Have 3 wild stories, all from France. 1) an appalling one, told to me by an archivist from a dept'l archive. She had dinner at the apartment of the archive director ca 1970s. In the WC, she saw that he & wife had placed local Community party papers there for TP.

I’ll tell my NYU advisor Tom Truxes because he’s not on social media. After a productive day in the early modern attic archive of a still active trading company. He discovered the IRA had robbed the payroll at gunpoint on the first floor in the 1970s.

So, there I was in the Belarusian National Archive in Minsk. The finding aids were shitty so I ordered a folder of "German Documents, 1941-1944." Friends, it was literally stuff taken off the bodies of dead soldiers (library cards, driver's licenses, etc) Some of them were literally bloodstained.

5. "Don't worry, we made a microfilm copy way back in the day." 6. There's no microfilm reader, everything's digital here, nerd 7. No you can't check it out, this is Special Collections material, are you insane? 8. [an absurd hunt ensues] 9. We accept your donation of a flea-market microfilm reader

I would also mention that the paperback edition of our book ‘Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia’ is also available for 20 per cent off! @drjpersian.bsky.social www.routledge.com/Histories-of...

This gets at something important that is in danger of being lost not only in the AI conversation but in any efficiency-focused, assembly-line model of academia. A lot of the best scholarship needs wayward paths. It's time-intensive, unpredictable, odd. The process is what produces the knowledge.

Happy Gravy Day #gravyday

Jewish communities self-policing in Australia since at least 1959 www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12...

Toowoomba-based position teaching into the Bachelor of Communications & Creative Industries. Please share!

A lot of people seem incapable of processing any tragedy that happens to Diaspora Jews without making it about Israel-Palestine. And that goes for both the ones saying, "This is where 'Globalize the Intifada' slogans inevitably lead!" AND the ones saying, "But Chabad is a pro-Israel organization!"

I have just read the worst take ever in the history of bad takes. Calling for a moratorium on academic opinion pieces stat.

My tribute to the late Sneja Gunew, published in the terrific new collection Researching Migration on Indigenous Lands, edited by @pastmigrations & Francesco Ricatti- open access & packed with innovative scholarship link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Matilda

Unable to join #HATM tonight (again) due to wife and child being sick. 😞 1) Haven’t read much on Australia (except for Bill Bryson’s “Down Under”), but ”Fascists in Exile” by @drjpersian.bsky.social is in my queue (see link below). 2) Clearance/reduced priced baby back ribs from Ralph's.

And his father is legally allowed to own 6 firearms? In Bonnyrigg.

Ukrainian Holocaust survivor gunned down on Bondi Beach. That's a sentence.

Police advise people to ‘take shelter’ following reports of active shooter at Bondi beach

Does being cited by one's heroes ever get old? 🥰🤩

Our final issue for 2025 has been published - Check out JICH Vol 53 Issue 6 now: www.tandfonline.com/toc/fich20/5...

Chris Hay & @drjessc.bsky.social writing in @jas-jozstudies.bsky.social

Reading a philosophical magazine of questions/answers from the 1690s: "Quest: Why one hours Sermon seems longer than two hours Conversation?"

these are two slightly different things but the point is that academia runs on two things: helping others and holding grudges. often at the same time and for the same people. we cannot lose this

This is quite an investigation into ARC’s proposed restructure & job cuts by @jennaprice.bsky.social. You know you’ve botched your “review” when several staff complain to a Senator! ARC also ran a witch hunt to find people who might’ve “leaked”. Ugly stuff.

Terrible news on the grapevine today that after their brutal "spill and fill" exercise, Macquarie University has announced which academic staff members no longer have a position. Devastating for the people who've lost their jobs. Dreadful for those who've been spared (for now). Awful for everyone 💔

One of my last bangers from the other place

"So, do you know [random fact about literally any time/place]" no sir I do not, you get to make me look foolish bonus good for you

fleecing students not only of money but also one of the most precious things they have, their chance to learn, is the edtech business model, and universities are hopping right on board

The actors are great but I do not understand the love for The Beast In Me, which is a steaming pile of ponderous crap

Always a mixed blessing when my work is topical 🙃

Wollongong! www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11...

James Watson reviews ‘Immigrant Industry: Building Postwar Australia’ by Anoma Pieris, Mirjana Lozanovska, Alexandra Dellios @alecadell.bsky.social, Andrew Saniga and David Beynon Berghahn Books @berghahnbooks.bsky.social doi.org/10.1080/1031...

I heard a story about a female academic giving a paper at the IHR who, after receiving a long and aggressive question from a senior male professor, simply leaned back with her hands behind her head and replied “Oh, do fuck off.”

Mentioned in the same sentence as these two classics AMAZING ... Glenda Sluga’s Bonegilla: A Place of No Hope (1988), Mark Peel’s Good Times, Bad Times: The Past and Future in Elizabeth (1995), and Jayne Persian’s Beautiful Balts: From Displaced Persons to New Australians (2017) ...

Shout out in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung re a conference in Lviv: When Lubomyr Luciuk (Kingston) tried almost entirely to refute Nazi and war criminal accusations against Ukrainians in Canada and the Waffen-SS Division "Galicia" he was contradicted by Kai Struve and Jayne Persian.

Success rate is just number of successful submissions as a proportion of the total (eligible) submissions. For DECRA, there's a fixed number funded – 200 per year – and so the changing success rate directly indicates the number of applicants, with some exceptions (e.g. in 2012, 277 were funded).

DECRA success rate is the lowest in 14 years, since 2012 (1st year the scheme ran). What a pathetic system we have for supporting new ideas, new people… DE26: 13.1% 25: 17.9 24: 19.6 23: 15.0 22: 19.7 21: 17.1 20: 16.0 19: 17.2 18: 16.3 17: 16.7 16: 16.4 15: 14.3 14: 13.6 13: 15.6 12: 12.8

Everything must be THE MARKET!!!!

Check out Jayne on the @holocaustpod.bsky.social! thhp.buzzsprout.com/2291653/epis...

I didn't do well on my Yr 12 HSC because I was too busy reading, underlining and making notes know William Shirer's Rise & Fall of the Third Reich 🤣

This is such a howler. It's 2025. The literature is out there. Read it. Please.

Oh dear

Right. Hitler's DNA. Brace yourselves for a deluge of misinformation and bad science. I'm in Australia, so do get in touch if you want some expert debunking.

At the airport cafe and through my Bose noise-cancelling headphones I can hear music, TV, conversations & announcements 🙃 sell me silence!!

“CSIRO has announced it will slash up to 350 jobs as the national science agency grapples with long-term financial challenges … with current funding failing to keep pace with the rising costs of running a modern science agency.” Not “challenges”. They’re choices. 😡