The Center for Humanities Research at GMU is hosting a hybrid book talk for my monograph Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy this upcoming Friday from noon-12:30. Register at this link: chr.gmu.edu/events/17595

I ordered a cake to celebrate my book launch. It turned out kinda epic. 😆

Today is the day! Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy is officially out! I'll be posting about the book and the digital project it launched in the upcoming weeks. www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

Really pleased to announce the launch of the all-new, all-dancing, London Lives website - www.londonlives.org It has been thoroughly re-engineered to facilitate more types of search, and redesigned for phones and tablets. The team very much hopes peope like it. 1/

While not an exploding box (you'll have to read the book ;-)), something equally exciting was waiting for me on my doorstep today. My advance copies for Civil Blood arrived! A hearfelt thanks to my wonderful editor at @cornellupress.bsky.social @bethanywasik.bsky.social for making this day possible!

Why does having a cover for your book make it feel more official? Thrilled to share mine for Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy out Nov 15 with @cornellupress.bsky.social This book has some things to say about the intersections between violence and statecraft.

Thrilled to be giving a book talk later this year at the Italian-German Historical Institute for my forthcoming book with @cornellupress.bsky.social Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy! Information below.

1) Finally back in the research trenches and working on the next book (and the project Mapping Violence) and the Venetian material I've collected continues to delight. Today's find from the archives of the Council of Ten: An investigation of a 'cartello' of a treasonous poem from Verona.

*first day of class “Hey, everyone, if you liked K-Pop Demon Hunters, you will LOVE our first text!*” *Milton’s Paradise Lost

So....I've just learned that there are women on TikTok dressing up as Alexander Hamilton and sneaking out of windows to get to the dueling ground. This made my morning.

Author copies arrived today! 😍🥳 #dh #bookhistory #medievalsky

A very helpful collection of primary sources on early modern Europe. 🗃️

If you're attending #DH2025 make sure to check out @jmotis.bsky.social's panel Revitalizing, Maintaining, & Sunsetting the Digital Humanities on Friday and @deepthimurali.bsky.social & @jasonheppler.org's session Participatory Platforms, Open Scholarship and Advanced OCR on Thursday.

Want to see the scope of what the NEH grant terminations is? The ACH ( @ach.bsky.social ) has compiled a database: impact.ach.org

Call for Papers – Deep Mapping Dialogues An online workshop exploring layered narratives of place in archaeology & history. Submission deadline: 1 June Workshop date: 24 September Proposal submissions & detail: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... #DeepMapping #DigitalHumanities #History #Archaeology

A few tips for NEH grantees: 1) if you've spent money on an awarded grant but have not yet drawn down the funds, make sure to submit the paperwork to drawn down funds ASAP. 2) the NYTimes article suggests that "DOGE" might cancel awards. If you receive an email from DOGE cancelling your NEH award,

I'm adding two articles I wrote back in 2016 and 2017, during a different round of threats to NEH and other valuable cultural agencies. The first is "How to Fight for Federal Support of Cultural Research and Why It Matters," which offers some specific advocacy tips medium.com/@jasonrhody/...

The @humanitiesall.bsky.social has a resource, NEH for All, w data about the impact of the NEH locally and nationally. Yes, it is important to right now use the contact and advocacy resources, but it's also critical, imho, to read, gather, & share this info w family &community. www.nehforall.org

📯 New publication! 📯 We are proud to share the outcomes of our NEH workshops in 2024, which brought together researchers from around the world to pilot data-driven approaches to the history of travel 🗃️ #earlymodern #digitalhumanities #digitalhistory read more here: github.com/rmidura/EMDi...

If you, like me, are looking for firm details on what’s happened so far at NEH, here’s a list of programs that are marked as discontinued or cancelled on the website. This is a snapshot - I’m sure this the impacts will grow as more cuts unfold throughout the day. #NEH #DigitalHumanities

After waking up to news of the devastation of the NEH (summer stipends, digital projects for the public, grants to tribal institutions, along with a host of other grant programs now shuttered and rumors of more cuts to come), I want to encourage everyone to not only write their reps

Are you at the RSA Boston conference? Do you have questions about DH projects, tools, or funding? Interested in DH but not sure where to start? Come see me and my wonderful colleagues at digital humanities "office hours" at 11am today! rsa.confex.com/rsa/2025/mee...

Workshop on Digital Humanities and Open Access 💡Research data accessibility in Digital Humanities 🌐https://dh-atlas.github.io/workshop.html #DigitalHumanity #VeDPH #DHAtlas #CulturalHeritage #OVI #CNR #OpenAIRE #Ecomic #DigitalEcoSystem #DigitalLibrary #DigitalInnovation #CNR #CaFoscari

ACH is holding two Town Halls next week (3/19 and 3/21 from 12pm-1pm EST) to hear your experiences regarding how the recent government actions are affecting your ability to pursue digital humanities & the steps that ACH can take to support you and your communities. Sign up here:

A new guest post, by Andrea McKenzie on 17th century legal shorthand and its uses - not just for speed, but also secrecy and snark: legalhistorymiscellany.com/2025/03/12/s...

"Advocating for the Humanities: A Resource Guide" OR "Use What You Got!" Preparing for Natl Humanities Advocacy Day & post-mortem advice triproftri.wordpress.com/2025/03/13/a... @docfreeride.bsky.social #sjsu @calstate.bsky.social @neh-odh.bsky.social @humanitiesall.bsky.social @ach.bsky.social

I'm doing an AskHistorians reddit AMA today from 9:30-12:30 EST on violence in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy and the history behind Assassin's Creed II. Stop by to chat with me about violence, vendettas, and Ezio Auditore!

Save the date for ACH 2025, which will be held June 11th-13th. Look for a CFP to be circulated in the next few weeks!

From your friends at #ReviewsInDH: "We firmly believe that the integrity of knowledge production depends on a commitment to championing a broad range of perspectives, voices, and stories, and we will continue to honor our commitment."

Call for applicants! 📣 Only a few days left to apply for the Gerda Henkel Fellowship offered by @ghiwashington.bsky.social and in collaboration with RRCHNM. Applications for the 12-month fellowship in digital history are due by February 28th, 2025. Learn more: www.ghi-dc.org/programs/hen...

I've just cleared a few to-do list items and been alerted that the first pre-ordered copies of Postal Intelligence have arrived (!) so now seems like as good a time as any to share some exciting and troubling tidbits from my ten years with Europe's postal technocrats 1/? #earlymodern 🗃️

5 archival trips, 1000s of documents, many, many books and thousands of hours of writing (and agonzing) and rewriting later (and many people to thank): Now available for pre-order: Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy. www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

I've been struggling with not feeling helpless the past few days. But today I woke up to an email from a former student who thanked me for introducing her to "Nazi punks f8*k off" by the Dead Kennedys because it was helping to channel her rage. Thank you student for reminding me that there's hope.

Let’s talk about resistance after a conqueror takes power. Specifically let’s talk about this bendy yellow building, and what it shows us about the moment the Florentine Republic finally fell to its kleptocratic/proto-capitalist banking-fortune Medici conquerors 1/?

Truly grateful for my semester in Venice at @vedph.bsky.social. Sad to be leaving behind a city that has become my second home and a terrific group of colleagues who have been so welcoming. At the same time excited to share the fruits of my archival research and work on some new projects.

Day 2 sharing teaser #HistoryPix for "Inventing the Renaissance" (out in one month!). Often in Florence one sees buildings like this, where one section is rough stone standing out amid stucco neighbors. It's actually a remnant of the old Guelph-Ghibelline feuds that so long rocked Medieval Italy 1/?

Glad to be joining other DH innovators at a #mla25 roundtable (session 743). We’ll be looking through the lens of a hypothetical “digital humanities textbook” at DH pedagogy today and, more broadly, at the changing missions & forms of today’s higher education: hcommons.org/groups/digit...

This was an absolutely brilliant talk and I highly recommend a listen.

The past we study is shaped by what survived - but what about everything that didn't? The CHR journal wants your work on measuring, understanding, and accounting for missing data. Deadline has been extended to Jan 31, 2025. Guest-edited by @zoeleblanc.bsky.social and @mikekestemont.bsky.social

Heading to #AHA25? Check out "The Large and the Small", two roundtables I organized on creative and narrative nonfiction history, biography, and memoir. 💙📚 🗃 #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thCentury 🧵 1/n aha.confex.com/aha/2025/web...

Way More Than Very Happy to announce this book, co-edited with the incomparable Isabel Galina, and co-authored with 70+ amazing folks from 5 continents: "The Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities" www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/1... Tell your librarian!

For faculty and advanced grad students in the US: if you’re curious about philosophical discussions of slavery in early modern Europe & America, consider applying for this NEH Summer Institute, which I'm co-directing! #philosophy #philsky #earlymodernphilosophy #slavery #NEHgrant @nehgov.bsky.social

Just in time for my course prep for next semester! I'm really excited for this--some excellent work on early modern space in this issue.

Another truly terrific 🧵 on violence and civil society and what historians now know after decades of research.

Excellent 🧵 on misconceptions of medieval violence and the civilizing process. Until recently we haven't had really good data on violence from the 16thc. onwards and some of that data says violence rose among the elites. See, A Renaissance of Violence by @crosehistorian.bsky.social

This looks fantastic!

Google quietly updated their ngrams viewer again this year. The books used appear to be extremely different yet again--the rate of the words "she said" are about 60% what they were in the 20th century compared to the 2019 release, and just 20% compared to 2009. But there's a catch:

Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory is released _today_. You can buy a copy, or, you can read it FOR FREE via Project MUSE. Please spread the news to your colleagues, your friends, your syllabus makers. muse.jhu.edu/book/123276

Please excuse the self-promotion, but www.Oldbaileyonline.org was recently awarded the Mary L.Dudziak Digital History Prize by ASLH, and Bob Shoemaker and I just received the certificate. We were really honoured, but having no wall space to speak of, I thought it could usefully go here.