Don't write your manuscript reviews using AI. DEFINITELY do not feed someone else's manuscript into AI and have it write the review for you.

This coming Monday! Very excited to have teamed up with the French History seminar for a discussion of Mélanie Lamotte's By Flesh & Toil: How Sex, Race, & Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (@harvardpress.bsky.social) MON, 18 May, 17:30, zoom & in person @ihr.bsky.social #EarlyModern #Skystorians

In honor of e-publication week, Chris and I have launched a Substack. Follow for more than you ever wanted to know about the ivory sporks, wildly inaccurate maps, and emetic recipes that didn't make it into the book. #earlymodern #frenchhistory #skystorians open.substack.com/pub/frenchat...

What does a university have that Google cannot offer its workers? Art History departments, Classics departments, History departments, Music Theory, etc. The humanities are what distinguishes universities in an AI economy. Universities defunding the humanities are digging their own graves.

JCK is wrong & this article is ridiculous, but universities need to emphasize what makes higher education different than AI / tech companies, and the answer to that question is that which they have marginalized for decades: curiosity-driven, rather than market-driven knowledge.

If you missed my RHS lecture last week, then you can catch a recorded version on the Society's website: see the link below :)

When a @rpanchasi.bsky.social essay comes out, you drop everything and start reading, and you admire the prose, learn new things, and come away with ideas that will sit with you for who knows how long. Same routine as usual here....

An absolutely fab essay by Roxanne Panchasi about the novel “History Lessons” and, more broadly, the stories we tell about academia

I will die on the hill of never doing this. I know about AI. I know about all of it. But I once did a (faulty!!!!) seminar where the leaders made this choice and imposed it on all of us, and I *hated* it.

This means that hundreds, if not thousands of labs all over the country will close. Tens of thousands of jobs will be lost. This is in defiance of Congress's will and in defiance of good stewardship of the US economy. This is entirely because Russ Vought hates science

“Edinburgh’s Unruly Women” is coming out in paperback this summer 😎 You can preorder here: www.routledge.com/Edinburghs-U... for hundreds of case studies of individual women who navigated their local church courts 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🩵📜 @routledgebooks.bsky.social @janeohlmeyer.bsky.social @voicestcd.bsky.social

The hero we need in the last week of the semester

The hero we need in the last week of the semester

Mary Wollstonecraft warned you that women who are only objects of pity and love, due to their “fascinating graces,” their “soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, [and] delicacy of sentiment” — in a word, due to their weakness (and not strength) — “will soon become objects of contempt.”

#CFP Female Networks of Knowledge: Natural History between Private and Public Spaces (Vienna, November 19-20, 2026), due May 30. Conference explores how women shaped scientific knowledge via networks that crossed the domestic, social, and institutional from early modern to 19th c. #envhist #histstm

Dream positions: 3 (!!) PhD placements at the Prize Papers with emphasis on finding students with the following language skills: French, Spanish, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages. (Of course, I emphasize the Dutch language!) www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/professional...

I am finishing up a book on early modern news in Europe, and I think I am aware of most research published in English, French and German. But I want to cite, mention and refer to much more relevant literature done in Europe on the topic. So, #skystorians communities with knowledge of ... 1/2

Insane byline. What's the opposite of nightmare blunt rotation

PUB. DAY! Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia is officially out today. Available Open Access: www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501... #legalhistory Outfit: red for bloodstain testing+flowered shirt for botanical poisons+poisoner's ring (for show only)

Yes, and: #RFKJr & allies are making money on all this. Then we have Russ Vought who wants to tear down everything, Jay Bhattacharya and others who are still nursing grievances for their poor scholarship in 2020. Eugenics, nihilistic, religious zealotry and revenge are a heady dangerous mix.

i firmly believe that kennedy wants preventable diseases to rip through american communities since, in his warped mind, those who survive without vaccines will have proven themselves “healthy.”

In a month we are going to present the Invention of the scientific power couple in 18th century France with @meghankroberts.bsky.social in this exciting workshop! Glad to get to travel after this long writing period and listen to those great papers! couples.hypotheses.org @zoethomas.bsky.social

For the academic study of the history of science: the Scientific Revolution didn't happen, and the scientific method doesn't exist.

Gender is socially constructed.

Yes! Whenever I give feedback without a grade, I find I can dig a lot deeper because it’s the opening of a dialogue rather than the last word on how well they did.

For those that don’t know (welcome!) gloves impede dexterity, which increases the possibility of damaging a book FAR more than handling with clean dry hands. Gloves ARE still used for some materials (photographs, metal objects, items made of hazardous materials, etc.)

Not a single biologist and only one university researcher on PCAST. This leaves the country unbelievably ill prepared for an age of biotechnology, a race we are already beginning to lose.

It’s so hard for me to imagine anybody with expertise in public health, or history, or technology, equating the public health impact of AI with VACCINES and SANITATION.

In all seriousness though, elder millennial jokes aside, I think it’s important to resist the media framing of any mainstream resistance to the status quo as just the shrill nonsense of middle-aged women with nothing better to do. This isn’t the first time they’ve run out this playbook.

@profchrisadams.bsky.social and I remember two remarkable scholars, Elborg Forster and Patricia Ranum, "faculty wives" who never held formal positions but their generative scholarship made contributions to the field of French history. www.societyforfrenchhistoricalstudies.net/in-memoriam

Historians: I offered to visit my 10yo’s 5th grade class to talk about history but now I feel utterly stymied. I kind of want to tell them about children in the past but everything that comes to mind is…grim. Anyone have any great ideas on what I can share?

Clearly hitting my stride as chair because I just my department through our course scheduling process, which is governed by elaborate and ironclad college-wide rules, and not only did we get it done, we finished *twenty minutes early*

We all know the worst airport in the US is LaGuardia.

Absolutely thrilled to report that the Board of Governors at @uncpress.bsky.social have approved my book THE RACIALIZATION OF PRINT for publication by @oieahc.bsky.social. Forthcoming, early 2027.

8yo is on day 3 of a fever so I’m working from home. I gave him a bell to summon me as needed. Let’s see how much writing I can get done… 🫠

Writing rubrics is an essential part of the cognitive and relational work of teaching. Farming that out to a shitty program that will be used to penalize students in the grade book is an egregious betrayal of our responsibility to our students. 2/2

Also: I get that higher ed rarely requires people who want to be professors to learn much of anything about teaching, but generating a rubric is figuring out what it is you want students to demonstrate what they learned and how you will fairly and accurately measure it. 1/

Anyway, AI is a managerial technology that came out of fields where researchers act more like managers than researchers and this is not a coincidence. It’s fundamentally related to why certain people jumped at the chance to try to build certain kinds of systems that devalued (other people’s) work.

Not only were race science and race medicine mainstream — they were *prestigious* and buoyed along by scientific academies, colonial administrators, and ordinary readers. I published an article in HWJ about surgeons using race-making to boost their careers. academic.oup.com/hwj/article-...

This is your reminder that if you are a class member and have NOT yet filed a claim in Anthropic v. Bartz, the AI copyright lawsuit, you have 9 days to do so.

... the Arne Jacobsen egg chair teamed with leather couch and a studio backdrop feat. a Lambo inexplicably inside the room. And where Knowles's set is filled with masculine urban cliches, Walsh's set is the rustic counterpart: the fish, stone fireplace, and boat-shaped shelf with tiny old books.

It's interesting how The Daily Wire attacks the idea that gender is a performance when their sets are all about gender performance. Look at the aesthetics here — the cigars and crystal decanter with Japanese whiskey, the black dress shirt, the tight suit with two-toned double monks and tie bar ...

Forthcoming new book by Ann Blair on authorship & collaboration, from @princetonupress.bsky.social: 👀 📗 press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... #EarlyModern #HistBookChat

Nouveauté.😊

Pope Leo is the first Pope to have ever experienced the US healthcare system, so there's that

It is lovely that the Art Gallery of Ontario can now name the Black woman in the gorgeous #18thc portrait they acquired 6 yrs ago & also date the painting. It's from 1775. She is Eleonora Susette, enslaved by the Dutch governor of Guyana, accompanying his widow on her return to the Netherlands.

I got to bike to work again after two days of needing to drive (heavy rains + flood risk on Monday, heavy winds yesterday) and yes it’s still wintry cold but the sun was shining and the birds were singing 🤗

It’s so good I have to post it twice, this time to say hell yes, look at what you can do with an Africana Studies major from Bowdoin College

Very welcome upgrade to the usual trite St. Patrick’s Day greeting