Top 10 of this year's most read pieces — no.5: Julie Park's essay on the early modern fascination with the camera obscura, and the magic, melancholy, and dream-like experiences it produced.: publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-ea... (Full Top 10 here publicdomainreview.org/blog/2025/12...)

🚨🚨🚨 Major announcement!!! I am extremely pleased to announce that HAA is searching for a senior, endowed position in premodern art or architecture. The subfield is wide open. Please spread the word and encourage curious scholars to write to me with questions! 🚨🚨🚨 cfopitt.taleo.net/careersectio...

Am fascinated by this thread and its answers. Helps me make sense of Horace Walpole’s urge to write and publish catalogs of his father’s art collection and the contents of his own home, while offering thoughtful critical truths regarding the purpose of libraries and librarianship

Like my attempt at a historical costume neckpiece, w/2 pillowcases? For @adamwithbooks.bsky.social ‘s film project. He’s asking us to make short videos of ourselves saying lines from Rousseau’s Confessions while wearing a white Rousseauvian neckpiece. To join in email Adam: [email protected]

“Johnson says library resources like these aim to level the playing field. ‘The hope is that people use our services to educate and inform themselves, and gain wisdom about any topic under the sun.’”

C17 commonplace book index belonging to Whitelock Bulstrode (MS 3244, container 1.1) @ransomcenter.bsky.social. Can’t help but think immediately of @djbduncan.bsky.social and his splendid work on the history of the book index

Love that feeling of sudden freedom after meeting a big deadline for a collaborative project begun months ago. Time to make James Beard’s tomato pie recipe just in time before summer ends

I’m definitely going to be watching this space

Margaret Wise Brown, 1910–1952 photo: Philippe Halsman, 1946 Nat'l Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Btwn 1937 & her death in 1952, she authored over 100 books, incl "The Runaway Bunny" (1942), "The Little Island" (1946), and "Goodnight Moon" (1947). She preferred to write with a quill pen. #BookSky 💙📚

Dealing with copyedits for an article and trying not to feel like a patronizing jerk for agreeing to the suggested use of “[sic]” next to a misspelled word in a quoted line

My essay on how the early modern camera obscura brought us more deeply into our interior lives is now live @publicdomainrev.bsky.social publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-ea...

He Read (at Least) 3,599 Books in His Lifetime. Now Anyone Can See His List. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/b...

“Immortality, if considered at all, is less important than more easily achieved goals. Pleasure in the work itself. Usefulness. Kindness. An eagerness and readiness to be of help…” www.nytimes.com/2025/07/13/o...

Finding out that My Dark Room won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2024 award, originally announced last December, is like discovering a gift under the Christmas tree that almost got lost 🎁 🎄📕🎉 @choicereviews.bsky.social @uchicagopress.bsky.social www.choice360.org/choice-pick/...

Couldn’t have asked for a more gratifying experience sharing my newest work, on Hester Piozzi’s scrapbook, w/@oxford18thc.bsky.social. Thank you @ballasterros.bsky.social for all you did & said. The napkin covered sandwiches waiting for me at end of talk were delicious. Photo @luisacale.bsky.social

Grateful to the MLA for capturing this special moment of my receiving their 2024 James Russell Lowell Prize honorable mention award from MLA president Tina Lu for My Dark Room at the annual convention's award ceremony in New Orleans @modernlanguage.bsky.social @uchicagopress.bsky.social

Excited to deliver my paper--based on fresh work for next book Writing’s Maker—"Hester Thrale Piozzi's Minced Meat for Pyes: Scrapbook Composition as Life Writing"--to @oxford18thc.bsky.social next Tuesday. Many thanks to @ballasterros.bsky.social and @davidftaylor.bsky.social for the invitation

Happy and proud to see My Dark Room, my 2023 book with the University of Chicago Press, with its honorable mention award labels at the MLA convention in New Orleans last week

This looks incredible

Thrilled that My Dark Room (University of Chicago Press) has been awarded an honorable mention for the MLA’s 2023 James Russell Lowell Prize! 💫✨💫 www.mla.org/content/down...

Enjoyed being at the Getty on an unusually misty day

Had lovely time discussing My Dark Room w/ Penn State Professor of Art History Nancy Locke as my insightful & deft interlocutor for the PSU Humanities Institute Reading New Books in the Humanities by Penn State Faculty program.

A morning of wonder and calm exploring the Huntington’s cactus garden before the tourists arrived with an architectural historian friend who is delightfully sensitive to the play of light on the marvelous collection of succulents and cacti (that has woefully been stolen from).

A pleasure to collaborate with the intellectually generous, vibrant & deeply talented @luisacale.bsky.social , as well as the curious, rigorous & tenacious up-and-coming scholar Carolin Gluchowski, who had defended her viva the week before. Both papers framed the conference with critical key terms

Thanks to my elegant, brilliant & kind co-convener Adam Smyth, our speakers, & our audience at the Extra Extra! conference at the Huntington, for an exhilarating program of great papers on the history of the visually altered book last week. A🧵 in progress

Insane the number of last minute requests come at you when you’re struggling to get out the door for a trip

“Fredric Jameson was arguably the most prominent Marxist literary critic in the English-speaking world. In other words, he was a fairly obscure figure: well-known — revered, it’s fair to say — within a specialized sector of an increasingly marginal discipline.” www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/b...

This looks wonderful!

A digital tsunami is coming and the National Archives desperately needs help—in funding, personnel, and infrastructure—to continue to do the amazing and democracy-fortifying work it does in maintaining and making publicly accessible our nation's records. wapo.st/47AEERp

Here to report for accountability that I wrote my response to the reader’s reports for my next book (thanks to the help of great & very smart friends) & finished my article! Won’t lie about not pulling any all-nighters. But I’m happy I got them done; it’s the kind of hard work I actually enjoy

Just opened my file drawer of folders from my library & information studies program. How lucky I was to have a chance to discover & enter this fascinating field at my stage as a scholar. It’s changed my perspective & I’ll never write again the kind of chapters and articles I used to

No day of mine would be complete without a portion of it spent on looking for my phone.

Grateful that the sign on my neighbor’s lawn is for Harris…and no one tore it down (yet).

Too disturbing to visit bsky now. Don’t want to know actually these domestic pet killing stories whether they are true or alleged. Please stop.

I can’t get over the fact that she said as an aside nothing’s going to happen to people’s guns…She and Tim Walz own guns.

Every week I'm getting messages from people asking to reschedule because they or someone they live with has Covid. I think it's time to get my next vaccine shot ASAP and start donning the mask again.

Knowing summer is being left behind when polenta is cooking in the double boiler for an hour and a half

I get to collaborate in person soon with a formidable scholar of material texts and one of my hands down favorite people @luisacale.bsky.social at the Huntington for the conference I’m co-organizing with Adam Smyth on the visually altered book

Indulge me as my inner 12 year old enjoys this headline; on the other hand middle-aged me wonders, do I have it? www.nytimes.com/2024/09/04/w...

This friendly, sweet young fellow was found wandering in Jersey City yesterday. He needs a home--the short-term foster has 2 and a kid with allergies, I have 4 and my friend has 5. Can @adoptapet.bsky.social and @catsofyore.bsky.social please share? www.adoptapet.com/pet/42485924...

It's official kvetching about writing on social media season. Heard back from an editor that he would like me to write more words for an essay. I don't think he really wants to see me do that...

It kills me to miss the pleasures of an early September sunny day with the clearest blue sky to plough through writing an article so I can actually finish it. Honoring Labor Day in the US by laboring.

Standard mode of writing: get so fed up with the guilt over not doing it or being so late (happens more often than I want to admit) I finally sit down & do it, whether it’s a short online essay or long monograph. Somehow things get written despite—or because of?—the dysfunctional dynamic.

Yes I’ve become someone who checks her retirement savings statement regularly. I either daydream or panic. One of the unsung rituals of the middle years

Can’t believe I’ve finally finished my part in a project that’s dragged on for several months. Looking forward to going home finally and having a glass of wine. Will share what this thing is soon. For now, an image. One of you will no doubt know what this is.

As the GOP knows there’s always time for reproduction and starting families even when school’s about to begin & deadlines are looming so I propagated my Annabelle hydrangea today, a plant in my garden originally made out of a cutting off my mother’s Annabelle

It's not every day when you spend your afternoon reading & digesting a front page article about a good friend, the ordeal that could only be wrought in academia he went through, and his controversial manner of writing explicitly about it. Go Aaron www.chronicle.com/article/when...

They also have great titles in book history and 18th-century studies. Stock up everyone!

As a scholar of enclosure & spaces of solitude it's fitting that I want to create a privacy hedge around my home. Grateful that the time I spent researching it has informed me that I need to call 811 before I can even start digging, lest I prompt disaster by digging into a utility line

My cats don’t know how to deal with the fact that I am now cleaning all the time. I don’t recognize myself either.