The Smithsonian is OBVIOUSLY in the book.
Never thought I'd be misty-eyed thanking the Field Museum for saving my ability to do book research on the colonial violence of natural history museums by hosting @biodivlibrary.bsky.social, but here we are. Thank you, Field Museum. Guess you'll have to wait and see whether this makes the book...
This is the news the BHL community had been waiting for: the answer to BUT WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TO THE BHL WEBSITE? We've been overwhelmed by outpourings of excitement and relief from BHL users across the globe – thank you #FieldMuseum! #ILoveBHL #BHLTransition
"We don’t need technological erasure of loss – we need to learn how to grieve, rally, and save life before it disappears....It requires better relationships with living beings: seeing them...as our kin with their own claims to justice rooted in being alive."
"Frozen zoos place species in a liminal state, making the line between life and death significantly more complicated" - a good account by Sadiah Quereshi of the profoundly complicated ethics of "de-extinction," which, uh, does not sound great.
aeon.co/essays/de-ex...
"History is never ideologically tidy. People pursue their aims in the context of their times, and women are no different: they are part of history...." Thinking through all of this while working on white women's complicity in colonial violence (quite a bit earlier).
"What...are we to make of white women physicians who opened doors to women in medicine, contributed toward improved care for women and children, celebrated women’s participation in civic and professional leadership, and were avid eugenicists?"
lareviewofbooks.org/article/whit...
I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; Which none but they that feel can tell— Oh, I was plunging to despair.
Great new website for Material Intelligence, featuring a new issue on palm — incldg pieces on the Ecuadorian hat, coconuts, wicker, palms as a quotidian staple in Central Africa, etc.
(I wrote a piece on sandpaper for their sand issue :)
Alternatively, a massive hawk tried to eat Franklin this morning. He barked, I screamed, and we ran away in terror.
museum curators describing literally any portrait of a woman: she boldly meets the viewer's eye, confronting our gaze
Dear everyone,
As per the post from the Bodleian librarian below, AI bots and scrapers are putting just about every website under great pressure, British History Online included.
A lot of excellent tech staff are working hard to keep everything working, but outages and siruptions are inevitable.
If you've been noticing that source repositories have been glitchy, down, or slow recently (as I have), maybe it's because AI is fucking them up along with everything else. Sucks not just for my own research, but when I tried to show a student how to use these resources they simply...wouldn't load.
On historians— telling & sharing the history of what we are living through—
📣 BSHS Small Grants – deadline 31 March
Looking for a little support for archival visits, research trips, or research assistance?
BSHS offers small grants (£50–£500) to help move research projects forward.
Especially aimed at early-career researchers.
Find out more: bshs.org.uk/grants/#rese...
We are launching our first-ever internship program this summer! Visit our website for more details. Applications are due by April 10. bit.ly/4aXdZQw
Spring break is for catching up on old work, right? Fleshing out, finishing up, and sending out a million articles and projects this week. Right? Right…?
This was, and continues to be, a massive labor issue that has affected thousands of people, from grantees to students & educators, to reviewers, to #NEH staff, to the public (effectively, millions).
See what grants were cancelled, and multiply the numbers affected, here:
bsky.app/profile/jmot...
NEH's budget is tiny—not just compared to NSF/NIH, but compared to humanities funding in every other wealthy nation. What little was there was largely rescinded and several programs were cut in full last year. It decimated not merely individual projects but whole corners of the humanities in the US.
I hope this child knows the damage that he's done and thinks about it for the rest of his life. I'm sure he won't.
Many small institutions are dependent on this funding to keep their doors open. Scholars need these grants to write books, develop public programming, do experimental work, and shape history. Reviewers take their work incredibly seriously, knowing all of this.
Okay more on this: as someone who received + \benefitted from and, separately, has reviewed grants for the NEH, this is just so incredibly disheartening + disgusting. I know how enormously hard people work on these grants (both crafting + reviewing), and this is a punch to the gut.
That would be great - I'm at elaine.ayers@yale.edu.
Work with me! 2-year postdoc (1+1) within COLUMN: Colonial Legacies of Universities: Materialities and New Collaborations (HORIZON_HORIZON-CL2-2024-HERITAGE-01-04). Topic: “Research of university botanical collections in relation to Italian and European colonialism”. Call at: shorturl.at/aurdS
I absolutely DO have some projects lingering that I haven't had the reason / motivation to finish up, and the timing works shockingly well as I'm on break. I'll work on this an email you!
Ooh!
Call for Papers: Women’s Fieldwork and the Making of Nineteenth Century Natural History Collections
We seek articles to complete a special issue on women’s field collecting, and contributions to nineteenth century natural history for Nuncius.
#Histsci #NaturalHistory #WomensHistory #Fieldwork
Basically my major impetus behind trying not to die right now is the fear of being turned into AI. Don't use my corpse to send motivational messages (I would never), make porn (slightly more likely), or comment on students' papers (I give so many line comments).
Hmm I wonder why the price of filling up my tank of gas just skyrocketed
A corrective to extinction narratives based on charismatic megafauna: microbes. "The diversity is so extraordinary and so, so poorly understood. There’s your freaking wonder."
www.noemamag.com/saving-the-l...
