Brian Ulrich

This is going to go so poorly for graduates on the job market...

I can't think of a single job that doesn't require navigating differences in upbringing, worldviews, political views, etc. Why would you ever hire people who have had zero practice at such foundational skills?

Remember the moral panic about safetyism? Trigger warnings? Snowflakes? Well, its actually happening in Texas.

Lots to read in here...

Astonishing and infuriating that there’s basically no public debate about what could be a major catastrophic war

סמוטריץ' הצהיר כי על הממשלה הבאה "לעודד הגירה" של פלסטינים מהגדה שר האוצר אמר בכנס של הציונות הדתית כי "בטווח הארוך אין פתרון אחר", וקרא לבטל את הסכמי אוסלו

Bezalel Smotrich: the next government must "encourage voluntary migration" of Palestinian from the West Bank - there is no other solution. "We must complete the revolution".

This is what the Israeli right is working towards: not Apartheid, but mass expulsion.
www.haaretz.co.il/news/politic...

Yeah, the balance seemed pretty good to me, including the awareness of the split between the legal and advocacy wings

How FIRE, a Philly-based free-speech group, went from ‘cancel culture’ watchdog to Trump antagonist FIRE built its reputation policing cancel culture. Now the free-speech group is confronting the Trump administration.

Pretty good article on @thefireorg.bsky.social from the Philadelphia Inquirer (which I am subscribing to under a promotion of 25 cents for six months)

My school, a top research university, gives us access to an institutional AI bot, HopGPT. As an experiment, I just asked it for the most important *academic* works on WWII. It gave me a list of 8 books. The first was Churchill, followed by David Irving, then Primo Levi. We are so, so screwed

Counterrevolution in Egypt The agents of coercion in Egypt – its military, police, and intelligence services – have been locked in a perennial struggle for power since their inception. Each institution has vied for dominance, s...

@versobooks.bsky.social is running a sale through 20 February.

You can get 20% off when you preorder my book Counterrevolution in Egypt:

Yes, and that was in 2021

I just saw a publication that repeatedly gave the copyright date of my first book as 2021 rather than 2019, and I wonder if it will be isolated or something that spreads

Rethinking Conquest The momentous political and social changes that affected the Near East following the death of the prophet Muhammad have traditionally been framed as ‘conquests’. But what did ‘conquest’ mean, if anyth...

New open access volume on the Arab conquests of Byzantine territory

Israeli security cabinet expands powers in occupied West Bank Ultranationalist finance minister says measures intended to bury ‘idea of a Palestinian state’

Annexation.

Israeli security cabinet expands powers in occupied West Bank in move that finance minister says will “fundamentally change the legal and civil reality” there. He said the govt was “burying the idea of ​​a Palestinian state”

www.ft.com/content/ee9c...

Bowl Depicting a Running Hare - The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bowl with Eagle (63.178.1) and Bowl with Hare (64.261)The tenth and eleventh centuries under the Fatimid caliphate were times of prosperity in Egypt and the neighboring lands, when a burgeoning class ...

So I heard we’re posting super bowls. Here’s a Fatimid lusterware bunny. Islamic lusterwares originate in Iraq to emulate the sheen of Chinese porcelain, but the combo with highly animated-looking Fatimid animal motifs is my favorite. He even has a little snack.

www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

A Mandaic curse bowl in the Royal Ontario Museum. It has a spiraling Mandaic text that leads to an encircled x at the center.

This Super Bowl Sunday, I’d like to introduce you all to the magical curse bowls used in Upper Mesopotamia and Syria in late antiquity. Written in Mandaic (as here) or Syriac Aramaic, they trap demons who trespass on a household by sucking them in with spiraling spells to the center of the bowl.

There's something to this. Teachers need to meet students where they are in terms of structure and scaffolding, which is not always easy, but choosing fewer and easier readings is in a way reducing expectations and that doesn't do students any favors.

In case you haven't seen it, there is a roundtable on that book beginning on page 412 here

journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/al...

Please stop using substack

Long-Distance Trade in the Ancient World This book presents a novel perspective on long-distance trade in the ancient world that integrates network theory and environmental analysis

"traditional Eurocentric perspectives .. have tended to focus primarily on empires & imperial agency as the dominant analytical category. [This book argues] instead that environmental factors played a much greater role in influencing the formation of trade routes." link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Immigration A sweeping narrative history of American immigration from the colonial period to the present  “A masterly historical synthesis, full of wonderful detail a...

Here is one: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

Just finished a long meeting where the business faculty expressed the concern that their students weren't getting enough liberal arts

Book cover, The Premodern Origins of Jihadi-Salafism, by Jaan S. Islam

📖Out now: Jaan Islam's new book on Jihadi-Salafism📖
edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-pre...

The cover of the forthcoming book Colonial Negatives: Picturing History and Identity in Morocco by Patricia Goldsworthy. Bottom half of the image has an image of an oil seller in Fez surrounded by Muslim and Jewish Moroccans. The image highlights the religious diversity of the crowd, and demonstrates the dynamic nature of the Jewish district

I just got a copy of my cover for my forthcoming book! It features a postcard from Fez by the Moroccan Jewish photographer Joseph Bouhsira. Bouhsira was the first Moroccan to establish his own commercial photography studio, and many of his images featured the Jewish community in Fez.

Historians Must Reclaim AHA (opinion) Two recent vetoes by the association’s governing council raise the question of who defines what counts as “history.”

Recently the @historians.org Council vetoed member resolutions that would have committed AHA to defense of academic freedom. In doing so, the org relayed their stance that its federal underwriters-not historians themselves-determine our discipline's limits. 🔗⬇️

www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

Absolutely - especially when the careerism is misguided on what is often needed

I am eager to read this!

I also got class-adjacent questions today from my world history students when I was covering ancient Israel and Judah

Hearing that the entire Washington Post team covering the Middle East has been let go. This is devastating news. They were doing vital coverage here, & providing a necessary bridge between this region & the US. It's very obvious why that is needed.

Accessible Medievalist The Accessible Medievalist Copyright © 2025 by Kisha G. Tracy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Kisha Tracy has launched The Accessible Medievalist, which focuses on medieval people with disabilities - check it out at theaccessiblemedievalist.omeka.net #medievalstudies

New book: #Sufism in Saudi Arabia Since 1979: The Politics of Orthodoxy in Contemporary #Islam, by Besnik Sinani #SaudiArabia @degruyterbrill.bsky.social