Drew Flanagan Ph.D

Are AI-generated summaries suitable for studying and research? Despite didactic, ethical, and environmental concerns, the use of GenAI is on the rise in academia. For most applications, the jury is still out on whether and how they will benefit education and rese...

GenAI tools are not good at creating summaries: www.tue.nl/en/our-unive...

I'm proud and excited to be delivering the 2026 Ray Ginger Lecture on Thursday at the invitation of the history department at @brandeisuniversity.bsky.social, my Ph.D alma mater. Boston friends, it would be great to see you! #skystorians

BenedictAndersonBot: "Imagine, if you will, a community"

What if the person being... summoned... just has a few publications on a narrow topic?

Student: "Here's my AI-generated essay on cupcakes"

DrewBot: "Your work could benefit from considering the relationship between cupcakes and the civilizing process as conceived of by mid-20th century Europeans."

Thank you!

That sounds closer to what I was thinking - Tammany was the first example that came to mind. Is there an example or two I should look at?

maybe... I'll chase that down. This is a real vague brain fog question, so thanks for bearing with me

Could be! I'll check it out

Hive mind question: there is a social theorist from the 20th century who argued that corruption is endemic to democracies, but in a positive way, reflective of democracy's promise to provide material benefits to people for participating. I think. I could have imagined it. Who am I thinking of?

Director of Poland’s Jewish Museum Reinstated After Defeat of Far-Right Government Dariusz Stola will return as director of Poland’s premier Jewish museum, reflecting a broader cultural renaissance in the country.

Direktor des Jüdischen Museums Warschau wieder im Amt: Sieben Jahre nach seiner Entlassung durch die PIS-Regierung ist Dariusz Stola wieder Direktor des Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw www.artnews.com/art-news/new...

Excited to see that my new article "The Democratization Paradox: Ordinary Germans, Allied Occupation, and the Built Democracy of Postwar Germany" has been published! DM me if you'd like a pdf.

doi.org/10.1177/0022...

"Who defeated Germany in 1945?" asked in 1945, 1994, 2004 and 2015. Opinion wildly shifted against the Soviet Union and towards the United States.

Suprematism, by Nikolai Suetin, 1920-21, 📸 by @tiltoncreative

I hate when my research is relevant

The Right’s Civilizational New World Order Civilizationalism, the idea that world politics revolves around culturally bounded civilizations led by great powers, is energizing the Right on both sides of the Atlantic. It is key to the effort to ...

"Civilizationalism, the idea that world politics revolves around culturally bounded civilizations led by great powers, is energizing the Right on both sides of the Atlantic. It is key to the effort to dismantle universalism and remake the international order."

jacobin.com/2026/02/civi...

Abstract Al assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistance of Al. We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of learning the library. We identify six distinct AI interaction patterns, three of which involve cognitive engagement and preserve learning outcomes even when participants receive AI assistance. Our findings suggest that Al-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation - particularly in safety-critical domains.

‘Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition… We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average.’
arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245

"Although Grammarly markets itself as a writing assistant, many of these tools are designed to do your work for you. The fundamental architecture shared by all of Grammarly’s AI tools... makes this clear. This is unfortunate on at least two levels."

JFC...

New book out: From Empire to Federation in Eurasia: Ideas and Practices of Diversity Management.

Co-edited by our colleague Dr. Ivan Sablin (also author of the Introduction) and chapter 6 on the Yugoslav Kingdom (1920–21) by Dr. Jure Gašparič.

📖 www.routledge.com/From-Empire-...

Sharing this with my capstone seminar!

This is an incredible work of trans-imperial history, which puts ideas of honour and revenge at the centre of a highly original analysis of colonial violence. I can't recommend @mark-condos.bsky.social' work too highly...

👇🏻🔥👇🏻🔥👇🏻

Cover of the magazine ‘Difesa della Razza’ (Defence of the Race), 5 November 1939, ‘dedicated to foreign racists’.

How did the international community react to the #racial policy of #fascist Italy (1938–1940)?
To find out more, join us on Zoom for a lecture by our fellow Luca Fiorito.
👉17 February 2026, 5.30–7 p.m.
Link to register to participate in person or online: tinyurl.com/mwhm8jyj
@maxweberstiftung.de

In 2014 as a grad student at Brandeis, I was invited to participate in a Mellon-funded dissertation seminar. In a temple deep beneath the foundations of Gerstenzang Graduate Student Center, I was initiated into the secret rites of an ancient order, the Wizards of OverthinKing Everything (W.O.K.E)

Opinion | A.I. Companies Are Eating Higher Education

'Young people are quickly becoming so dependent on A.I. that they are losing the ability to think for themselves. And rather than rallying resistance, academic administrators are aiding and abetting a hostile takeover of higher education.'

Cheery news from Columbia University's Dean of AI. 1/3

I think the greatest gift college professors in the humanities can give to students right now is a seminar room where, for 80 minutes twice a week, nothing that happens to them is a sales pitch for an AI product.

Leftöver Crack

This is rather special. Marc Bloch was a titan of modern historiography, and a big influence on me as a young history student. He was a brilliant French medievalist murdered by the Gestapo for both his Jewishness and his contribution to French resistance, but they couldn’t kill his work

Freiburg ist schön

Job offer!!
I’m helping a PBS series look for a social media manager/content creator for an upcoming promotional campaign. The start date is ASAP, and a project timeline that currently goes to July.

This is for a series on American Muslim history, so candidates with cultural familiarity preferred!

Revolutionary Warfare: How France lost Algeria but developed a new kind of social war Terrence G Peterson's book explores how 'pacifying' Algerian society became a focus of the French campaign against independence

ICYMI: "@tgpeterson.bsky.social's 'Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency' is a deeply researched and strikingly lucid account of how one colonial war reshaped the meaning of modern warfare."

www.middleeasteye.net/discover/rev...

Proofs! I’ve been working on this material for years. I’m thrilled that it’s seeing the light of day in Journal of Contemporary History. It asks what ordinary Germans made of the democratization imposed on them by the Allies, analyzing the paradox that democratization is fundamentally undemocratic.