Dr. Verena Krebs

Job in a really great department in a surprisingly awesome city (said the German who'd never been, until she did go).

a woman in a black dress is smiling next to a man and the words that does sound tempting ALT: a woman in a black dress is smiling next to a man and the words that does sound tempting

Oooohhhh! I wish it wasn't ... *gestures wildly at everything*.

I'm so, so very sorry. I know you (and he) fought very hard till the end. My heartfelt condolences.

a man with a mustache is sitting at a desk with the words `` so much fun '' written on his face . ALT: a man with a mustache is sitting at a desk with the words `` so much fun '' written on his face .

In both of my books the publisher's copy-editors were putting in extra work ... for me by randomly renaming my colleagues and the greats of my field.

I had the privilege to (peer-)review a version of this article last year and I'm so glad to read the final version — and to find out that the author is one of my long-time academic crushes 😍🥳😱.

"Something happened in Northeast Africa in the early thirteenth century.

It was swift, violent, destructive, and perpetrated by non-Muslims.

It might have been accompanied by an outbreak of disease; it might have had apocalyptic overtones; it might have been several events rolled into one."

Solidarity, and strength to you and your dad! ❤️♥️❤️ It's been a solid month of this on my end today, but things are finally really looking up. The bone-deep mental and physical exhaustion that creeps up on you is a beast to reckon with.

Same. I even have a subscription (by accident! But yeah! And it's *not* cheap!), so it's doubly infuriating. Avoiding the inevitable for now by simply not accessing the page at all.

Yeah. Average survival time is 11 months. He was first diagnosed in October 2019.

Sheer single-minded obstinacy (Him: "well, this cancer hasn't met me yet, I'll show it a fight", me: "I'm not that kind of doctor, but you need to treat him with x, y, z!") on both out parts for the win.

a woman says " everything hurts and i 'm dying " ALT: a woman says " everything hurts and i 'm dying "

Everything I've ever published was written against a steady backdrop of care work with intermittent bouts of sheer personal terror — made extra terrific by being on a fixed-term, contingent appointment.

All this to say, academics are not robots. Be kind when evaluating (junior) colleagues.

Well, in retrospect, August was a 🤬 flaming dumpster fire of a month.

Spent most of it in various hospitals with my dad, fighter extraordinaire, now in his 6th year of obliterating Glioblastoma statistics. Things are looking up, but ... phew.

Man plans, God laughs, academic sabbatical edition.

a black and white photo of a man in a suit and bow tie . ALT: a black and white photo of a man in a suit and bow tie .

The typo in the post is intentional to show you that I'm a real human being by the way.

Oh my lord, it's been a day or five.

I just did this—followed the steps below to stopAcademia's AI-fication of my work.

Thanks but no thanks. I've gone on enough real podcasts, done real interviews and written my own public facing essays that I really don't need an auto-generated version that likely distorts what I actually wrote.

Excellent, just did this.

Excited to share the article that @mmonier.bsky.social and I wrote on the Introduction to the Gospels by ibn al-Assal and its Arabic and Ethiopic traditions 🤩

brill.com/view/journal...

Photo of the Cairo metro mosaic of St. Verena (transliterated here as Verina), "the Egyptian nun who introduced personal hygiene to Europeans", Abbassia, Cairo, Egypt. She's wearing bright red garb and staring judgingly at the onlooker, holding objects useful for personal grooming, hoping you'd get that smelling good is an option.

I tend to think my name's pretty basic — 'Verena' is very much an 80s girls' name from the German-speaking regions of Europe (although we're all named for a 4th-ct Coptic saint from Thebes in Upper Egypt— القديسة فيرينا).

And then there's weeks where I'm constantly called ...Veronika, Vera, Verona.

Absolutely!

Dare I ask if there's a specific Bluesky thing I missed?

Well, it's finally *really* out:

habemus full citation — Krebs, V. (2025). ‘People and Things Have Always Been Mixed Up’: Notes on the So-Called Global Middle Ages. Journal of Medieval History, 51(4), 581–585. doi.org/10.1080/0304...

50 free downloads at: www.tandfonline.com/eprint/RAEXD...

What. I have no words but impotent fury.

Yes we are, I'm a fan of @rhaplord.bsky.social's page! It's an excellent public scholarship resource.

Youths buried in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries carried West African DNA Despite bearing remarkably far-flung genetic origins, a girl and young man were buried just like their peers

Last week's big-splash news about the 7th-century Anglo-Saxon burial of a girl with partial West African genetic heritage dovetails pretty nicely with the larger argument I made in my essay above:

The 'medieval' world of Afro-Eurasia was always a "Geteilte Welt":

separate *and* shared all along.

One day I'll learn what the purpose of all this "published as first view" (with effectively "wrong" bibliographic data) and "full final view" rigmarole is (maximum confusion for future altimetric data, I guess), but today is not that day.

Well, it's finally *really* out:

habemus full citation — Krebs, V. (2025). ‘People and Things Have Always Been Mixed Up’: Notes on the So-Called Global Middle Ages. Journal of Medieval History, 51(4), 581–585. doi.org/10.1080/0304...

50 free downloads at: www.tandfonline.com/eprint/RAEXD...

Africans in the Indian Ocean world and the autobiography of a Somali Globetrotter. In 1944, a soldier on Australia’s most remote northern coastline discovered a handful of copper coins that were originally minted in the medieval Swahili city of Kilwa, Tanzania, between 1150 and 1330...

In the year 1071 CE, an envoy from the East African island of Cengtan (層檀, ie, Zangistân/Zanzibar in Tanzania) named Cengjiani visited the court of the Song dynasty ruler Shenzong (r. 1067–85):
www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/africans-i...

a blue dumpster is floating in a flooded area near a sign that says narrows ramp ALT: a blue dumpster is floating in a flooded area near a sign that says narrows ramp

Yeah, I've spent a good chunk of the last few years nostalgic for the earlier days of the internet. Not perfect by any means but also not this...

I'm an old, I'll see myself out now 😬.

Yeah, but it allowed a glimpse into a future where avoiding it is functionally impossible— & where reality is completely negotiable, & contingent on your personal algorithmic bubble (that you might not be aware of). That post had thousands of likes & comments, because people *wanted* it to be true.

a cartoon character from south park is sitting in a hospital room ALT: a cartoon character from south park is sitting in a hospital room

Not to be a Cassandra, but it's gonna get so much worse with the proliferation of AI slop. I saw a viral Facebook post about how a 15th French king was cured by a Songhai physician from Gao that was based on a ChatGPT Reddit post indexed by Google's AI summary, fed into Facebook, fed into the G-Ai.

a close up of a dog 's face with a desert background ALT: a close up of a dog 's face with a desert background

And yes, I'm aware I'm typing this on one of these platforms, and that they live for any kind ofnegative engagement and pushback from their "enemies".

Thanks for dragging him with footnotes! this woke historian will go walk the dog and literally touch some grass on a beautiful evening now.

Yeah, I know. All of these dudes are so obviously fake & really not half as smart as they'd like to be.

Zero patience for all these stupid little boys playing at smart men that web 2.0 launched into dubious prominence (Curtis Yarvin being another example), now allowed to havoc on these platforms.