Irina Dumitrescu

Fifteenth century woodblock of the Wife of Bath

David and Jonathan from the Vespasian Psalter

The Centre d'Etudes Médiévales Anglaises @sorbonne-universite.fr is convening the 2nd instalment of the André Crépin sessions on Saturday October 18.
@irinadumitrescu.bsky.social will give a plenary on the Chaucer's women and perfection, and we will read folios from a mystery manuscript together!

Thinking of inventing an app where you can tell it that you, say, made a phone call to complain in French, and then followed it up with a formal complaint email in French, composed with dictionaries, not AI, and it just plays ten minutes of applause and shows you videos of fireworks going off.

The liberating potential of trash On recycling as creative process

I wrote a Substack post about garbage, and why I love it.

irinadumitrescu.substack.com/p/the-libera...

hahahaha!

I just did a little more research and found out the goat deal was a myth. Disappointing, but good to know the truth. Karl Marx was indeed imprisoned in the university jail when a student tho.

www.uni-bonn.de/en/universit...

That is correct, I only asked for access to a green, as per tradition. But the negotiation took a turn and I was offered the goats.

When I negotiated the terms of my current professorship, I asked the chair if it was true that professors at our uni were entitled to pasture land for their goats. He said I could have all the goats I wanted. I still do not have a single goat, though to be fair, I haven't put it through purchasing

I'd never heard of that! I must see it.

I know just what you're wondering: is there a French Bridget Jones' Diary with a lovable-goofy heroine, a brooding Englishman, a fantasy version of the literary world, and every beat both utterly predictable and knocked out of the park? I present to you: "Jane Austen a gâché ma vie".

🚨Job Klaxon🚨

Open rank Professorship in History of the Middle Ages with consideration of digital Methods

📍Institute of History, University of Bern (🇨🇭)
📆Deadline: 19 October 2025
▶️ Information: tinyurl.com/56ywncuj

#Medievalsky #DigitalHumaniities

Oh thank you!

Completely random I know! But it just occurred to me that I wish I'd known this stuff earlier, before I ruined a bunch of items I liked. Seems to me that part of sustainability should also be knowing how to care for items without destroying them.

Meanwhile, a lady who sold me some of my better clothes told me I should wash them in liquid detergent. And (more of a Euro specific thing) a woman selling intimates said the detergents today disinfect well enough that a 60 C wash is unnecessary.

Those dishwasher tabs that promise to get everything off your dishes also destroy the actual dishes. Meanwhile, the powder costs less than two euros a bag, and you don't even need to fill up the container.

One thing about the German labor force is that sales people often have a *lot* of training for their jobs. So I've made a habit of asking them how best to care for purchases. This is how I learned you don't need fancy dishwasher tabs. Powder is fine, much cheaper, and gentler on dishes.

Academia may not give you job security, flexibility, or wealth, but it will let you unexpectedly connect to eduroam in foreign cities

The Louvre puts on its first fashion show | Apollo Magazine High fashion meets fine art for the first time in an exhibition at Paris museum. Irina Dumitrescu finds it difficult to know where to look

High fashion has met high art at the Louvre for the first time – and the results are so eye-popping, Irina Dumitrescu hardly knows where to look

What makes a good teacher?

'The ones who make the most difference are those who see us for who we are and for who we might become.'

Irina Dumitrescu: What makes a good teacher?

"Exercise seemed to be the hallmark of people who had mastered the chaos of life, who had ambition and the discipline to meet it. As long as vacuuming was my primary aerobic activity, I was doomed to be a lesser kind of person, a dabbler, a loser."

www.the-tls.com/politics-soc...

I would read an academic murder book in which the murder was solved by reading the syllabus

“He died — of uncontrollable laughter at a joke by his jester, having just eaten a whole goose — with no surviving legitimate heirs, and the line which had begun with Wilfred the Hairy, Count of Barcelona in the ninth century, finally died out.” - Sicily: A Short History by John Julius Norwich

Paris said au revoir to cars. Air pollution maps reveal a dramatic change. Air pollution fell substantially as the city restricted car traffic and made way for parks and bike lanes.

“Over the past 20 years, Paris has undergone a major physical transformation, trading automotive arteries for bike lanes, adding green spaces and eliminating 50,000 parking spaces.

Part of the payoff has been invisible — in the air itself.”

Leadership, strategy, real action, common sense. #Paris

Environmental Literacy and the Teaching of English How can foreign language education be a spark that ignites environmental awareness and sustainability? This book offers a humanities approach to environmental literacy, highlighting the potential of l...

This might be of interest to some: my cherished colleague (once at Bonn, now in Tübingen) Uwe Küchler's book on an environmental humanities' approach to foreign language teaching is out on September 1!

www.narr.de/environmenta...

Someone is Wrong on the Internet: A Study in Pandemic Distraction I am about to set a timer and write, when I notice someone is wrong on the internet. They have linked to an article without looking at its source. They looked at its source but did not see the logi…

A piece I wrote a while ago for Lithub on being distracted while trying to write, not at all pandemic specific. Let me know if anything resonates.

lithub.com/someone-is-w...

I’m not given to conspiracy thinking. In fact, I’m allergic to it. Frankly, I don’t think the world is that well organized. But if I were so inclined I would look at the fact that I now live in a society in which children are staring at little screens so much that they sometimes walk into poles, so much that they no longer read full books unless required to for school, so much that they do not move their bodies unless it’s part of a program. I would look at the fact that rates of mental illness are growing among young people, and and that the young people themselves say that technology makes them miserable but they can’t quit it. And then I would look at this latest festering cherry on a shit cake, a free technology that convinces young people they can outsource their thinking, their reading, and the very writing which they could use to make sense of the world and of themselves. And not only does this technology convince them that they can do that, the grownups in the room jump to suggest that maybe they should do everything by AI, after all, it’s the way of the future, it’s what their jobs will require, in fact it’s a kind of superpower, and they might as well get on that now. And I’d wonder whom exactly it serves to make a generation of young people sick, weak, and incapable of doing the most basic research or reflection on their own.

"What makes me mad about AI in education" by Irina Dumitrescu

https://irinadumitrescu.substack.com/p/what-makes-me-mad-about-ai-in-education

The Louvre puts on its first fashion show | Apollo Magazine High fashion meets fine art for the first time in an exhibition at Paris museum. Irina Dumitrescu finds it difficult to know where to look

‘With its short jacket and faux-fur trim, the suit has a mid-century flavour, emphasised by the Disney cartoons woven into it. A plush headdress featuring oversized antlers completes the look’ – Irina Dumitrescu on just one of the startling creations in ‘Louvre Couture’

What makes a good teacher?

'The ones who make the most difference are those who see us for who we are and for who we might become.'

Irina Dumitrescu: What makes a good teacher?

I'm in this photo and I don't like it.

Childhood precocity and the saints

'My favourite origin stories betray how children have not, in general, changed very much over the ages.'

Irina Dumitrescu on childhood precocity and the saints