“…universities are becoming more reliant on wealthy benefactors. But the networks that fund research and programs can also entangle top universities with morally compromised figures… complicity and compromised institutional integrity.” www.chronicle.com/article/a-mo...

IR US is for grad students and ECRs so that they can workshop a research project, practice presenting initial findings and more formally at conferences, integrate critical engagement and understand what it takes to revise and submit for publication. The best part: @drfstewart.bsky.social as a mentor

Shaul interview HDS news www.hds.harvard.edu/news/2026/02...

Marc Bloch, historien et résistant juif, entrera au Panthéon le 23 juin

Hoooooly crap. The Chronicle article is paywalled, but here’s the executive order: www.sos.ok.gov/documents/ex...

CFP IR UK: The call for papers for the 48th Implicit Religion Conference, "Knowingness, Agency and Authority" is live. #IR48 DEADLINE: 27th March 2026 www.implicitreligion.co.uk/ir-uk/implic... CFP PDF: cdn.prod.website-files.com/616453adbf9f...

They tell us we only need STEM education now, and everything the tech bros are doing and saying makes a case for why we actually badly need the humanities.

Iowa closing the African American studies major during Black history month is diabolical. This article is from 4 days ago, but it is now official. The minor will continue.

I think often of the women in the Louis CK story—how they all left comedy and never went back, but he’s still going. It’s everywhere and it’s such a loss for them and for us—for things they’ll never make that we’ll never see.

Can we do anything to get British Library manuscripts online? The absence is such a nuisance! www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2026/...

My spouse is not on Bluesky, X, etc., so every time I send him a link or screenshot of a quote tweet &c., he gets confused, and I have to explain, “it’s like the Talmud; it’s like the Talmud”

"It may take time to prove you're right, but you have to stick to it." - Fred Korematsu Jailed for refusing to abide by FDR's Exec Order 9066, he took his case against internment all the way to the Supreme Court - and lost. Remember him on Korematsu Day, January 30th. 1/

"On Holocaust Memorial Day, we're choosing to focus on reinforcing distortions of ancient (and present-day!) Judaism that have been used to justify Christian (and non-Christian!) antisemitism for centuries."

Fascism and anti-intellectualism go hand in hand.

Medieval scribes at work. A 13th-century Bible manuscript is filled with historiated initials, a few of which depicts scribes with their essential tools: a quill pen for writing and a penknife for sharpening the nib and scraping away mistakes. #bookhistory #rarebooks 💙📚📜

Oh baby

More is more!

'The editors of this volume have laid down a challenge, nothing less than the promotion of a new late antiquity: Eurasian Late Antiquity... the continental regions of Eurasia were subject... to forces bringing them together... a “hidden grid” of linkages connecting them.' Averil Cameron, p. 419

‘the grants to FEHE, the University of Texas and the University of North Carolina, “were noncompetitive, meaning the recipients were selected to apply.”’ www.forbes.com/sites/michae...

Knowledge unified under the outstretched arms of Philosophy BL Add 30024; Brunetto Latini, Li Livres dou Tresor; 1260-1299 CE; France, S.; f.1v

"Slavery was real" Tiny sign at the base of a brick wall that, until yesterday, held panels about the people enslaved by George Washington. Presidents House, Philadelphia.

One day, if we are lucky, the erasure of American history will itself be remembered as a shameful chapter in American history

Manuscript volvelle with animal faces and a little bird cut into one of the dials 📚📜 search.library.yale.edu/catalog/9996...

Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou: The Short Surrealist Film That Revolutionized Cinema (1929)

A great read and an even better listen---I **love** when authors read their work

We are now a mere 11 weeks from publication day for THY WILL BE DONE, my book about how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated George Washington’s history with slavery. It comes out on April 7. Help me spread the word! Pre-order on Bookshop Pre-order on Amazon

Weird resonances with Herder's pointedly rhetorical "Archive of Paradise," that I get into a bit in my intro here, is a theme for our Ancient Word series, and Olender discusses in his Languages of Paradise.

Has anyone written a scholarly study of the popular noncanonical anthology *Forgotten Books of Eden*? It features a bit in my Forgetting book, but I haven’t seen anything else so wrote up some of what I know—albeit mostly in the hopes that others will tell me more…? open.substack.com/pub/humanhis...

🥁🥁🥁Hello academic blueskyers, we are hiring again. We are looking for a proactive, communicative, motivated post-doc 🦸‍♂️🦸‍♀️ for our ISF project Josephus Christianus (sinowloc.wixsite.com/josephus-chr...). Feel free to circulate!

It's amazing what gets printed in collected texts - today the supposed "letter 149" of Jerome - most likely in fact an Irish computistical text of the 7th century. www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2026/...

brilliant article about dispersed, displaced, lost and destroyed collections and the strange combination of emotional, affective, technical and administrative language used to describe them

I’m revising my graduate seminar on medieval manuscripts and was wracking my brain trying to think of an enticing short reading to intro my students to a case study in codicology before remembering that I co-edited a journal issue devoted to the topic. Enjoy! journal.thewalters.org/volume/76/

The scribe emerges in the margin from the line-filler to write the text. Bodleian Library MS. Douce 6; Psalter; c.1320 CE-1330 CE; Flanders (Ghent) f.61r @bodleian.ox.ac.uk

HYBRID LECTURE! "The Fabrication of Borders: Tailoring and Cartography in Early Modern Europe," Emanuele Lugli, Stanford U. & the 2025-2026 SIMS + Center for Italian Studies Fellow in Italian MSS Studies #medievalsky February 12 @ 5:15pm EST More details and RSVP here: https://bit.ly/4qkdSoN

this is a rollicking great read it's a story of a bunch of tenured idealists who believed that they were building a university dedicated to free speech and free inquiry, but then lost control of their project to... the right-wing megadonors who funded the university www.politico.com/news/magazin...

The audio version is now out for everyone. On your morning commute this morning, join us as we dive headfirst into 2020 cancel culture discourse in this retrospective on the Harper's Letter with @parkermolloy.com. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Ngl love this meme www.instagram.com/reel/DQIKBLV...

Bandcamp has banned AI music. The company has released a statement which includes the following: "Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp." stereogum.com/2485199/band...

My earlier 🧵 is based on a quick read & focuses on “Religious Studies” but hoping some journalist might also look further into this policy for possible aim/effect to defund yeshivot offering BAs…? (Ironically in this case given the efforts to defund universities in the name of *protecting* Jews)

In the past, book bindings were not only reinforced with parchment, but sometimes also with printed matter that was no longer relevant at the time of binding. Usually this remains hidden, but when the spine comes loose, you sometimes notice remarkable things.

Bibliomania, or Book-Madness was a satirical book by Thomas Frognall Dibdin published in 1809 which popularised the term ‘bibliomania’ and described the craze for book collecting, detailing serious ‘symptoms’ like obsession with first editions, and prescribing ‘cures’ such as human contact.

Our forum on Celsus' Contra Celsum continues with an article from Robin Darling Young, "Contra Celsum from Caesarea to Constantinople: The Travels of a Byzantine Book"

Speaking of articles:

Important to note that the first pro listed is not a pro but at the very very very best a pro/con. Generative AI's greatest use right now is by students to avoid reading and writing.

An invaluable new report. A "premortem" is exactly what we need.

What is “Religious Studies”? An interesting example comes up in the initiative discussed in this article, which seeks to limit federal funds to programs based on average income after graduation www.chronicle.com/article/coll... +

"I’ll explore what tethers our current higher education policy realities to past moments in history, leading to potential lessons on crafting an American higher education system that thrives within a multiracial democracy." this series from @bakerdphd.bsky.social look amazing!

JTS is excited to announce a 10-session online Introduction to Judeo-Arabic course, from March 5 to May 28, 2026. Taught by Dr. Yaara Perlman, the course will primarily focus on the close reading of classical texts as well as documentary materials such as private letters and legal documents.

Open Access! www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...