I wrote something up about how the H-1B fee could harm US higher education and the communities that rely on it. open.substack.com/pub/brendanc...

Jewish/Christian relations, Jewish scholarship on Jesus, Harry Austryn Wolfson meets JFK, and more tidbits from the Harvard archives... humanhistoriesofkn.substack.com/p/from-the-a...

The digital version of God, Slavery, and Early Christianity is officially out! If you're interested in ancient Mediterranean slavery's effects on Christian thought and practice, this is for you. www.cambridge.org/core/books/g...

Wishing a very fine Gerald Ford Stuck in an Elevator Day to all who celebrate

These are precedented times and the precedent is a loud ass warning www.nytimes.com/1939/02/04/a...

just did a fun podcast interview about GOSPEL THRILLERS so I thought i'd remind blooskie: i wrote a book! GOSPEL THRILLERS! it's a fun, somewhat quirky dive into fiction, conspiracy, and the Bible in (mainly) US culture! available wherever you like to get books! www.google.com/books/editio...

New (and compelling) data on ceramic change and possible trade route collapse in late ancient Hispania www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

It is a rare and special day, long awaited and ever delightful: publication day for a new @maryroach.bsky.social masterpiece www.maryroach.net/replaceable....

New pod! Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney on Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration You can now subscribe to the show too. Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m... Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/2Vys...

Publishers: Open Access publication destroys the market for a monograph, so you need to pay us the full production cost up front so we can break even. Also publishers: Here's the paperback run of your OA monograph

❗️Our recent work around the #ancient tower at Palaiopyrgos (Paros) is published in JAS Reports 🎉 🏺 We used multi-method #survey & #geophysical prospection to better understand landscapes of #agriculture and production in the rural #Cyclades. READ OPEN ACCESS: doi.org/10.1016/j.ja...

This is now out in paperback and the publisher sent me copies. I've got four to give away — if you're a graduate student, early career, or contingent researcher, I'm happy to send you a copy in the US, or deliver to AIA/SCS/AAR/SBL. Just chime in here or send me a DM.

SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in a college applicant's file is blatantly unconstitutional ALSO SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in targeting whom to detain and deport is cool cool cool

Dear colleagues, Greetings!. I hope you have all had a pleasant and productive summer. Especially a productive one. Please mark your calendars for the annual departmental besiegement, Sunday from 6:30 AM to 9:45 PM, inside the department office. With so many of the best wishes, Your Chair.

Petition to outlaw calling an all-day, on-campus meeting a "retreat."

The Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration Database is live at historyofincarceration.com. Both the platform and the data are very much a work in progress, and we will continually update it over the coming years. I hope that it is useful, and if you would like to contribute, please do be in touch.

Seizure medication, wheelchairs, Social Security cards, dentures, urns of ashes, work uniforms — just some of what's been thrown away during cruel, degrading, utterly counterproductive homeless sweeps. A good time to revisit this gutting @propublica.org story:

From @josephinelee.bsky.social and @michellepitcher.bsky.social in 2024: 24 Texas prison units still have agribusiness operations. Nine are located on former plantations. Incarcerated workers harvest many of the same crops that slaves and later convict laborers did from 1871 to 1910.

You can see some collected info here. pasts-imperfect.ghost.io/pasts-imperf...

Obviously, Dean is to blame here. But I must note: Tenured faculty at elite unis have over recent decades laid the groundwork for such cuts by divesting themselves of the responsibility to teach foundational langs for their fields, shuffling that work to NTTs to protect their research time.

Publication day for a book that Matthew and I spent six years on, anguished over, fought for, rewrote twice, and nearly abandoned. I hope it proves useful in continuing important conversations about the ancient world and about the societies we choose to build today. www.ucpress.edu/books/ancien...

Not me revising 😒 to 😅 at the last minute before submission because I don't want to come across as overly aggressive

the new issues of Studies in Late Antiquity has our SBL forum on the 20th anniversary of THE WAYS THAT NEVER PARTED (co-ed @annetteyreed.bsky.social): ft. me, @simchagross.bsky.social, Heidi Wendt, and Jae Han's intro! online.ucpress.edu/SLA/issue/9/3

Lovely essay in the @lrb.co.uk on Renaissance era libraries and their influence www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

For a medieval monastic chronicler, a headline to die for

Excellent mail day. @zacharyherz.bsky.social

(With apologies to friends that this account has become almost entirely professional) I was delighted to see that yesterday _The Christianization of Knowledge_ was released in paperback! And I will remind any interested readers that it is also *free* online: www.cambridge.org/core/books/c...

My new article "From Togas to Turbans: Jewish Male Head Coverings between the Roman and Sasanian Worlds" was just published by the Jewish Quarterly Review. It is available for free download here: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...!

So excited that my book has a cover. Michigan's design people have outdone themselves in their styling of Mr. Murder Mittens (a massive Roman temple key from Switzerland). Full details here (the e-version will be open access come the publication date): press.umich.edu/Books/S/Stea...

It's time to tell you to pre-order this! $34.95 for a handy lil' paperback! www.ucpress.edu/books/things...

If the authors (including @letteney.bsky.social) are right about the pervasiveness of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean world, then this book will require a paradigm shift in how we think about coercion and social control in antiquity. Not often that the historiographic stakes are so high!

Excited to announce that after a lot of editorial work our volume "Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean, 100 BCE - 300 CE" is out now. @jeremiahcoogan.bsky.social @illdottore.bsky.social academic.oup.com/book/60683

Welp this was a fun unexpected eventuality of putting together the Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration database: a ransomware attack. (It's fine they got into an empty postgres database through a port that was supposed to be closed.) Ports are now audited and I know how much 0.0042 BTC is. ($460)

In a single year (1984), Brent Shaw published almost enough to make a decent *career*: 1. "Anatomy of the Vampire Bat," *Economy and Society* 13, 208-249. 2. "Bandits in the Roman Empire," *P&P* 105, 3-52. 3. "Close-Kin Marriage in Roman Society?" (with R. Saller), *Man* 19, 432-444. 1/3

Everything is bad. But a colleague dropped by with a lovely gift: a 1777 edition of William Barron's _History of the Colonization of the Free States of Antiquity, applied to the present contest between Great Britain and her American colonies_

my review of @letteney.bsky.social's CHRISTIANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE IN LATE ANTIQUITY is out in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History (short version: it's good!) www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Short reports for Hadashot Arkheologiyot on what we were up to at Legio in 2022 and 2023: (2023) www.hadashot-esi.org.il/Report_Detai... (2022) www.hadashot-esi.org.il/Report_Detai... More details forthcoming in the Limes 2025 volume and a standalone article on the amphitheater.

Out now: What *is* ‘ancient history’? Why it is much bigger and more important than we might think, how generations of scholars have dismembered it, how we can do it justice – and why ‘Classics’ has run its course: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Also, my book showed up on the UC press website and I learned that because I got an alert from Google Scholar that I should claim it so really really I'm already done for the week www.ucpress.edu/books/things...

The Roman desire to make expensive intricate art of chained up defeated people looking sad is so fucking WEIRD. They absolutely love to look upon people they chained up. Deeply unpleasant bunch of lads.

Glenn Youngkin has vetoed a bill which would have slightly eased the burden on prisoners in solitary confinement. Solitary is an abomination and must end. Please support the work of @solitarywatch.bsky.social solitarywatch.org/2025/04/02/v...

Worthwhile reading. Some of the features that John rightly criticizes in AI writing are shared by the sort of committee reports and consensus papers that emerge from workshops and symposia because someone felt that there had to be a “product“ associated with the meeting.

Due April 1st! Please share with potentially interested scholars.

The Vatican Digitizes a 1,600-Year-Old Illuminated Manuscript of the Aeneid

[New Post] Cuicul (Djémila) followinghadrianphotography.com/2025/03/26/c...

Rarely post here, but check out my new, highly ambitious study of slavery and the Roman economy!