Nahyan Fancy

I think this is my best essay on this topic (maybe my best essay). I'd like you to read it, if you haven't.

Most read/shared piece on The Important Work is by a high school student who shares this view: theimportantwork.substack.com/p/at-my-high...

The Farhad Daftary Doctoral Scholarship Program. A great program for Ismaili students interested in pursuing a fully funded PhD. www.iis.ac.uk/study/fellow... Check out further requirements on the website. Deadline March 31, 2026.

thetimes.com 三 THEy TIMES Log in Subscribe Home UK World Comment Money Life & Style Roman slaves were better fed than many citizens, Pompeii reveals

A new report on dietary findings in a select area of Pompeii likely inhabited by enslaved people came out in Scavi di Pompei. Many newspapers are now running w/a headline about Roman slaves “eating better” than free Romans. pompeiisites.org/e-journal-de... Let’s discuss why this is problematic

This technology that people in school administrations and higher education are demanding everyone get behind because it's "the future" and "we just have to accept it," which is, nfn, the language of abuse.

Congratulations to @gi-anna97.bsky.social on her first book having just submitted her wonderful PhD thesis too. A truly brilliant young scholar of #histmed #medievalmedicine whose work all interested in history of medicine and medieval studies should follow.

Leprosy in the Mediterranean Medical Literature Recent studies have underlined the importance of consulting different sources to trace global histories of diseases. However, due to a lack of critical editions of medical works, leprosy is poorly und...

When it rains, it pours! More medieval disease history today. @gi-anna97.bsky.social has just brought out her FIRST BOOK! Leprosy in the Mediterranean Medical Literature: The Kitāb al-Malakī and Related Texts. www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi... De Gruyter/Brill are having a sale. #MedievalSky

Huge Trove of Nude Images Leaked by AI Image Generator Startup’s Exposed Database An AI image generator startup’s database was left accessible to the open internet, revealing more than 1 million images and videos, including photos of real people who had been “nudified.”

NEW: An AI image generator startup left its database exposed online, unsecured and accessible to anyone.

The "overwhelming majority" of the files inside contained nudity, with images appearing to contain children and explicit face-swaps

I find it calming to read about Plague during other centuries. It’s amazing how what probably felt apocalyptic while it was happening can be explained because of new technologies is reassuring. Like humanity will make sense of ALL OF THIS at some point in the future. It helps give me perspective.

Iconic Plague Images Are Often Not What They Seem Many images that have been traditionally used to depict the Black Death are, in fact, not images of the plague at all. Now, a group of dedicated historians are trying to correct the record.

Addendum: here's @npr.org, in 2017, confessing to their sins (and including other misused images that Jones & Nevell had collected): www.npr.org/sections/goa...

The Four Black Deaths Abstract. The Black Death, often called the largest pandemic in human history, is conventionally defined as the massive plague outbreak of 1346 to 1353 c.e

I talked about plague & the 1257 Samalas eruption in 2020: doi.org/10.1093/ahr/.... (Link to #OpenAccess copy: works.hcommons.org/records/ba3b...)

Since plague historians have the attention of vulcanologists & climate historians/scientists for a hot minute, let me throw out some notes on a #YersiniaPestis study that came out several months ago, but whose historical implications weren't immediately obvious. W/ this graph in mind, here's mini-🧵.

Bauch & Büntgen 2025, fig. S2. A graph showing "annually resolved and absolutely dated summer temperature." On the right side, a vertical blue bar marks the temperature dip after 1345. On the left side, a red arrow marks an even deeper dip after 1257. 1258 witnessed well-documented epidemic activity in the Middle East.

The omission is esp. odd b/c the potential volcano-plague connection has been sitting there in plain view for 5 years. Not the 1345 volcano, which is the new & valuable element of today's study. But an earlier & waaaay bigger one: Samalas in 1257. Here's fig S2 from today's study, which I've marked.

Screenshot of the opening page of a 2014 study demonstrating that an image from a medieval manuscript being used to depict "plague" in fact was clearly meant to depict leprosy. Kathleen Walker-Meikle and Wolfgang Müller, “Diagnosis of a ‘Plague’ Image: A Digital Cautionary Tale,” in Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, inaugural issue of The Medieval Globe 1, no. 1-2 (Fall 2014), 309-26, https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/tmg/vol1/iss1/13/

The #OmneBonum leprosy image strikes again. Over the course of three years, me, @richardnevell.bsky.social, @medievalbadger.bsky.social & other colleagues waged a campaign to correct a visual "misdiagnosis": an image meant to depict sufferers from leprosy was being misinterpreted as plague.

Thanks for this shoutout to the 2020 study @karlgalle.bsky.social! Even more pertinent is this one @fancynahyan.bsky.social & I did last year (not cited in the study, oddly, even though it was announced over a year ago): doi.org/10.1017/mdh.....

Magic and Occult Science | PhD and Research Degrees | University of Exeter

If you have students interested in an extremely trans- and interdisciplinary PhD in humanities, check out our new PhD in Magic: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/pg-res...

...Monica and I addressed this in our article for @medicalhistory.bsky.social from earlier this year, where we introduced the concept of the prodrome.
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Nice write-up on the new article on a volcanic eruption in 1345 and Black Death. But as @monicamedhist.bsky.social states in this piece: the study helps explain why the BD happened when it did, but that it could happen is because of an existing "plague infrastructure" ... 1/2 #histmed

Forgot to update this 🧵 on what seems to be evidence for 13thC plague in Europe w/ my latest piece. This appeared in @science.org in Sept, but was submitted in July: "Discordant Dates in Disease History: Comment on Sidhu et al. 2025," www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (eLetter at bottom). #histmed

Did the Black Death Rampage Across the World a Century Earlier Than Previously Thought? Scholar Monica Green combined the science of genetics with the study of old texts to reach a new hypothesis about the plague

This work builds on genetic & historical studies by @monicamedhist.bsky.social @fancynahyan.bsky.social & others that have transformed our understanding of timing & mechanisms of plague's spread in Central Asia over the preceding century before reaching Europe: www.smithsonianmag.com/history/did-...

Sarah Hurwitz and liberal Zionism’s hail mary Sarah Hurwitz’s now-viral appearance at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly has exposed the crisis of Zionism in the U.S. and Jewish leaders’ desperation to confront it.

Obama's former speechwriter blamed Holocaust education for making young Jews too sympathetic to Palestinians. She thinks teaching kids "Nazis bad" is backfiring because now they see Israel killing people and get confused about who the good guys are. mondoweiss.net/2025/11/sara...

I was asked by the Democracy Now producer if I still wanted to be introduced as the Renberg chair. I said yes. I am still being paid until Sept 1, 2026. Just bc Northwestern won’t let me teach & wants to pay Trump $75 mil, I still hold this LGBTQ chair for 10 more months & will do so w dignity

Some more information about the new #BibliaArabica project from @goetheuni.bsky.social, which will partner with @lmumuenchen.bsky.social, the project will be based @badw.de and @adwmainz.bsky.social.

We are not a serious country, at all.

A chart shown in this morning's meeting of the International Boccaccio Edition's project launch meeting, showing the declining investments in university libraries as a percentage of their overall budgets.

I heard the most amazing presentation this morning. The folks at the @intbocced.bsky.social explained their ambition to create a new, open-access critical edition of all of Boccaccio's writings based on a single principle: altruism. B/c it will make us good people to do good & generous things. ♥️♥️♥️

paging @wthrockmorton.bsky.social

I worked for an architecture firm in NY in the early 2000s that was an early adopter of the “cloud.” Then, on August 29, 2005, our entire website disappeared. Gone. Bu-bye.

Turned out our “cloud” was a server in New Orleans, which was swept away when Hurricane Katrina broke the levees…

Great news for Lancaster members. Well done!

Obama, Bill Ackman Congratulate Zohran Mamdani After Historic NYC Mayor Poll Win Barack Obama congratulated Zohran Mamdani and other Democratic candidates on their victories, calling the results a testament to the power of unity and forward-thinking leadership.

I couldn't believe #1 (not because I am his fan, but just felt that would be a very poor thing even for him to do), so I looked up. He didn't name him (general comment for all democrat winners), but the media as always spun it this way: news.abplive.com/news/world/b...