Omelas already exists: no need to build it or choose it. We already live here –in the narrow, foul, dark prison we let our ignorance, fear, and hatred build for us and keep us in, here in the splendid, beautiful city of life...
Dr J. E. Nicholson
@justjenerally.bsky.social
she/her | research: multilingual drama in Ren London, incl. Shax; genre; whiteness, affect & ecology in The Winter’s Tale; Modernists reading Ren texts | pedagogy, film, Ghibli, puns, cats | jenniferenicholson.wordpress.com | ORCID: 0000-0002-4375-2961
Sometimes in a library I imagine each book as years of an author’s life such that you are standing amidst uncounted hours of effort and concentration like some oasis of meaningful time.
'I have a real concern that when you are only measuring employability at a very early stage in someone’s life you are missing the growth and the success that take place after that.' - Evelyn Welch (Vice Chancellor at Bristol University) www.theguardian.com/education/20...
Florence Welch’s mother says cuts to arts and humanities ‘absolutely tragic’
Exclusive: Prof Evelyn Welch, vice-chancellor of Bristol University, believes her daughter’s success shows value of arts education
theguardian.com
it’s amazing how often the solution to endlessly multiplying pedagogical problems turns out to be restoring an actual pedagogical relationship between instructors and students
Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa@benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · last mo.A really interesting piece on reducing AI cheating in the classroom from a Professor of English and former Dean of Humanities at University of Utah. The solutions? Smaller classes, lower teaching loads for faculty, and in-person classes.
Starveling: I am the Man in the Moon please listen #MoonMad www.english.cam.ac.uk/research/slo... David Hobbs as Starveling as Moonshine in the 1999 @the-rsc.bsky.social Dream, dir. Michael Boyd, des. Tom Piper. Lovely persistent Moonshine, with his wee dog. (Have never seen a real dog - Crab 2.0?!)
To be a historian is to speak ill of the dead and the rest of you should take more history classes and join us.
When will I learn that the sit-and-trawl-through-then-digitally-request-items process in an archive should Not be attempted after 5pm? Not today, apparently. In this section of the catalogue, only, I'm two pages down, with seven to go.
Becoming versed in the laws of physics or the experience of reading Great Expectations is not something that shows up on a resume or that meets some mechanical learning objective, it is the generous sharing of the confused wonder our cultures have painstakingly cultivated over time.
I ran out of my travelling Vegemite (yes, an essential) and so bought some Marmite to keep me going. Not having had the latter for perhaps two decades, I'm delighted to discover that this essentially astral-projects me back to my specific childhood like of both but for different reasons.
Everyone knows about the Renaissance book wheel, but I only today learned about the Holloway Reading Stand & Dictionary Holder, patented in the late 19th century by an Ohio company We used to be a proper country archive.org/details/holl...
If I were the King of Universities (which, heaven forbid), I would place this finding at the exact centre of every single policy decision from teaching to research to estates to capital investment. At every level in every process, the question would be: are we as humane as education demands we be?
It's not that a Humanities education turns all its graduates into good people, it's that it arms good people with the skills and knowledge they need to understand and advocate for themselves, others, and society.
I see, as in a map, the end of all. Richard III, 2.4.59
‘Who Should I Vote for?’ Voters Turn to A.I. Before Casting Their Ballots
nytimes.com
This morning I watched from here a helicopter skirting like a damaged insect the Empire State Building, that jumbo size dentist’s drill… —Norman MacCaig, “Hotel Room, 12th Floor” from THE POEMS OF NORMAN MacCAIG (Birlinn, 2009) #FourthofJuly #America250 #poetry birlinn.co.uk/product/the-...
I agree with all the takes about an attack on the humanities being an attack on critical thinking, &c. It’s also about joy, though. ‘Why bother studying that’ is always also a sneer at — why do you think you should get to do something you enjoy? Grow up and be miserable all the time!
A lot of media coverage of the ‘AI’ reading of the Herculaneum scrolls really fails to understand what’s happened here. There’s no language processing happening, the AI/ML is not trained on a corpus of texts or language. It can detect ink to see shapes. HUMAN EXPERTS are then transcribing the text.
Currently awaiting the long SYD-LHR flight (via Singapore). I’ll be writing & in some archives in London & Oxford before heading to #WSC2026. I’m delighted to be contributing to the Perfect Bodies [& proto-utopias] seminar, & keen to catch up with Marlovians, too... #fairverona #WSCverona
Outstanding description of AI prose from Orwell here: "It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug."
TracingVRL@tracingvrl.bsky.social · 2mo agoA journal editor I interviewed in 2021 for an article told me they make sure the style of all articles "sound science-y". That shocked me. Hadn't he read George Orwell's warnings in "Science and the English Language"? www.orwell.ru/library/essa...
The most dangerous thing about AI is not that the machines might one day think. It is that we are being trained, by men with enormous financial gains riding on our acquiescence, to stop thinking for ourselves.
Chuffed to rediscover the podcast episode I was in with @thatshakespeare.bsky.social during lockdown throes, right before having to put research on pause for a while re: hiring freezes and so forth. It turns out it's available to hear on YouTube. Different versions of this will be in the new book!
Ep 121: Shakespeare's French with Jennifer Nicholson
YouTube video by That Shakespeare Life
youtube.com
Pretending that education is just job training and that it should be stripped of all non-utilitarian elements is one of the worst ideas in the history of ideas. Acting like it's some kind of axiom we should be using to orient ourselves at the moment is disastrously wrong-headed.
This looks familiar… (I wrote a chapter in this! Hard to believe it was around 6 years ago.)
Medieval Institute Publications@mip-medpub.bsky.social · 2mo agoOur first recommendation for Pride Month is: "New Directions in Early Modern and English Drama: Edges, Spaces, Intersections" edited by Aidan Norrie and Mark Houlahan!
Omelas already exists: no need to build it or choose it. We already live here –in the narrow, foul, dark prison we let our ignorance, fear, and hatred build for us and keep us in, here in the splendid, beautiful city of life...
If I have the power of indoctrination that some claim I do, that students are swayed utterly by my every word, why is it that I have to say "put a poem's title in QUOTATION MARKS and either UNDERLINE or ITALICIZE the title of a full-length work" over and over and over and
Recently I was delighted to have my bundle of postcards from said artist arrive in the mail. Wonderful images accompany a wonderful backstory and a thankfully reunited cat with family.
Tom Cox@dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 3mo agoTHREAD. A while ago my parents' cat Bridget went missing. As the worrying weeks dragged on my dad devised a way to distract himself: he began to paint Bridget's adventures, imagining her travelling through time & inhabiting art's most iconic scenes. What he produced (& how quickly) was phenomenal...
In it for the money : My Prizes—An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard roughghosts.com/2026/06/07/i...
In it for the money : My Prizes—An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard
In recent weeks, talk, at least in the literary circles I circle, has turned to literary prizes and prize winners, more explicitly to the question of the use of AI to at worst generate complete sto…
roughghosts.com
‘Fear is my name, and I am Death’s messenger and the reminder of Death; and I have come before him to warn you of his coming.’ Killer description of Hell in this!
Prof. Dimitra Fimi@dimitrafimi.bsky.social · 2mo agoNEW TOLKIEN JUST OUT: delighted to see “JRR #Tolkien’s Soul’s Ward: A critical edition of his unpublished translation of the early Middle English homily Sawles Warde” edited by Andoni Cossio and Nelson Goering: academic.oup.com/res/advance-... Chuffed to have played a minor role in this 1/3
