Oliver Moxham 🎙️🗾🏛️

Ruins of the Urakami Cathedral and the Commemorations of the Bombing of Nagasaki Within 500 m of Ground Zero in Nagasaki in 1945 after the US Army’s atomic bombing, there was the rubble of a Roman Catholic cathedral known as St Mary’s. The area was already noted f...

New publication on the Ruins of the Urakami Cathedral published in the Encyclopaedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict. link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/... @springernature.com @nobigdiehl.bsky.social

‘That belongs in a museum’: The true ‘cost’ of detecting in England and Wales. By Tess Machling [A download/print PDF version can be found at the end of the paper] ‘My members don’t want to be quasi-archaeologists, they want to go out on a Sunday, dig around, get dirty, find …

FOI requests show that in 2024/2025, payments to individual finders & landowners for 'Treasure' rewards cost us £7,280,321.26

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bigbookoftorcs.com/2026/01/11/t...

#Archaeology #Treasure #Detecting 🏺

London in the Second World War - EXTENDED--> 03/02/26

This free exhibition explores the experiences of Londoners during the Second World War and the effect it had on the city they knew.

More info and FREE tickets: www.thelondonarchives.org/visit-us/exh...

Solid-gold rant incoming… by Tess Machling [A download/print PDF version can be found at the end of the paper] Before I go any further, I want to state that the theft and destruction of heritage across the world is not unco…

My thoughts...

#Archaeology 🏺 #Gold #Torcs #Robbery

bigbookoftorcs.com/2025/10/07/s...

I hope they're planning to subsidise student rail fares - that's an intimidating commute!

Nonetheless, the value of Japanese Studies endures. As demonstrated in my podcast, Beyond Japan, the field thrives on the rich diversity of scholars who work on the nation. We can hope that the strength of that diversity will overcome the adversity imposed by short-sighted uni administrators.

The conference is only triannual, and BAJS 2018 was my first time attending a conference as a bright-eyed undergrad. The mood was bittersweet: it was wonderful to return and present original work to a crowd of familiar faces, but cuts to JS courses at Cardiff U and Sheffield U weighed heavy.

Hyunjae Kim presenting on Japanese imperial heritage in Amidong Biseok Village, South Korea.

Changwei Huo discussing imperial Japanese shrines left across China and Taiwan.

My co-panellists brought perspectives on Japanese imperial heritage from across East Asia. Hyunjae Kim discussed how local interpretations challenge national discourse in Korea, while Changwei Huo shared how imperial Japanese shrines in former colonies had been repurposed by modern nations.

Oliver Moxham standing before a projected slide titled "domestic heritage, international memory".

Last week I presented my PhD research to a packed room at the 50th British Association for #JapaneseStudies conference. The panel I convened on "Imperial heritage today and tomorrow" went down a treat with many pertinent questions from an engaged audience of scholars across the disciplinary spectrum

It's great to be back! As part of an ongoing retrospective project on WWII at Sainsbury Institute (SISJAC), I produced a special episode of #BeyondJapan, interviewing Mary-Grace Browning on post-war reconciliation through their Pacific Venture programme. Have a listen and share your thoughts!

Usually when pushing for written works on a niche topic. It happened often enough that I decided it's better to search myself than searching fruitlessly for an imagined citation. Here's to the old ways!

This was ChatGPT 4.0, though. I hear 5 is more willing to admit when it doesn't know something.

After a year's fieldwork in Tokyo and Kyoto, observing the tension in public war memorial and narratives, it was a personally healing experience to see Japanese attendees bowing and praying at a British memorial. Acknowledging suffering on all sides remains essential for intercultural memorial.

World War memorial in the stone floor of Westminster Abbey, bordered by red poppies.

On Sunday I joined a reconciliation Evensong at Westminster Abbey to commemorate the 80 years since the end of WWII. With the Japanese ambassador in attendance, it was a sombre yet reassuring occasion indicating willingness at the highest level to heal past wounds.

Hello, my book will be out in just one month! I don't really want to do a book launch, can I just have a normal party instead?

I've tried ChatGPT as an alternative to Google Scholar to see how good a literature review it could do. I experienced several critical issues:
1) The response was out of date by >1 year
2) It highlighted well-known works, but ignored new developments
3) It made up citations of well-known authors

🤷

Labour peer calls for removal of Clive of India statue from outside Foreign Office Thangam Debbonaire says Indian visitors to the ministry should not have to walk past ‘historically inaccurate’ bronze

💥”Lady Thangam Debbonaire said the statue commemorating Robert Clive’s bloody establishment of British rule presented the UK in a poor light and was historically inaccurate” www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

OpenAI claims new GPT-5 model boosts ChatGPT to ‘PhD level’ GPT-5's release comes as tech firms continue to compete in an effort to claim the world's most advanced AI.

Obviously a lie, since the definition of PhD-level expertise, standard across universities worldwide, is that you can produce original knowledge.

A Poster advertising public libraries Painting: Harvey Dunn. 1923.
#Libraries #Art

Bit of #BlueSkyWriting this fine July Friday

"Wont To Do"

So I thought I'd write a poem,
But that won't get me knowledge,
And that won't get me a degree,
But that won't get me money,
And that won't get me a degree,
But that won't get me knowledge,
So I thought I'd write a poem.

#poem #poetry

Excellent article from David Wengrow. Given how much the far right and white supremacists have co-opted history and prehistory, as well as "race science", this should be required reading for anyone interested in how we combat fascism seeping its vile way into perceptions of the archaeological past.

All good, thanks! Just finishing the third year of my PhD and nearly a quarter into my first thesis draft. Had some interesting insights into transnational nationalism on Google Maps reviews you might be interested in! Hope you're weathering the changes at UEA well?

r/AskHistorians Join the conversation

Hey there #Skystorians! Looking for more great people to populate your feed? Eager for more history in your social media timeline? Don’t forget to check out the AskHistorians Starter Pack! A collection featuring the mods, flairs, friends & contributors that make up the community!

- De Boeck et al. (2022) for how easily online anonymity can be deanonymised
- Van Dijck et al. (2025) Governing the Digital Society
- Ström (2020) for the disproportionate power in private hands of the Big Five and the financial motives behind seemingly 'neutral' platforms

Hope that helps!

As someone who regularly works in Japan, I can guarantee only a tiny fraction of archaeological texts are available in English, or even available online for remote translation! Second language courses should be broadly available for all postgrads to bridge this gap imo

Photograph of fire damaged buildings and a burnt boat partially sunk in the water, at Underfall Yard, Bristol.

Sign up now for this free webinar on heritage crime and maritime heritage. Monday 30 June 12-2pm. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/heritage-c... #MaritimeHistory #MaritimeArchaeology

The second point here nails why generative so-called AI cannot replace human translation. Cheapskate publishers are trying to, even so, offering skilled translators copy edit rates to 'tidy up' machine translation which ends up as more work than starting from scratch. Readers, please reject this.

I was there last autumn, just after they finally fixed their online systems. All working fine now!

Dr Megan Kelleher was an excellent chair, offering stimulating discussion in the Q&A. Many thanks to Megan Hamilton et al. for coordinating such a successful conference!
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I was also delighted to have Emma Donington Kiey as a co-panellist, who I remember teaching about heritage on the MA in Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies at the Sainsbury Institute! Her work on 'monpe', Japanese women's trousers which became commonplace in wartime, shows much promise.
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On my panel, I was joined by Abigail Winslow who discussed her work on the challenges of accurately representing the historical experience of air raid shelter displays. I shared with her my own experiences of air raid shelters in Japan and remarked on their potential for intercultural war memory
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