Nicholas Witkowski

According to the American Historical Association @historians.org, "Banning generative AI is not a long-term solution; cultivating AI literacy is."

You can download the report here in which they explain all the ways they claim that AI can be useful in the classroom.

The front cover of Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration by Matthew Larsen and Mark Letteney.

If the authors (including @letteney.bsky.social) are right about the pervasiveness of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean world, then this book will require a paradigm shift in how we think about coercion and social control in antiquity.

Not often that the historiographic stakes are so high!

Some more teasers for After Transformation, and a discount code for 30% off if you pre-order through Duke UP. The code is: E25KTRST

See here: dukeupress.edu/after-transf...

#classicsbluesky #byzantinebluesky #ancientbluesky

I’m behind on all of my planned reading these last couple of months, but I’ve taken peeks at the three of these because I just can’t wait. Mandatory reading, all of them.

Fabulous Fall Buddhist Studies Lecture Series line up presented by the National University of Singapore Buddhist Studies Group!

Image of Book Cover featuring calligraphy of Hongyi

Thrilled to announce a new volume I've co-edited with Benjamin Brose: Inner Worlds: Individuals and Interiority in Chinese Religious Life. It’s out now from Brill and you can find it here: brill.com/edcollbook/t... ✨ #NewBooks #ReligiousStudies #BuddhistStudies

This piece may be of interest to @karwaanheritage.bsky.social, @journalslavery.bsky.social, @thecjbs.bsky.social, @southasiainstitute.bsky.social, @himalmag.bsky.social, @buddhismnow.bsky.social, @istb-univienna.bsky.social, @buddhistdoor.bsky.social, @willdalrymple.bsky.social

Rethinking “Brahmanization” and Caste Politics in Late Ancient South Asia: A Study of Outcaste Buddhist Subalternity

Now downloadable w/o paywall @dukepress.bsky.social in #CSSAAME: my most recent study which attempts to answer the question,

What does it mean to talk about #Buddhism as a #subaltern religion?

tinyurl.com/2zu4pe4m

Working on humanistic approaches to premodern Japanese law? Apply to come see us at UCLA! ⬇️ Share widely with colleagues around the world! Presentations can be in either English or Japanese.

Academic friends, I am in touch with a prospective PhD candidate who is looking for potential departments and supervisors - could you please share this and/or hit me up with any suggestions?

It is outside of my areas of expertise, really

gary.donnelly@manchester.ac.uk

Fool of a Took: Palantir’s Fascism on Campus This week it was revealed that White House deputy chief of staff and avid White nationalist Stephen Miller, the man behind the brutal escalation of ICE raids all over the country, owns between $100,00...

Really excited to see my and @ardenthistorian.bsky.social 's pieces on the nerdy fascism of Palantir up @religiondispatches.org -- give it a read, those people are weird and awful.

religiondispatches.org/fool-of-a-to...

Dharmamitra got a significant update: We now feature fast OCR for Sanskrit, Tibetan, etc. powered by Gemini. You can upload images and PDFs. We also added an option to translate from files directly, instead of needing to go through OCR manually first!

The linked article lists Classical Studies as one of the departments at Indiana University that "could lose its main offerings."

This is a major US university with a distinguished tradition in Classics.

Dire news.

Interface for the magic database in Trismegistos.org

Just wanted to note that @trismegistostm.bsky.social has a searchable database of ancient magical and divinatory texts from the Mediterranean. www.trismegistos.org/magic/search... 🪄🔮 It is quite cool. #DH

Video up of my Milk Tea Alliance pub day event at JF Books (the reborn in DC version of Shanghai's legendary Jifeng Books, which I visited often in the 2010s)-- www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClrR... . (For a sense of why JF Books is so special, see this by Amy Hawkins www.theguardian.com/world/2024/d... )

“OpenAI, Coursera, and many other EdTech startups, fantasize about utilizing public and not-for-profit educational infrastructure - our data repositories, labor forces, real estate, and tax havens - to transform themselves into technofeudalists.”

If I were in NYC tonight, this is where I'd be...

The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) at the New School for Social Research (NSSR) in New York City offers advanced graduate students and faculty the opportunity to spend a week working wit...

June 8-14 Summer lecture series in NYC -

Lewis Gordon
Homi Bhabha
@bernardharcourt.bsky.social
Rashid Khalidi

www.criticalsocialinquiry.org?fbclid=IwY2x...

Circle of hooded monks in white with some armed figures on the edge of the circle in front of a temple building. Japanese text in the middle.

A thirteenth-century Japanese picture scroll shows monks deliberating whether to go to the capital to stage a protest. Those in agreement proclaim: “mottomo, mottomo”—that is appropriate, that is appropriate.
(See Adolphson, Gates of Power, 252).
#ManuscriptMonday
colbase.nich.go.jp/collection_i...

After Transformation: A Lyrical History of Christian Late Antiquity

Poem: Eusebius Tries to Organize Time

Augustine’s Mirror

Proofs for my forthcoming book. Out in November. See here: dukeupress.edu/after-transf...

#ancientbluesky #byzantinebluesky

I'm going to try and boil down the argument of the book I'm writing, The Hebrew Bible: A Counterhistory. It has the advantage of being based on something totally banal that everybody knows but I don't think we have a satisfying way to think about. 1/5

Now out: my article answering the question:

What does it mean to talk about #Indian #Buddhism as a #subaltern religion?

Download here: read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/arti...

UGent Buddhist Studies Lecture: “Visualising Rituals in Gandhara” by Ashwini Lakshminarayanan, June 05, 2025

Register here: forms.gle/TwffQCPuVipU...

www.cbs.ugent.be/guestlecture...

Toward the Formation of a Waliullahi Public in Eighteenth-Century India: The Trials and Tribulations of Nurullah Budhanwi

My latest article on the conflicting pressures faced by Muslim scholars in reformist circles of the 18th century:

read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/arti...

Opinion | Silicon Valley Is at an Inflection Point

In my first op-ed for @nytimes.com, I argue that the alliance between Silicon Valley & the US government is a threat to democracy. The Republican tax bill now up in the Senate, which would ban states from regulating AI for a decade, will only cement that trajectory. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/o...

Volume 45 Issue 1 | Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East | Duke University Press

Thank you to Dheepa Sundaram @themodsisyphus.bsky.social & Rohit Chopra @rohit.bsky.social for all their work editing the just published May 2025 #CSSAAME @dukepress.bsky.social special volume "Religion and Its Publics in South Asia"

Entire Issue free for download: read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/issue

hey friends, you can now pre-order my element.

and if you don’t want to pre-order, don’t worry! it’ll be free for download for about two weeks after publication.

May 22nd - Prof. Stephanie Balkwill's online lecture on her new book, _Women who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism and Governance in the Sixth Century_

Register Below:

www.soas.ac.uk/about/event/...

Stephanie Balkwill, "The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century" (U California Press, 2024) - New Books Network

Jessica Zu's fantastic interview with Stephanie Balkwill about Prof. Balkwill's new _The Women who Ruled China_
@ucpress.bsky.social !

#Buddhistfeministhistoriography

newbooksnetwork.com/the-women-wh...

Remembering China’s Empress Dowager Ling, a Buddhist who paved the way for future female rulers The empress, like many other rulers at the time, legitimized her reign through Buddhism, portraying herself either as a Buddha or as a patron of Buddhists.

Remembering China’s Empress Dowager Ling, a #Buddhist who paved the way for future female rulers buff.ly/KwIfpA9
Stephanie Balkwill, University of California, Los Angeles