Marissa Nicosia

Damn me, but all things are queer

Take a commuter boat on the Thames through the heart of the city. A whole other perpective.

Seconded

Welcome to March! This 15th century Book of Hours, use of Rouen, celebrates the month with the labor of pruning vines, and an illustration of Abraham and Isaac (the ram in the image reflects the Zodiac sign of Aries). UPenn Ms. Codex 1056, f. 3r-3v #medievalsky

🔗: https://bit.ly/4m0SpP7

Ah okay. A change, but not as bad as the headline made it sound.

Love this detail - (The starter is included in the sale.)

😭

Gotta love how academic books don't earn you money, but LLMs can make money off of stealing them in the aggregate and if you write enough, they can also profit from stealing your personality after you are dead.

I think you’re familiar with my work: I’m the…“beast wishes,” in that email you just sent to your boss.

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

A photograph of an ornamental carved wooden swan, white with an orange beak, which is on a green ornamental wall bracket. The wall bracket is attached to the sandy coloured wall of a historic building, and flanked by two sash windows. The swan faces away from the wall, looking out towards the street. Image Credit: A Grade II Listed sixteenth-century swan. A carved wooden swan on an ornamental cast-iron bracket, 11 Sadler Street, Wells, Somerset. Image credit: Tony Cooper / Art UK, (CC BY-NC) https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/swan-281128

📢 NEW Will of the Month Post! 📢

This is for everyone who followed our 'Eyrie of Swans' discussion last week, and with particular thanks to @hnewsome-chandler.bsky.social , @lostplayhouse.bsky.social and @tracelarkhall.bsky.social who helped us identify it! 🦢 1/3🧵

sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcult...

A Shakespearean History of Traffic Could Shakespeare ride a horse? How did Tudor wine orders get delivered? Did playhouses cause congestion? and other questions

Meet Thomas the carter… New post follows Tudors moving around London, on the back of some recent research.  What did Shakespeare’s commute look like and who invented the one-way street?

open.substack.com/pub/shakespe...

Oh noooooooo. I haven’t looked recently 🫠

A fabulous review of two books that I am very excited to read. Thanks @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social !!

Women, Gender and Sexuality in Premodern Literature and Culture Welcome to Cambridge Core

Delighted to be series editor for Cambridge Elements in Women, Gender and Sexuality in Premodern Literature and Culture. If you have something cool and interesting you’d like to work with us on please get in touch (micrograph 20-30k)

www.cambridge.org/core/publica...

John Gallagher · Quickly Quickly Quickly: Early Modern News In early modern Europe, couriers represented the increased connectivity of the Continent. They travelled faster and...

‘The infrastructure of posts and couriers that served states and merchants laid the foundations for a revolution in communications.’

@earlymodernjohn.bsky.social on early modern news.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Adjunct pay/working conditions AY25-26 This form is part of a project to crowd-source pay and working conditions for people who teach and research in colleges and universities during AY2025-2026. This form is for people paid by the course ...

Well, let's give it a shot again and see what we get.

Erin's filling in CHE's holes again and collecting adjunct pay info. Drop yours at the form.

Have I just stumbled upon my new FAVOURITE PRINTER'S MARK? #chicken #singingchicken?

Pile of children's books printed on linen and other fabrics on a messy desk.

Indestructibles, Assemble!

Getting together a group of extra-durable kidlit books printed on fabric for the hands-on shelf in my upcoming exhibition...
Impressive Textiles: Printing on Fabric opens December 10 @newberrylibrary.bsky.social!
www.newberry.org/calendar/pri...
#linen #DeansRagBooks #ABC

“Was no great thing”

THE MORALITY Of SHAKESPEARE's DRAMA ILLUSTRATED. By [the infamous] MRS. GRIFFITH.

HENRY THE SIXTH. THIRD PART. [was no great thing]

DAVID GARRICK, Efq. [a slayer]

THE TAMING O F THE S H R E W. [Easy as taming a monky]

I’m loving the attitude in the marginalia to this copy of Griffith’s Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated (1775).

Expect the record-setting cold Philadelphia has experienced in recent days to continue for the next six weeks (😭), at least according to Punxsutawney Phil.

🔗 www.inquirer.com/news/pennsyl...

One of my most cherished classes is my 18th century novels course where the primary learning objective is "learn how read long novels." We did a "couch to 5k" approach to attention span and note-taking.

Blueskeets of the @rsaorg.bsky.social persuasion, I hope you'll save the date for 3 excellent book history-digital humanities panels at the conf
Thurs 9-10:30 Collections as Data
Thurs 11-12:30 Network, Media, Method
Fri 2:30-4 Preserving Greek Texts
Details: rsa.confex.com/rsa/2026/mee...

I love how Philly shows up

Sharpie, colored paper, and sandwich boards have become resistance art at the President’s House site.

“I hope people will think about what other information is under threat of being disappeared,” said one Philly-area resident.

🔗 www.inquirer.com/news/philade...

One substantial bonus to of getting involved in this #dhmakes / #booklab world is incredible mail days

A batch of prints from the indomitable @literaturegeek.bsky.social arrived & are headed to spots of prominence around @skeuomorphpress.org (though I may claim the Moby Dick print for my office…

Please Don’t Say Mean Things about the AI That I Just Invested a Billion Dollars In “[Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang Is Begging You to Stop Being So Negative About AI” — Headline from Gizmodo - - — Guys, enough is enough. Bullying is a s...

"There’s an extremely hurtful narrative going around that my product, a revolutionary new technology that exists to scam the elderly and make you distrust anything you see online, is harmful to society."

A zine documenting the National Park Service’s “Life Under Slavery at George Washington House” exhibit—removed by the government January 22, 2026 in an act of censorship (zinebakery.com/bakeshop/cen...)

Dr. Ann Blair - How Renaissance Scholars and Printers Decided on the Size of Books YouTube video by Harry Ransom Center

If you missed Ann Blair’s @ransomcenter.bsky.social Pforzheimer Lecture last night, you can check it out on YouTube:

www.youtube.com/live/u16QHaI...

I think you’ll agree that it’s both sharp and a lot of fun.