Felicity Callard

Yale lab reports mass killings in Sudan, calls for student activism The Humanitarian Research Lab was told this week that over 10,000 people in Sudan were killed within three days.

“Individuals on the ground sent a message that reached us Monday morning that 1,200 were dead,” Nathaniel Raymond, the lab’s executive director, said. “By that evening, they said 10,000. By Tuesday, we couldn’t reach them anymore. We assume our ground contacts are dead.”

Our submissions at @histhum.bsky.social have increased massively in last 2-3 years. Huge amount of time now spent desk rejecting — many submissions wholly out of scope and many appear to be AI generated

But often I find the consulting room curiously evacuated of the libido, even or especially with male patients. With notable exceptions, many of my patients do not talk about sex, real or imagined. We know that people are having less sex (Herbenick et al. 1419).' But they are not making love discursively either. Sometimes, listening to my patients' anhedonic language, a strange and mortal sleepiness begins to fall over me. This stupor began to trouble me in a new way after Israel's genocidal invasion of Gaza last year. About this campaign of terror my white, male patients were markedly silent. How could I blame them? I found myself tongue-tied on the subject in my own analysis, in which I imagined, however unfairly and transferentially, that my convictions would be unwelcome. I began to wonder if these two silences-around individual desire on the one hand and mass violence on the other-were in some way twinned. Had our loss of a language for sex made room for violence, and vice versa? In the clinic or in the world, what would it take to speak into these silences and bridge them?

When and where does the imperial core’s genocidal violence disrupt academic scholarship in the Anglo-American academy? Where and how does Gaza appear (and, equally, where does it not)?

This comes from the start of an essay on Theweleit’s Male Fantasies read.dukeupress.edu/history-of-t...

SOAS University becomes the first British University to Issue a Statement on Scholasticide in Gaza www.soas.ac.uk/about/news/s...

I remember being flummoxed when I first encountered MF. Very intense memories now of the exact place in the Johns Hopkins library I sat trying to work out exactly what Theweleit was doing

Volume 15 Issue 2 | History of the Present | Duke University Press

Ooh! Current issue of History of the Present has a forum (currently freely accessible) on

Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies - in his time and ours read.dukeupress.edu/history-of-t...

Solidarity with all British Library workers on strike

I did the same. Not sure what finally propelled me to read it

Cover of “The Door” by Magda Szabó

Took me several years to take this down from my bookshelf to read; I had read several shattering reviews over the years. I finished it this evening and need now to sit in silence

This is a growing list. I’ve just added my signature. Follow the link here: www.boycottdivestunsubscribe.com/opinion-boyc...

FT figure showing “UK universities have undertaken widespread cost-cutting measures” using data from a survey of Universities UK members Dot plot of responses to a survey of Universities UK members showing institutions have undertaken widespread cost-cutting measures including course and department closures. Taken from https://on.ft.com/430FLZs

The real cancel culture in British universities on.ft.com/430FLZs

Looking towards the loch from the shore: blue sky, lots of colours in the hills behind, water lapping at the shore, trees with very few leaves left in the foreground

We have reached reading week. Here is beautiful Loch Lomond in the autumn sun on the last day before the hour changes

Capitalism and the temporalities of industrial location theory: Liberalism to Fordism - Parker Everett, 2025 Industrial location theory (ILT) attempted to grasp transformations in capitalist space, particularly the growth, transformation, and decline of industrial urba...

On capitalism and the temporalities of industrial location theory: Liberalism to Fordism - Parker Everett journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Of modern mediums and susceptible psychologists, and of things we do not know - Jaap Bos, 2025 Research into psychical phenomena such as telepathy and spiritualism in the 19th century was so much hampered by fraudulent mediumship that researchers and the ...

On the relationship between psychical researchers and their mediums (later, parapsychologists and performing telepaths):

'Of modern mediums and susceptible psychologists, and of things we do not know': Jaap Bos (Open Access) journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

‘In the end, generative AI might be a blip in tech history, over-promising and under-delivering until finally the cash runs out. But it seems it’s arrived just in time to shove universities over a cliff edge they’d already walked themselves up to’: @jraden.bsky.social

Coupling this study with existing evidence of how COVID infections can increase the mortality of those with certain cancers eg www.nature.com/articles/d41... makes an even stronger argument for the potential of COVID-19 vaccines to increase rates of survival in those with cancer

So now they're developing AI-simulated patient & public involvement/engagement (PPIE) panels and claiming it will ensure 'more inclusive' and 'diverse' patient involvement (by simulating lived experience of those harder to recruit to panels).

www.nhsgoldenjubilee.co.uk/research-and...

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs

- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%
- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%
- Social Sciences by 50–70%
- History by 60%
- Biology by 75%
- The German department will lose all PhD seats
- Sociology from six PhD students to zero

This critique of the Critical Medical Humanities is part of a forthcoming special issue on the medical humanities (past, present and future) in @histhum.bsky.social

Screenshot of post of the ECR Prize 2025-26: available here https://www.histhum.com/early-career-prize-2025-26-history-of-the-human-sciences/

History of the Human Sciences announces its 2025-26 ECR Prize. All details (including previous winners) on our para-site histhum.com. Deadline: 30 January 2026.

Also! Follow the journal on Bluesky at @histhum.bsky.social www.histhum.com/early-career...

Thank you for reading. I would love to read your wonderings if you decide to write them up!

This is me (and tbf Stan) in Greece. Stan told me the down-filled puffy coats come out as soon as it drops below 18 degrees in athens

S5 E11 - Steven Shapin on the Social Life of Scientific Knowledge Podcast Episode · The HPS Podcast - Conversations from History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science · 19/10/2025 · 50m

This week we welcome Prof. Steven Shapin to the pod!🎙️

We explore his journey through interdisciplinary spaces, revisit Leviathan and the Air-Pump 40 years on, and explore how credibility, trust and expertise are shaped by the fragmentation of expertise and (recent) political & cultural challenges

Beneath the Howl of Hunger “And though the world may have looked away, let this much be remembered: we named the hunger. We bore it. We endured. Let that remain.” – Alaa Alqaisi

Alaa Alqaisi's 'Beneath the Howl of Hunger' in @arablit.bsky.social arablit.org/2025/07/23/b...

Hunger That Defeats Language “The hunger I’m experiencing now is not what I imagined. It’s not what you imagine, dear reader. It’s not just an empty feeling in your stomach. It’s a numbness that s…

These are the 2 pieces of writing by Palestinians being starved by Israel in Gaza that made me delete my earlier draft commentary and start again: Husam Maarouf's 'Hunger that defeats language' in @arablit.bsky.social arablit.org/2025/05/30/h...

Perfect. Thank you.

Screenshot showing that a paper has been submitted to a journal: 'Submission confirmation. Thank you for your submission.'

At last. This has been sitting, inchoately, inside/alongside me for years, I think. On the look out for people's pet posts that I might like for the rest of the day

Very much look forward to hearing/seeing more as your cooking continues

Oof. typo in @dialogueshg.bsky.social handle

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Here's @davidjbissell.bsky.social's "Feeling out of it: Displacement, disengagement and dispossession in experiences of brain fog" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...