barbara taylor

LOOOOVE being an AI hater. Greatly enjoy being a ~dissenting voice in institutional debates. Adore being the only person from the school of humanities in any room where AI is being discussed and watching everyone’s eyes dart towards me like I’m a dog on a chain

Me walking across the stage with my thesis title projected in the background.

Pictured straight after the ceremony with Dr Kate Flaherty, both in our regalia!

Some updates: This week I graduated with my PhD and go to wear a very very silly hat!! (See pictured with my inimitable supervisor Kate Flaherty) Then I flew straight back to NZ where a couple of weeks ago I started my Lectureship at the University of Auckland. Lots going on!! All a bit mad!!

Exhibits at the state library of Victoria are absolutely incredible. Very very exciting to see a copy of topsell’s four footed beasts IN THE FLESH!! Love these freaky guys.

Again: I am very pad at posting but I am out here doing things I swear.

This week i am at the @anzamems.bsky.social conference in Melbourne! On Tuesday, i attended the wonderful PG/ECR palaeography workshop (decided I love Bâtard). Yesterday I presented my paper on prophecy in Shakespearean romance (it went well thanks!) and the brilliant keynote by Leah DeVun.

I am unfortunately a hater at heart but!!! Critical engagement is important and attention is a kind of love!!! Keep making bad theatre everyone

I do love going to see independent theatre but what I REALLY love is debriefing with friends afterwards about everything we hated

Picture of a screen with pixelated fireworks that reads “congratulations on submitting your thesis!”

Title page of a PhD thesis titled “materiality and re-enchantment in Shakespearean romance”

Amongst all the horrors I am happy to announce that I submitted my PhD thesis yesterday evening at approximately 5:30pm. She weighed in at about 200 pages and 80,000 words xxxxxxx

There is currently a trend of folks designing themselves a “personal curriculum” of books to read and think about, usually culminating in a reflective/analytical piece. This tells me that the kids yearn for the humanities seminar.

It’s officially spring!!! 🌺 🌸🌷 so I have to submit my thesis before I’m incapacitated by my yearly debilitating hay fever

I have just submitted my short video presentation for this awesome symposium! Join me to chat predators, and check out the awesome program of presenters. 🐻🐺

Not to complain about things that don’t matter but I’m already on the brim and I just paid $7.60 for a large black coffee that is the size of a medium anywhere else

That being said I would love 40 pages of people giving me praise before any piece of work I have printed thank you

There are a full 40 pages of poems and musings and complimentary epistles in honour of Beaumont and Fletcher in their first Folio of 1647 before we even get to the catalogue page and I think blurb culture has really gone too far

Have you registered yet for this year's #Globe4Globe? Join us for 24 hours of Shakespeare and environmental justice, with a brilliant line-up of speakers! Free and online. events.humanitix.com/globe4globe

a university is not for generating profit, it provides cultural enrichment via weird little gremlin people who love visigoths or haikus, and very occasionally a scientist who figures out faster than light travel

Chapter is actually good I was just having a feeling after 10pm which is never wise!!!

I’m doing great actually

Love slaving late into the night on the most mid 30 pages of academic prose anybody has ever had the misfortune to read or write

I’m reviewing the Chicago style guide which has changed since I started my PhD and can I just say thank u to whoever decided to remove chapter page ranges. I owe you my life

Great solidarity from #ANU staff, students, and broader community today in the face of mass ANU job cuts.

It was also fantastic to be joined by Senator @davidpocock.bsky.social and @lauranutallgreens.bsky.social. ✊

Join the @nteunion.bsky.social today at www.nteu.au/join.

But also my thesis is due in 2 months so perhaps I should be not alive nor doing things

Hi I’m in Brisbane at #ANZSA this week (is there a hashtag??? No??) and today I presented on the “turmoil and trouble” panel about anthropophagous animals, hellmouths, and shax’s late romances. I promise I am alive and doing things

Back of an ice-cream van on the beach it has a long thin sign halfway down that say "slow mind (volkswagon logo) that child"

Elderly relatives talking about you at family functions:

Q: So I wonder what you think about that, about the phrase “globalize the intifada” and what we've seen as some anti-semitism coming from the left-wing protesters. A: The first thing as you were saying is anti-semitism is a real issue in our city and it's one that can be captured in statistics, the ones that you're citing. It's also one that you will feel in conversations you have with Jewish New Yorkers across the city. And I remember one conversation I had with a friend of mine after the horrific war crime of October 7th. He was telling me that he went for Shabbat services at his temple and he was facing forward when he heard the door open. And he turned back with a chill going up his spine because he didn't know who was coming in. And that's more than a year ago. And then just a few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a Jewish man in Williamsburg who told me that the same door he would keep unlocked for decades is one that he now locks out of a fear of what could happen in his own neighborhood. And I think that this is something that has to be the focus of the next mayoral administration, is not just talking about it, but tackling it. And these are the conversations that have informed our commitment around increasing funding for anti-hate crime programming by 800% in our Department of Community Safety. To the question of language that's being used. I am someone who I would say am less comfortable with the idea of banning the use of certain words and that I think it is more evocative of a Trump style approach to how to lead a country. And-

Q: Does that just make you uncomfortable? Like the phrase globalizing intifada. And like the phrase from the river to the sea, does that make you uncomfortable? Or do you think- A: Okay, those are different. Those are super different. Q: They're not really. A: Those are like different genres. Q: I'm sorry, I'm asking so wrong. Then they're not really different to me. And to some people they are not different. A: I know people for whom those things mean very different things. And to me, ultimately, what I hear in so many is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights. And I think what's difficult also is that the very word has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw ghetto uprising into Arabic because it's a word that means struggle. And as a Muslim man who grew up post-911, I'm all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning. And I think that's where it leaves me with a sense that what we need to do is focus on keeping Jewish New Yorkers safe. And the question of the permissibility of language is something that I haven't ventured.

I feel like I'm losing my mind. Here is the transcript of what Zohran Mamdani actually said about the phrase "globalize the intifada." This is his "refusal to disavow it." This is what has people terrified. Just fucking read it.

Source: podscripts.co/podcasts/the...

Don’t make me tap the sign but the sign is all the studies about how AI makes people actually worse at stuff and atrophies your brain while also inducing religious psychosis for some reason

This is of course from Coleridge, “a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on; and so did I.”

-Rime of the Ancient Mariner

unfortunately my Fun Thesis about Magic seems to accidentally be about climate disaster, capitalism, and biopolitics. :( :( hate critical theory

Back in Australia after a Long Month and have mere months to finish and submit my dissertation!!! Thoughts and prayers welcome

Also shoutout to my hyperextended hitchhiker thumb