👏👏 to @fmussgnug.bsky.social for a 🎆 inaugural lecture on loving apocalypse too much @uclselcs.bsky.social last night! Saul Bellow's Herzog, Frank Kermode, Loki & multiverse destruction, Mary Shelley's & apocalypses as a way of looking beyond & through them to something more sustaining.

Large red-letter day Tues 28 Oct @uclselcs.bsky.social + @anthropoceneucl.bsky.social when my wonderful colleague @fmussgnug.bsky.social will give his inaugural professorial lecture on why we love apocalypse so much (and maybe shouldn't…?). In person, 18:00. #Anthropocene, #envhum, #literature

THE HERDS’ 20,000km journey has finally come to an end at one of the furthest reaches of the world. Since April, the animals’ route has led them through the Congo Jungle of Central Africa, the desert of the Sahel, and towns and cities across Europe. @theherds.bsky.social

On this day 48 years ago (July 15, 1977) the New York Times article ran a front page story "Scientists fear heavy use of coal may bring adverse shift in climate" allouryesterdays.info/2023/07/14/j...

Introducing a ✨ special issue✨ of Italica (Vol. 101, No. 3) on postsecular Italy, guest edited by Clodagh Brook, Monica Jansen ‪@utrechtuniversity.bsky.social‬ , and Maria Bonaria Urban. cc: @fmussgnug.bsky.social‬ scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/ital/art...

THE HERDS in London: seeing the animals arrive at the far end of the street I was moved to tears @theherds.bsky.social www.theherds.org

The UCL Stampede for the Arts on a Heating Planet continues with Prof. Emma Bond’s Ravindranath Tagore Lecture in ComparativeLiterature @efbond.bsky.social “The Work of Literature in Times of Eco Crisis”. www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropocene...

Very proud and happy to be hosting David Lan, producer of THE HERDS, and Maryam Pasha, London producer of THE HERDS at UCL. @theherds.bsky.social www.theherds.org

The Visual Arts on a Heating Planet 🌍 Join us for this roundtable event where artists & scholars explore the role of the arts in responding to the accelerating climate crisis. 📆26 June, 12noon - 1.45pm 📍IAS Common Ground 🔗 Book here! shorturl.at/gXFmr Part of the UCL Stampede events & The Herds 🦁

📣Next week! The UCL Stampede for Arts on a Heating Planet🌍 Life-size puppet animals🦁 are travelling a 20,000km route to symbolise their flight from climate disaster as part of THE HERDS public art & climate initiative Attend our event to mark the arrival in London👇 26-29 June 🔗 shorturl.at/T64aV

How might history help us understand the material and social significance of heat? In what ways do these histories connect with domestic structures, gender & patterns of consumption? Join us for an Anthropocene Histories seminar on Histories of Heating🔥 📆4 June,3-5pm| 📍online 🔗 shorturl.at/a7VZD

Lovely to hear so many different languages at Eurovision 2025. Is this the most polyglot Eurovision in history? Does anybody have stats? 🇪🇺

📣Join us for the first seminar in our Interdisciplinarity: new reconfigurations of the social and natural sciences seminar series! Georgina Born and Andrew Barry will speak about AI, Environment and Art on 20 May from 5-6pm in the IAS Common Ground. Sign up here👉 shorturl.at/fSi6c

Join us for this Anthropocene Histories seminar where Kristin Asdal & Tone Huse discuss how the ocean, in the years proceeding WWII, has been harnessed to become a space of ever-intensifying capital investment and innovation 🌊 📆14 May, 3-5pm 📍Online - zoom 🔗 shorturl.at/qQGsE

How long until it occurs to the US government to offer political asylum to members of the now-banned, far-right German Reichsbürger?

Innenministerium verbietet "Königreich Deutschland"#Reichsbürger#KönigreichDeutschland#Vereinsverbot

Fredric Jameson’s early work on the fallacies of island thinking sheds light on Starmer’s gratuitous, pointless, hurtful remark about an “island of strangers”: island fantasies = nostalgia for feudalism where a coherent critique of capitalism appears impossible. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

Italy’s national holiday on 25 April 2025 will mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation from Fascism. This is how the City of Rome is marking the occasion:

Poland’s underground “flying universities” of the 1970s and 1980s are a hard act to follow, but an interesting model. In the Humanities, this kind of education would not require summative assessment, I think, but could be entirely focused on Socratic dialogue.

How odd that Dino Buzzati’s wonderfully odd, satirical SF novel, “Il grande ritratto” (1960) is now available in A.M. Appel’s elegant English translation - reviewed below by the great Michael Wood - but that the Italian original remains out of print. Mondadori, please act!

Great text by @naomiaklein.bsky.social and @astra.bsky.social: “The Rise of End Time Fascism”. Today’s far-right mimic what U. Eco called the “Armageddon Complex” of mid-century Fascism, but no longer trust their own “apartheid fantasies of bunkered salvation.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

News from Rome: we’re about to launch a new lecture series on The Politics of Literature at Roma Tre University. Our first speaker will be Ana Claudia Suriani da Silva, who is going to talk to us about writers’ diaries during the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985). All welcome.

This week, I had the pleasure of discussing Sandra Newman’s @sannewman.bsky.social brilliant novel, “Julia”, with the students of my graduate seminar on Inhuman Worlds. Interestingly, I read it as a futuristic dystopia while they read it as counterfactual history. 1984 lies firmly in their past.

If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.

I’ve taken the Senate floor and will speak for as long as I’m physically able to lift the voices of Americans who are being harmed and not being heard in this moment of crisis. Watch here:

Loved being at the Passa Porta Literature Festival, talking to authors David Nicholls & Peter Terrin about space, place & their writing. Wonderfully rich: Island fiction. Heterotopias. Beckett, Stevenson, Melville. Yorkshire, Monte Carlo & abandoned basements. And lots of maps. www.passaporta.be

@chrischirp.bsky.social: thank you for this excellent article: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Good set of questions from @tjheffernan.bsky.social. Extremely relevant also beyond the Canadian context

Good set of questions from @tjheffernan.bsky.social. Extremely relevant also beyond the Canadian context

@tommylynch.bsky.social and @stephenshapiro.bsky.social: here comes a list of twelve of my favourite British post-2000, post-apocalyptic novels:

Two British novels with a post-apocalyptic setting that I would happily teach again and again, until the end of the world: Julia Armfield, “Private Rites” (2024) Jessie Greengrass, “The High House” (2021)

New genre for American academics: apology/shame clause in routine professional correspondence with Canadian and Mexican colleagues.

Fingers crossed for Annalena #Baerbock (@abaerbock.diplo.de). If she succeeds, she will become the 80th President of the UN General Assembly and only the fifth woman in that role. We will need an all-female line-up until 2100 to break even www.tagesschau.de/ausland/amer...

Members of the European Council: now, if ever, is the time to suspend Hungary’s Voting Rights.

Even when it’s territorially expansionist, nationalism is fundamentally about making places smaller, horizons narrower, and experience and education more limited. These things are usually not that difficult to do; much easier, anyway, than the reverse, as the US will be some time in finding out.

archive.is/Zs2Yu non-paywalled

Germany issues warning for transgender & nonbinary people traveling to the U.S. www.advocate.com/news/germany...

Mezzanotten 🇮🇹

Meganotten, Midinotten, Mininotten

Interesting provocation from @georgemonbiot.bsky.social. But in a crisis, individual stockpiling would only exacerbate the problem. This book explains why prepping does not work.

Die Iden des #Merz [Sondervermögen und Schuldenbremse]

Why does the UKRI call it “Researchfish”? Does anybody know? I have been wondering for years. Is it a Christological reference? Or a homage to the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy?

Astronomers have discovered 128 new moons orbiting Saturn. They will be given names based on Gallic, Norse and Canadian Inuit gods, in keeping with convention for Saturn’s moons. Most new moons are in the Norse cluster, meaning astronomers are now on the hunt for dozens of obscure Viking deities.

“[Germany] is where a breach of the cultural firebreak has the most symbolic potency. Getting the AfD over the line into the German mainstream is the ultimate stress-test of historical conscience as inoculation against extreme nationalism.” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

"The move will potentially bar 71,000 people who have successfully applied for asylum from claiming UK citizenship" Labour is willing to break international law for the sole purpose of punishing 71,000 vulnerable people who did nothing to deserve such cruelty www.theguardian.com/politics/202...