englightenment. Medieval things they do love: castles and chivalry! 16% love the Inquisition. today.yougov.com/entertainmen...

"The flavour of crisis we are experiencing in UK higher education is far less about malice, and far more about political indifference." www.historyworkshop.org.uk/education/a-...

"Increasingly desperate, universities have made things even worse by taking the one-size-fits-all advice of a handful of consultancies to cut services in each department and centralise everything from recruitment to IT." www.ft.com/content/0ec7...

I published a piece in @neweasterneurope.eu on how the history of multiculturalism in the Balkans has been sidelined thanks to nationalism, population exchanges and war.

Essenial reading for historians of nationalism, byzantium and the theory of territory!

Just discovered that @bunyaminanderson.bsky.social and I's open access article on the Politics of Byzantine studies has made it onto the Wiki page for the 'Byzantine Empire'! Thanks to the anonymous editor!

Kalyan Minaret (12c.) in Bukhara. The oldest still standing in Central Asia, it was apparently (acc. to local man) spared by Genghis Khan because his hat fell off when he looked up at it. Also apparently (acc. to British spy) it was used for public executions in the late 19th/early 20thc.

excited to see that @bunyaminanderson.bsky.social and I's aritcle is now in physical print! what is byzantine studies all about?? find out now, open access!

A reminder about the EME/BSR fellowship: a month's stay in Rome for someone doing/recently finished a PhD on early medieval European history. Deadline 31st January. bsr.ac.uk/second-bsr-e...

Reflections Article in our 600th Issue: Mirela Ivanova @mirela.bsky.social and Benjamin Anderson @bunyaminanderson.bsky.social on 'The Politics of Byzantine Studies: Between Nations and Empires' academic.oup.com/ehr/article/...

Sorry to say we're closed today (Tuesday) 😔 Someone has bricked our window, robbed the cash drawer and, bizarrely, the Bluetooth speaker 🎶 All the books are safe! Turns out robbers dont read. If you wanna help out this struggling queer bookshop our website is still open Merry bloody Christmas 😥

Sheffield-area folk who love high quality local journalism: please subscribe to @sheffieldtribune.bsky.social! It's a great paper, and local journalism is more improtant than ever! Plus - an excellent Xmas gift! www.sheffieldtribune.co.uk/get-us-over-...

Amazing to take some of my students to the British Museum exhibition “The Silk Roads”! One highlight - a wall painting from a Sogdian house in Bukhara dated to 709 shortly after the Umayyad conquests.

This is happening today!

John Ma's Polis was one of my books of the year for @historytoday.com this year! See my praise: www.historytoday.com/archive/revi... This workshop will be a treat!

I'll be talking about my recent book, Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing between Rome and Constantinople in Princeton next Tuesday at 4:30pm for anyone in the NY/NJ area!

🚨 JOB CLAXON 🚨 : Two Post-Docs till Sept 2028 at the @univie.ac.at Cluster of Excellence 'Eurasian Transformations' - Deadline Dec 15. One on Christian identities, the other on Steppe nomads in Central Asia. #medieval #academicjob #medievalhistory

Concluding panel at the EurAsia excellence cluster conference in Vienna, on Russia’s management of cultural difference and its ideological repositioning as an Eurasian power.

'as many as 10,000 jobs could be lost across the higher education sector this academic year' hepi.ac.uk/2024/11/22/d...

Heading to Vienna for the first conference of their new excellence cluster: EurAsian Transformations! Anyone in Vienna?

Welcome to everyone new! I will post about: 🏺heritage from Central Asia to the Balkans; 📖 medieval translation and multiculturalims; 🏛️ literature, culture from post-USSR world. Am looking for: interesting new books 📚, films 🎞️, podcasts and news about Liverpool FC ⚽.

The Samanid Mausoleum in Bukharra (10th c.): oldest funerary monument in Central Asia! Survived almost entirely in tact underground (left). Local man outside told me Genghis Khan didn't destroy it because he was "scared of cemetaries".

My review of McGeer's welcome translation of the fascinating Continuation of the Chronicle of John Skylitzes is now online in the early preview of Early Medieval Europe with some other exciting papers!

📖 Available open access: Ben and I’s review article for the English Historical Review: “The Politics of Byzantine Studies: between Nations and Empires” academic.oup.com/ehr/advance-...

"The Politics of Byzantine Studies: Between Nations and Empires" by @bunyaminanderson.bsky.social and @mirela.bsky.social t.co/3iE3p79v5J

My TedX talk about history, borders, nationalism and my roots and routes around the Balkans is now available online! www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFmm...

Really looking forward to this symposium on information technologies, graphospheres and their evolution through time to honour the work of the great Simon Franklin in Cambridge next week!

Super review by Adrien Palladino in Sehepunkte of @mirela.bsky.social & I’s “Colonialist Discipline” 🥂 -

My book has just been published! Find out about the medieval invention of the Slavonic alphabet, and its various contemporary refractions in nationalist politics!

This evening we discussed Kadare, Gospodinov, Kafka, fiction, dystopia and bureaucracy for BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking - with Mirela Ivanova, Roger Luckhurst and Matthew Sweet.

This Thursday at 10pm I’ll be live on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking talking about the first ever Bulgarian novel to win the International Booker! Makes for a perfect Xmas present - tune in!

Ben and I did a fun podcast about how to de-colonize Byzantine Studies with Anthony Kaldellis which is now available online! www.medievalists.net/2023/10/how-...

I will be on Radio 3 Free Thinking tonight at 10pm talking about a new book collecting Slavic myths and fairytales. Tune in to hear about how the vampire came form Serbia!

My first post blue sky on the week of the U.K. publication of me and Ben’s book!