Kat Lecky

Happy birthday!

Image of the cover of a book titled Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions, by Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth. The background image is an eighteenth-century ink and watercolor rendition of the harbor of Le Cap in modern Haiti, with three ships and one small boat foregrounded in the bay and a handful of buildings scattered on the shore in the background.

Not available until June 2026, but we have a cover! #earlymodern #skystorians

With the benefit of hindsight I’d say treat it as a sort of second puberty when you get to make better choices this time around. And the post-crisis face palming is an integral part of the process, so don’t be too buttoned up about it all. Onwards!

Only in retrospect.

I’m a seasoned scavenger — I pull furniture out of the trash and make it beautiful. Your commune would be gorgeous and comfortable, on a shoestring budget (which may be useful given the property’s price tag!)

Last semester I taught a seminar on John Milton, in which the class collectively wrote and performed a 1-hour stage adaptation of Paradise Lost for their final project. By the time they were done they *knew* that text, and they gave a fabulous performance to a packed audience of friends and family.

Women’s Colleges Face a Unique Challenge Under Trump An Office for Civil Rights complaint filed against Smith College raises questions about how women's colleges will navigate Trump’s anti-DEI and anti-trans campaigns.

When "female" is a forbidden word, women's colleges are at risk:
www.insidehighered.com/news/institu...

Oh no! I’m sorry. This spring my institution tried to *secretly* turn our library into administrative offices but the humanities faculty caught wind of it and staved it off. For the moment.

The editors of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal invite submissions for the Fall 2026 / Volume 21.1 Forum on the topic of Early Modern Women and Migrancy. In keeping with the Journal’s tradition since its third issue (2008), this Forum will comprise short contributions on a single topic by scholars from a variety of disciplines. For Volume 21.1, we invite contributions on women’s experiences of migration and migrancy specifically (as opposed to other kinds of mobility) in the early modern world. We particularly encourage submissions that appeal to readers across disciplinary and national boundaries. Articles may cover literature, history, art history, history of science, geography, music, politics, religion, theater, cultural studies, and any region of the early modern world. At least part of our selection process will be focused on assuring geographical, chronological, and disciplinary diversity across the essays ultimately published in this Forum. Submissions are due October 15, 2025 and should be 3,500 words including footnotes; essays should follow the EMW Style Guide (www.journals.uchicago.edu/pb-assets/docs/journals/EMW-style-guide-CMOS18-1735857164913.pdf). Contributions will be peer-reviewed. If you have any questions about whether your proposed forum essay fits the scope of the journal, please contact us at emw@press.uchicago.edu. Please submit contributions at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/emw/about. See Submissions and Instructions for Authors. For article type, select Forum. For additional queries, please contact the editors at emw@press.uchicago.edu.

Here's our CFP for the Forum again, with ALT text

Oprah Announces <i> Culpability,</i> by Bruce Holsinger, as Her July Book Club Pick Oprah hails her 116th Book Club pick as the “tale of our times”—a gripping, emotionally charged story that explores the explosive rise of AI, self-driving cars, and drones, all seen through the intima...

So excited for @bruceholsinger.bsky.social and his new book Culpability, which in unputownable!
www.oprahdaily.com/entertainmen...

@jessifer.bsky.social is definitely the person to talk to!

Vegetables in the Middle Ages: From Cabbages to Cardoons - Medievalists.net Discover the surprising history of medieval vegetables—from carrots and peas to artichokes and cabbages—and how they were grown, eaten, and understood in the Middle Ages.

Vegetables in the Middle Ages: From Cabbages to Cardoons www.medievalists.net/2025/06/vege... #vegetables

W.E.B. Du Bois, Harvard’s best grad, said that it took him 90 years to become conscious of himself as a member of the working class. May we get there more quickly. Academics everywhere: join a union or build a union, and if you can’t do either, then organize your coworkers and act like a union.

It’s really interesting that all the romance languages share one font, but English and German are differentiated both from them and each other. I don’t know the answer to your question but Georgianna Ziegler would.

Detail of an early modern image of a person blowing a trumpet on a horse backgrounded by words and a sun

For those who missed it: The English Short Titles Catalogue (ESTC) has finally been relaunched with the help of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) following the cyber-attack on the @britishlibrary.bsky.social. Find it here: datb.cerl.org/estc/

I'm a professor. We're not the 'elite' the powerful billionaires say we are. Most professors don't have tenure. An increasing number don't even have full-time jobs. How did these inconsequential people become enemies of the state?

"We are not the elites the billionaires claim we are. Most professors don’t have tenure. The humanities professoriate don’t even have full time jobs, have been known to sleep in their cars. How did these inconsequential people become enemies of the state?"
www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outl...

THREAD: We recently heard that the Trump administration was leaning on the government of Gambia to help Elon Musk. For weeks, our team made phone calls, wrote letters and knocked on folks’ doors to try to confirm it. But we were stuck.

So our reporters got on a plane to Banjul. 1/

“No one is above the law” huh … if that mayor had just paid a well-timed visit to the Capitol in January 2021 he could’ve scooped up one of those handy universal pardons, and strolled all carefree into the detention center wearing nothing but ghost guns and child porn.

Pope’s Momma is Louisiana.

Icon for podcast Talk Nerdy -- old style radio microphone, old style graphic of atoms

Catch me on a podcast, talking with Cara Santa Maria about my new book on the long history of abortion.
player.fm/episodes/480...
book: bit.ly/4iwTsoL

No. You need to send the President you got to jail first. We locked up 7 governors to get this one.

Portion of a page from Tommy Orange’s novel “There There”

This passage from Tommy Orange’s “There There.”

Text: Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Here's a list of sites you may have never heard of! www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines. www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need. https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols. www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries. http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science. www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed. www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free https://www.ecosia.org/ Ecosia is a not-for-profit tech company that plants and protects trees. By dedicating 100% of its profits to the planet, Ecosia has planted over 214,229,374 million trees since its founding in December 2009 Yandex.com Yandex is a technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning. Our goal is to help consumers and businesses better navigate the online and offline world. Since 1997, we have delivered world-class, locally relevant search and information services. Gutenberg.org Project Gutenberg is a library of over 75,000 free eBooks Duckduckgo.com "Protection. Privacy. Peace of mind. Get our browser on all your devices. Search and browse with the DuckDuckGo browser for more protection.

History Matters - Why is a 17th century English court case being used to justify Donald Trump Kathleen Commons | 2 May 2025 ◇ American History | Birthright Citizenship| English Legal History | Immigration Law

I've written a blog about Calvin's Case (1608) being used by (some) lawyers to argue against birthright citizenship for "illegal" immigrants, looking at what the immigration legal system looked like in 17thC England historymatters.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/blog-archive...

‘Discurso de Su Vida’: A Black Woman Healer’s Biography — Medicine and the Making of Race, 1440-1720 Inquisition records from the Spanish, Portuguese and Roman Inquisition have become key sources to expand the range of voices within the combined histories of medicine and slavery, precisely because th...

Forgot to post due to travel: a GEM of a source, and an archival discovery by our very own Carolin Schmitz... an incredible inquisitorial record of five separate prosecutions and one very unique testimony by María Felipa, a sometimes free, sometimes enslaved Black healer on the Canary Isles...

Congratulations to Prof. Miles Grier, whose book Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery won the Early American Literature @early-am-lit.bsky.social 2024 Book Prize and the Shakespeare Association of America @saaupdates.bsky.social 2025 First Book Award!

Sh’ma Koleinu: A joint message from Jews of Columbia across the ideological spectrum We, a diverse coalition of Jews at Columbia and Barnard, wholeheartedly reject the invocation of <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/additional-measures-to-combat-anti-sem...

A moving and important letter from Jewish Columbia/Barnard students across the ideological spectrum, coming together to speak out against antisemitism, and the use of false and bad-faith accusations of antisemitism to crack down on free speech & dissent. Please read and share.

FINAL PROJECT CONFERENCE! Register to attend Medicine, Slavery, and Race in the Atlantic World, bringing together longstanding project collaborators and exciting, new interlocutors. Spaces are *extremely* limited, so do sign up... see the programme at www.mmor.co.uk/events/confe...

#EarlyModern 🗃️

Thanks, Jared! It's bittersweet when many have been stripped of their fellowship. The Huntington originally funded three of us with NEH money; when the bottom dropped out Sue Juster and staff heroically cobbled together funds from Mellon and private donors, assuring us "your fellowships are secure."

2025-26 Awarded Fellowships | The Huntington The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens is a tourist attraction and collections-based educational and research institution.

So excited and grateful to be able to spend AY2025-26 in this scholarly paradise! www.huntington.org/2025-26-awar...