Leona Archer

T o celebrate the forthcoming print publication of our Encyclopaedia and Palgrave’s 25th anniversary this year, four chapters are free-to-view throughout October. blogs.surrey.ac.uk/medievalwome...

Quote from a story on changes at the U of Chicago that notes they are "pausing" doctoral eduction in Classics, Comp Lit, Germanic studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Romance languages and literatures, and South Asian Studies.

Wow. The University of Chicago, a world-class institution whose humanities faculty in the past has included Homi Bhabha & Lauren Berlant & Ralph Ellison & Hannah freaking Arendt, is getting rid of basically every graduate department involving the acknowledgment that other cultures & languages exist.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 490,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use Update: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has put online 492,000 high-resolution images of artistic works. Even better, the museum has placed the vast majority of these images into the public domain, mea...

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 490,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Couverture du livre "Femmes de Révolution" (Seuil, 2025)

(Minute autopromo #2)

Si vous vous demandez comment occuper votre ado politisé.e ou vous-même pendant les vacances, que lire à la plage ou ailleurs, (re)découvrez ces histoires de révolutionnairEs, de Théroigne de Méricourt pendant la Révolution française aux collectifs féministes contemporains.

Stop cuts to Modern Languages at Bangor University Can you spare a minute to help this campaign?

Petition to stop cuts to Modern Languages at Bangor University.
chng.it/pY54kCGbmD

Horrendous!

I read the ill-informed opinion piece to which this responds with dismay (especially since the author works in a humanities discipline also impacted by severe cuts across the sector). This is a thoughtful and necessary rebuttal:

The UK’s redundancy crisis: four views from the front line Higher education news feeds are currently dominated by near-daily announcements of large job cuts across the UK. But what effect is all this having on the atmosphere within the departments affected – ...

Hard-hitting and reflective piece. It would be a public service to higher education in the UK and internationally if @timeshighered.bsky.social made it free to read, even if only for 24 hours.

Kudos to the authors: Anonymous, Martin Mills (Aberdeen), Nick Megoran (Newcastle) & Les Back (Glasgow).

Cardiff’s closure of modern languages will tongue-tie its humanities The global examination of culture is not possible without languages at degree level, say Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Charles Burdett and Emma Cayley

Read now:

Cardiff’s closure of modern languages will tongue-tie its humanities

www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/card...

@emmacayley.bsky.social

The Arts and Humanities Alliance have written an open letter to Bridget Philippson, Secretary of State for Education, on the recently announced cuts across the sector. We are concerned that these measures disproportionately affect our disciplines and call for an urgent government review.

Sign the Petition Save MLANG at Cardiff University!

Cardiff University has announced it will axe its teaching of modern languages and merge four of its schools, cutting staff numbers by 50%.

Please sign and share this petition in support of the wonderful School of Modern Languages at Cardiff!

www.change.org/p/save-mlang...

Please help us to save Modern Languages at Cardiff University:

chng.it/Hmtvvdtptg

This is real. I just turned it off. They track you everywhere, because they can.

Risk of compulsory redundancies as 170 staff face axe at UEA Announcement follows the departure of 400 staff members last year as efforts to close budget black hole continue

😕 Here we go again. timeshighereducation.com/news/deeply-...
📢 Follow us for updates about the ongoing situation at UEA. #SaveUEA #UCU
🦋 Please share this post with followers, to let them we're now also on Bluesky.
💪 UEA UCU Branch Meeting this morning at 10am. Check your inboxes for full details.

Sad news of more cuts in languages, this time at Northumbria.

Thought-provoking rebuttal, particularly the final words. It's always worth reminding students that they are creative & intelligent, that our job is to help them accentuate that, & that the "hype cycle" around "AI" will rob them of that opportunity (as well as, you know, boiling the oceans)

I love Quiet Posters — can be pretty easy to miss friends or other infrequent posters in the following firehose, this does a great job of plucking them out for you. bsky.app/profile/did:...

I really enjoyed the first episode of 'Wolf Hall: the Mirror and the Light', but thanks to watching too much Cbeebies these days, I can't hear Mark Rylance's voice without thinking of Flop.
"The dissolution of the monasteries... it's a Bing thing!"

I might have to swing by one of your classes this week!

You guys, my kid just discovered a *whole book* of poems in French that, when read in French, sound like mother goose rhymes in English (but said with a heavy French accent). They are grammatical in French! 😵‍💫 The one below is Humpty Dumpty. This is depraved and wonderful. I love/hate it.

Report on Modern Languages Closures and Restructurings A recent survey conducted for UCFL on closures and restructurings of modern languages degrees in Higher Education provides evidence about the decrease of the subject area over the last ten years. This...

📢New report on Modern Languages Closures & Restructurings
A recent survey conducted by Wendy Ayres Bennett, policy advisor for UCFL, provides evidence of worrying signs across the HE sector & the pressing need for support & curriculum innovation
university-council-for-languages.org/2024/07/08/r...

I’ve come to abandon the use case for LLMs to summarize text because the summaries usually miss vital parts and are disappointing when I look closer. Australian government now has proof this is the case.

Another proof that LLMs have more limitations we need to understand.

I just did, as an experiment, a google scholar search on an important well-covered topic. It put an undergrad honors thesis as the #1 response. It's fine thesis (on a quick skim), but there are hundreds, thousands, of peer reviewed books and articles on this topic.

GCSE results 2024: French and German grades improve in languages boost Girls continue lead over boys as pupils who suffered disruption from Covid and strikes find out how they did in their exams

‘The twenty year decline in French and German appears to have turned a corner’
www.thetimes.com/article/b183...

How Africans Are Changing French — One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time More than 60 percent of French speakers now live in Africa. Despite growing resentment at France, Africans are contributing to the evolution and spread of the French language.

60% of those who speak French daily now live in Africa, and 80% of children studying in French are in Africa. There are as many French speakers in Kinshasa as in Paris.

“French flourishes every day in Africa,” said Souleymane Bachir Diagne, professor of philosophy & French at Columbia U.

Gift link

Crash course The UK’s universities are among the best in the world. So why do many appear close to collapse?

"University drama, theatre, arts, adult learning, evening classes, school visits, walking clubs, discussion groups, sports facilities, museums, displays, galleries—they could all be gone. Everything, in fact, that makes life worth living. That would be the unkindest cut of all."

UCU have declared an academic boycott of Goldsmiths in response to job losses:
Please do not—
* apply for jobs
* speak at/organise academic or other conferences
* give lectures
* accept positions as visiting prof/ researcher
* accept new contracts as an external examiner for taught courses #UKUnis

GMS and SFMS have put out this joint statement about the chilling state of redundancies in UK universities, which pose an existential threat to arts and humanities IMO: medievalgender.co.uk/gms-and-smfs...

England’s universities face ‘closure’ risk after student numbers dive Report from Office for Students warns ‘significant changes’ needed to ‘funding model’

Universities have long been one of the things that the UK does really, really well. In a short span of just a few years, they have been utterly run into the ground. Absolutely grim.
www.ft.com/content/8d85...

For context, in 2021-22 there were 285 higher educations providers in the UK who returned data to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. We're pretty much at the point where a fifth of them are making redundancies.