Francois Soyer

In the UK academic recession, you will be at one of these stages since many unis buy the same cuts model from the same consultancies. It is always the same process:
*Talk of belt-tightening
*Incidental savings (e.g. printing, refreshments)
*Travel budgets cut
*Promotion freeze (1/4)

Screenshot of Prism - I asked it to create a methods, participants, results, and discussion seconds. It did so within 54 seconds...

OpenAI just released Prism, a LaTeX editor with embedded ChatGPT for free.
Writing a paper has never been easier.
Clogging the scientific publishing pipeline has never been easier.
It took me 54 seconds to write up an experiment I did not actually conduct.

prism.openai.com

David Abulafia (1949-2026) Professor David Abulafia CBE has died. He was 76.

I am very sorry to hear of the passing of my PhD supervisor at Cambridge Professor David Abulafia. A very talented historian as well as a great supervisor and mentor who gave me sound career advice when I needed it. May his memory be a blessing. www.cai.cam.ac.uk/news/david-a...

David Abulafia (1949-2026) Professor David Abulafia CBE has died. He was 76.

I am very sorry to hear of the passing of my PhD supervisor at Cambridge Professor David Abulafia. A very talented historian as well as a great supervisor and mentor who gave me sound career advice when I needed it. May his memory be a blessing. www.cai.cam.ac.uk/news/david-a...

Hundreds of staff leave Edinburgh University amid cuts drive According to the university, 345 of these departures were the result of a targeted voluntary severance (VS) scheme run by the institution in 2025.

Missing from the coverage of redundancies at Edinburgh: this was done in such a haphazard, uncoordinated way, there are now core teams who have gone from 5 people to 1 with no change in workload or pressure and huge loss in knowledge of institutional process. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2576321...

L’hermafrodita catalana François Soyer revela la vida de Maria Duran, natural de Prullans, que va tenir una vida sensacional al segle XVIII

Catalan article in the newspaper El Pais about my 2023 book The ‘Catalan Hermaphrodite’ and the Inquisition: Early Modern Sex and Gender on Trial. elpais.com/quadern/2026...

Life in regional Australia, where venomous snakes live in car engines. 🐍🤷‍♂️

Also an interesting example of how a historian's interpretation of the evidence can change over time. Nearly a decade later, I have revisited the case of Maria Duran in a recent book and have approached it from a very different angle. www.bloomsbury.com/au/catalan-h...

Love French stamps (strong Spanish theme in this one, though).

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

It's been brewing for months: @inriaparisnlp.bsky.social releases CoMMA (Corpus of Multilingual Medieval Archives) !

📚 2.5bn tokens of mostly Latin and French texts
🕰️ 800→1600 CE
📜 23k manuscripts
🖥️ 18k on the reading interface: comma.inria.fr
🔍 Paper: inria.hal.science/hal-05299220v1

(1/🧵)

The perils of an Australian university campus in the springtime.

Birdlife in Australia is never dull: a discussion in progress at the feeder.

Deloitte to refund government, admits using AI in $440k report Deloitte will issue a partial refund to the government after admitting that artificial intelligence had been used in the creation of a report littered with errors.

Ouch: why pay $440,000 for AI work ("including three nonexistent academic references and a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgement.")? Then again, why pay $440,000 for a single report anyway? Universities should take note. www.afr.com/companies/pr...

Thank you!

Deloitte to refund government, admits using AI in $440k report Deloitte will issue a partial refund to the government after admitting that artificial intelligence had been used in the creation of a report littered with errors.

Ouch: why pay $440,000 for AI work ("including three nonexistent academic references and a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgement.")? Then again, why pay $440,000 for a single report anyway? Universities should take note. www.afr.com/companies/pr...

1/At Macquarie Uni we are losing 50% of our units in my faculty. This is on top of cuts in 2020. We estimate by next year my faculty will be teaching 80% fewer subjects than pre Covid. Disciplines being cut do not have declining enrolments. @jennaprice.bsky.social @michaelwestbiz.bsky.social

I am not quite sure how this works, but here's a free open source editable historical map that's pretty decent on medieval Europe.

I was sitting at my desk and had a feeling that someone was watching me.

Thank you!

YouTube video by Australian Academy of Science Swooping season: How to stay safe

Thank you, response sent. :-)
They're fairly large birds with a very sharp beak who seem to have a particular loathing for cyclists in the springtime! www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5JF...

Springtime in Australia.

Portugal's foremost twentieth-century poet, Fernando Pessoa, opining on Australia (Portuguese: É-se feliz na Austrália, desde que lá se não vá).

Portugal's foremost twentieth-century poet, Fernando Pessoa, opining on Australia (Portuguese: É-se feliz na Austrália, desde que lá se não vá).

Receiving my author’s copies of my latest book: always a wonderful feeling but this time also a bittersweet one.

Beware swooping trees.

Just found the longest word in the English language.

Saw some of my fellow inhabitants of Armidale using surfboards as makeshift sleds this morning! #Australia #Armidale

Certainly have not seen this much snow since I moved there in 2018!

Siberia Down Under. #Australia #Armidale