iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Terrific slide from Kathleen Thelen’s talk at the EUI today. Makes me wistful.

PowerPoint slide showing mid-20th century newspaper caricatures against discount retailers.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

This was a wild find for 1€ and dated AF but still bittersweet in our current zeitgeist.

Cover of the album Do They Know it’s Christmas from 1984.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

We know this tool does nothing and no one wants it but maybe lets just use it and whatever.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

At least they are being cut with eloquence and grace.

A clip from the article, with the quote: "And again, for a lot of conversation - and rightfully so - in higher ed about never facing those tougher questions about what we're not going to do, moving forward, I think here's an example where the recommendation at this point, from the group looking at this, was to try to do
that," Knuffman said at the November meeting.“

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

Wright’s “letter to his neighbours” after his partner’s death is something… www.pbs.org/kenburns/fra...

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

As part of the Kerry James Marshall exhibition, today I learned this.

Museum text for a painting by Kerry James Marshall. It reads “ Julian Carlton was a Black servant from Barbados who worked at Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Taliesin estate in Wisconsin. In 1914, Carlton set the architect's house on fire and murdered seven people, including Wright's partner, Mamah Borthwick, and their two children. In this painting, Marshall invents a fictional actor to stand in for Carlton, creating a level of distance from this instance
of violence.”

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

It’s also fine to decide that this is not where one wants to be.

Excerpt from the linked substack post which reads “ Especially for non-archivist and non-librarian users like me, interested in transcribing our own research collections of a few images up to tens of thousands, wanting flexibility and control of work flows, and the ability to summarise and enrich those transcriptions on the fly as part of our historical research.”

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 16/11/2025

Sunday mornings are always awful on here - UK news routinely drops something on HE and refugees. But for some reason I find it especially hard to take today. Maybe it’s the extra smattering of Epstein et. al. Get outside folks.

An irregularly paved road descends through narrow high walls, with greenery overhead.

Hillside view, looking upwards, at fields, stands of cypress, crowned by umbrella pines and a stone tower.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

Saw this today, forever changed, no big deal. I do have news for the guide, though. 150 000 francs in 1936/7 (what Picasso was paid) was not that much in today’s money - something around 75 000Euro, I think. (Still fine, I suppose…but we aren’t talking 1910s francs…)

A photo of Picasso’s painting, Guernica, in the Museo Reina Sophía, Madrid.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

The history department bulletin board crammed with no fewer than 12 PhD defenses in the next six weeks. 2 history PhDs a week out into the world! That’s a lot of great research.

A whiteboard covered in posters advertising seminars and announcing upcoming PhD defenses.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

Please consider this news in light of statements like these from the ostensible heights of Canadian politics. The Daily News is a lifesaver for news from the Left. Take a listen!

A CBC news story in which Pierre Poilievre claims Christians may be the group most victimized by hate crimes in Canada.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

There are some things I really admire about Italy, like these spontaneous demonstrations in piazze all over the country right now.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

Sometimes good things still happen in the 3$ bin at the Salvation Army. (Sadly libretto *not* enclosed.)

The battered cover of the two-disc London recording of Jesus Christ Superstar.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

This is how trees grow where I’m from, how about you?

A dense growth of coastal spruce trees known as tuckamore, trunks and boughs entangled.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

When Air Canada stewards strike (full support!) and you’re stranded for the foreseeable, seek caloric comfort in the local delicacies.

A cocktail and snacks - Hawkins Cheezies and Vienna Sausages - on a deck railing in front of a small Atlantic bay.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

There’s a whole field out here barely holding the line and this is what our guild representatives spit out. y.yarn.co/fcffc5a3-606...

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

Found the world’s most delightful museum and it’s Skissernas - a museum dedicated to sketches and preparatory works of public art. A little jewel that bowled me over. A fascinating way to think about creative process as well as the relationship between art and the public in the 20th century.

Photo of an interior corner of a large museum space with paintings on two walls and ceiling, and a series of twentieth-century sculptures in the middle of the room.

A figurative sculpture of mother and child intended for outdoor display, on a podium in a corner of an interior museum gallery. The walls behind are covered floor to ceiling in twentieth-century paintings of varied sizes.

A panel from Diego Rivera’s “Portrrait of America” entitled “A New Deal”, from 1933-34. It shows a violent strike scene.

The international gallery of the Skissernas museum, showing three painting-covered walls with sculptures occupying the centre of the room. Works include large sketches by Matisse, public murals by Delaunay, and ceramics by Léger.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

And there’s more - no wonder there is a packed house here this morning.

Orsi Husz presenting on the performative power of statistics on “feminine finance” in postwar Sweden, showing a slide with female statistical researcher behind the front page of a financial gazette.

James Taylor presenting the work of female stockbrokers in nineteenth-century Britain, next to a slide showing Amy Bell defending women’s interest in finance, stating “I want to make women understand their money matters, and take a pleasure in dealing with them. After all, is money such a sordid consideration?”

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

If you’re going to talk about women and finance, take advantage of the gorgeous visuals! Wonderful morning double panel on women and financial history.

Slides from a joint presentation on women’s financial activities in Italy and Spain by Stefania Licini and Susana Martinez-Rodriguez, showing a colourful portrait of a wealthy nineteenth century woman.

Slide from the conclusion of Susan Ingalls Lewis’s presentation that reads in part: “Conclusion: Finally I realized that women financed everything”

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

Perfect and delightful slide from Orsi Husz and David Larsson Heidenblad on turning wage earners (or are they taxpayers) into investors in modern Sweden.

PowerPoint slide showing a working man in the centre, happily holding his cash savings (or investment profits?) thanks to Swedish banking schemes to save in exchange for lower tax penalties.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

This is a very good opening to the World Economic History Congress. Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk Keynote on it intersectional political economy.

A screen showing the opening slide for a presentation entitled “Gender, Race, Class, and Care Work: Toward Intersectional Political Economics”.

Keynote speaker Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk in front of a presentation slide showing Amartya Sen on production and social reproduction.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

Look at these registers - which are already a database! Highly accessible! In person and online!

A screenshot from the Guardian article showing two pages of a census record, with lists of handwritten names and addresses in tabular form.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

I waited until the very last day - in fact, the last hour - to run to the Tracy Emin “Sex and Solitude” show at the Palazzo Strozzi and it was a pure delight. Dithered because UK, been there, etc. But very privileged to see it - it felt so meaningful in that place, and in this city.

A wall in Emin’s 1996 Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, showing paintings and drawings, including the text “I want to fuck the world / cunt international / that was yesterday / today I want to die”

Emin’s calico embroidery “No Distance” from 2016, depicting a line drawing of a female figure in black and dark blue.

Emin’s print “Like the Moon you Rolled Across my Back” (2022) in black, white, and grey, showing a crawling female form.

Large bronze entitled “I followed you to the end” (2024). Evokes a crawling female form, situated in the middle of a slate courtyard in a renaissance building.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

Reading early Atwood and I have got to say that the nearly animalistic feminism and the rollicking anti-Americanism are deeply compelling.

The cover of a paperback novel called Surfacing by Margaret Atwood. A line drawing of a female figure is seen from the side, guiding a canoe through shallow water.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

Ending a fantastic trip to Berlin for the @globalurbanhistory.bsky.social conference with just enough time to see this wonder.

Artist Paul Klee’s drawing of an angel, with curled hair, pointed teeth, and hands that morph into wings.

Small handwritten notes by Walter Benjamin, a draft of his 9th thesis from Concept of History.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

Today in Livorno I went straight to the Monumento dei Quattro Mori (on the direction of @moualdi.bsky.social). Then saw this terrific communist poster reproduced in the (surprisingly excellent?) city museum. Thoroughly impressed.

A statue featuring a top male figure in white marble on a base with four dark bronze chained figures at its corners.

An Italian communist party magazine cover from the 1970s featuring slogans against NATO and an image of the Quattro Mori monument with anti-US political signs.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

And they need to get Robert Caro’s name out of their unworthy mouths.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

Closing day of rich discussions on the history and present-day life of the Haitian debt. Coinciding with important signs that things are capable of changing. www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/16/dossi...

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

The EUI hosted a moving and probing conversation with Didier Fassin yesterday about moral abdication and Gaza. It is a disquieting satisfaction to hear such clear thinking on this devastating topic.

Spotlit stage in a darkened room, on which Didier Fassin and interviewers are seated, facing one another on sofas.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

I am not sorry to report I have finished the sandwich I swore I would only eat half of. It was so salty and so irresistible.

A lap covered with bread crumbs and salt, soon to be shaken to the ground for the stalking pigeons.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

I accept the horrible unsalted Tuscan bread because they save it all to bury the top of their schiacciata.

The crusty top of a half-eaten sandwich, with large salt crystals visible across the greasy , delicious surface.

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Alexia Yates @ayates.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

The Business History Working Group hosted a dynamic series of presentations on property history at @eui-history.bsky.social today. But the importance of Dr. Sreemati Mitter’s research on the theft of Palestinian financial property horribly evident as part of this catastrophe.