Laura Kolb

An orange cat facing away from the camera looks out a window, where the head of a turkey appears

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Truth. (I‘ve gotten to the point where “going into my spreadsheets“ is a soothing lil break from tears & emails)

Toward the Higher- and Secondary-Ed Alliance! - Public Books The influence of K-12 policy and pedagogy on higher ed can perhaps be seen best in the trickle-up effect of the standards of the Common Core.

I wrote about the divide between high school and college English, and what we might do to bridge it, for @publicbooks.bsky.social—part of an excellent roundtable on higher ed under Trump organized by @dennismhogan.bsky.social

www.publicbooks.org/toward-the-h...

!!!!!!

CFP: A Time of Monsters The monster has been here all along. It is a historical constant that manifests in wildly different ways across time, place, and culture. Whatever form it takes, the monster claws at categories; it un...

If you are a supporter and reader of @contingent-mag.bsky.social one of the biggest things you can do to help us at the moment is get this CFP to the NTT folks in your life. The fracturing of social media has made it very difficult to get the word out esp. to adjuncts and VAPs.

I regret to inform you that the first thing that came to mind was: “gimme a break, gimme a break, break me off a piece of that kit-kat bar”

Oh… you know I grew up just down the road from Blacksburg? A perfect part of the world for this play ❤️💫✨

This book applies the innovative work-task approach to the history of work, which captures the contribution of all workers and types of work to the early modern economy. Drawing on tens of thousands of court depositions, the authors analyse the individual tasks that made up everyday work for women and men, shedding new light on the gender division of labour, and the ways in which time, space, age and marital status shaped sixteenth and seventeenth-century working life. Combining qualitative and quantitative analysis, the book deepens our understanding of the preindustrial economy, and calls for us to rethink not only who did what, but also the implications of these findings for major debates about structural change, the nature and extent of paid work, and what has been lost as well as gained over the past three centuries of economic development. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Cover of Whittle, Jane, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb, and Taylor Aucoin. The Experience of Work in Early Modern England. of Cambridge Studies in Economic History - Second Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Who did what in early modern England?

New #OpenAccess book, 'The Experience of Work in Early Modern England' by @jwhittle.bsky.social, @markhailwood.bsky.social, @hkrobb.bsky.social & @aucointaylor.bsky.social, based on thousands of #EarlyModern court depositions 🗃️

Read it: doi.org/10.1017/9781...

Thank you, John!

ikr!!!!

I have been browsing AL Daily ever since I discovered the joy—the necessity—of wasting time on the internet at my sad, gray, post-college office job. And now look! 2003 me would be proud

A small deer peers through a window at a large orange cat while another deer grazes in the background

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Jobs | City University of New York

The English Department at Hunter College, CUNY is very happy to announce a Tenure Track position in #Medieval British Literature at the Assistant Professor level. Applications from scholars in interdisciplinary and/or global approaches are especially encouraged to apply.

cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...

Large Language Muddle | The Editors The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

YES! THIS on GenAI!

Please read this absolutely splendid piece of writing that had me cheering, a little bit weepy, and writing in the margins:

"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."

Phantom Age Gap Discourse What lies between an ingenue and an Opera Ghost?

How old is the Phantom of the Opera supposed to be? Get into the weeds with me and Lord Andy on Phantom age gap discourse: open.substack.com/pub/reinahar...

Your email finds me keening on the city walls

Took a few days off for big admin tasks but am now re-immersed and fully unable to cope with the fear-grief combo that accompanies Hector’s death

Thank you, Karl!

Thank you, Drew! (I keep thinking she’s the anti-Clarissa…)

“You Think Me a Bold Cheat”: Mary Carleton, Counterfeit Princess Accused of posing as foreign royalty to lure her young suitor into a bigamous marriage, Mary Carleton was the subject of dozens of pamphlets and broadsides published in the mid-17th century,…

CONLADIES OF HISTORY UNITE!
Laura Kolb writes @publicdomainrev about a 17th Century "German Princess" who could give Anna Delvey a run for someone else's money. publicdomainreview.org/essay/mary-c...

Subscribe to Book Post now, and you'll get 3 months of the paid version for free! No credit card or trial. It's totally automatic and our little way to celebrate near victory (10,000 subscribers)!

books.substack.com

Ooh - chiming in to say that @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social will be visiting my GC writing class via Zoom in late Oct - I will send info in case any of your students want to join!

The LIRR is the least Homeric setting imaginable but here we are

I am having big Iliad feelings in the train

“I know … But even so.”

“You Think Me a Bold Cheat”: Mary Carleton, Counterfeit Princess Accused of posing as foreign royalty to lure her young suitor into a bigamous marriage, Mary Carleton was the subject of dozens of pamphlets and broadsides published in the mid-17th century, including...

It is an absolute dream to have an essay in the Public Domain Review: publicdomainreview.org/essay/mary-c...

“You Think Me a Bold Cheat”: Mary Carleton, Counterfeit Princess Accused of posing as foreign royalty to lure her young suitor into a bigamous marriage, Mary Carleton was the subject of dozens of pamphlets and broadsides published in the mid-17th century, including...

It is an absolute dream to have an essay in the Public Domain Review: publicdomainreview.org/essay/mary-c...

woodcut of woman with symbols on her face

NEW ESSAY — Laura Kolb on Mary Carleton, the 17th-century woman accused of posing as foreign royalty to lure a young suitor into a bigamous marriage, a strange precursor to our modern-day fascination with conwomen and counterfeits — publicdomainreview.org/essay/mary-c...

Thai cat treatises — called “Tamra Maew” — pair illustrations of auspicious felines with poetic notes: one has “eyes like dewdrops on a lotus,” another’s are “lit like fireflies, applied liquid gold”. Pages of a fine 19th-century example here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/tamra-maew/

My mother once went on a solo trip; when she came back my father had acquired seven sheep