Dr Laura Varnam

We’re delighted by the enthusiastic response to our special issue announcement so far! Thanks all! 🥰

Framing GenAI as a battle between teachers and students is a red herring. Students and educators are on the same side. The real opposition are the data extraction firms and brokerages and their allies among the managerial class.

A disrespect for me as an educator means that a basic piece of sociality and trust has been broken and so I don’t owe anyone generous feedback. But I don’t need to be punitive either. That’s what those who are selling these products want. They want to exhaust us into resignation.

It is a waste of educators’ labor to worry about policing students’ work or jury rigging AI-proof assignments.There are desultory ways of going about responding to such papers. But that doesn’t mean acquiescence. That means working towards and demanding structural changes at our institutions.

For the evening crowd! Eleanor Barraclough & I are SO excited about this! If you are an academic medievalist directly engaging with creative work as a primary research method, check out our call for contributions for CREATING THE MEDIEVAL NOW! 👇

Thanks Fran! Please do consider submitting!!

Members of @guildmedmak.bsky.social should check out the cfp for CREATING THE MEDIEVAL NOW, a special issue of the journal 'Public Humanities', co-edited by yours truly & Eleanor Barraclough (with amazing artwork by our very own @hellomizk.bsky.social)

Thanks for sharing Kate and it does sound right up your street! Please do consider submitting!

Artwork by Kristen Haas Curtis for Creating the Medieval Now cfp.

Contributions (no more than 2-3,000 words) shd include examples of & reflections upon the contributor’s creative work to show how ‘making with’ the Middle Ages creates new possibilities for the forms & modes of academic criticism! Full details in the cfp! 4/ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

We are looking for contributions by medieval scholars/academics who are using creative practice as a core mode of their scholarly inquiry into the Middle Ages. Full details here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... 3/

We are actively seeking submissions from ECRs & from Global South & non-white contributors across disciplines, esp those who are creatively engaging with Islamic, Byzantine, African, & East Asian medieval worlds. See the cfp for full details. Please share! 2/ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Attention creative medievalists! Eleanor Barraclough & I are co-editing a special issue of Public Humanities entitled CREATING THE MEDIEVAL NOW! See the cfp for details: essays of 2,000-3,000 words due 1 May 2026. (Amazing artwork by @hellomizk.bsky.social). 1/ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Huge congrats to the brilliant Eleanor Barraclough who has been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize for her amazing book EMBERS OF THE HANDS. (Loving all the Lego in the video below... which definitely had nothing at all to do with me...😉)

It turned out that the image had been mislabeled by none other than the holding institution: the British Library. And it was being used, literally everywhere in the world to depict plague.

@richardnevell.bsky.social, a Wikipedian, intervened there: wikimedia.org.uk/2015/01/the-.... (Great read!)

Screenshot of the opening page of a 2014 study demonstrating that an image from a medieval manuscript being used to depict "plague" in fact was clearly meant to depict leprosy. Kathleen Walker-Meikle and Wolfgang Müller, “Diagnosis of a ‘Plague’ Image: A Digital Cautionary Tale,” in Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, inaugural issue of The Medieval Globe 1, no. 1-2 (Fall 2014), 309-26, https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/tmg/vol1/iss1/13/

The #OmneBonum leprosy image strikes again. Over the course of three years, me, @richardnevell.bsky.social, @medievalbadger.bsky.social & other colleagues waged a campaign to correct a visual "misdiagnosis": an image meant to depict sufferers from leprosy was being misinterpreted as plague.

Ooh thanks!!

Introduction to Making Medieval Manuscripts (Practice Based) This course introduces students to the complicated and messy processes of production through which pre-modern manuscripts were created

Booking is now open for Making Medieval Manuscripts! A practice-based course where we make ink, cut quills, illuminate, make pigments and bookbind, using #medieval techniques and materials. We also explore early medieval art. No experience necessary! #bookhistory ies.sas.ac.uk/study-traini...

I’m going to see JINKX AS JUDY next year!!!!!! OMG 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

Not sure how I feel about it either. God I loved that book as a kid!! (And I reread it during the pandemic and it’s just as good!!)

ONE HUNDRED MEMBERS!!! Aaaaaand the 100th member is gonna get some Guild merch in the post very soon! 🎉🥳💖 @guildmedmak.bsky.social

Oh man 😩

Kristen’s imagination blows me away once again! 😳🤩

So nice to meet you, Will! Thanks for joining us! 🦉

Ooh, I love it! (With a flavour of the dragon too!)

I liked the show but really got hooked when Andy talked about the Alfred Hitchcock & the Three Investigators series. That’s Backlisted for you, revitalizing the past while enlivening our futures with diverse, surprising recs.

Happy 10th anniversary, dear hearts. We’re so very lucky to have you.

Yay! 🥳

Tagging @valarie.bsky.social!

Guilty as charged, Val and Claire!! @thechesilbeach.bsky.social 😂

The Happiest of Happy Birthdays to the best podcast, made by the best team of people! Backlisted has changed my life- and I mean that most sincerely. So much love to you all, and to the amazing listeners and friends I’ve made along the way! ❤️❤️❤️

Tuesday!!!! So looking forward to it! 🎊🎄🍻