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Claude Willan

@claudewillan.bsky.social
1.4K followers 1K following 4.3K posts

Associate Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in English Studies at Durham. Opinions are mine alone but probably should also be those of my employer. Dad account.

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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Deep truths in my WhatsApp this evening, in response to my asking how in earth I afforded so much alcohol as a young person
Nobody young realises how expensive kids and rent and adulthood and teeth and cats and phones and electricity and pain au chocolat and parking tickets are
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Since arriving in the UK my American children have tried every Mac and cheese available for purchase in the country. The only ones they approve are those made by Dominos and, I discover this evening ... Waitrose.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Just another Wednesday afternoon in my mouth. See if you can spot the massive hole.
An x-ray of teeth showing a gigantic, enormous cavity.
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Caroline Dodds Pennock @carolinepennock.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Ditto 30,000 roles in universities in the past three years.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
If you could freeze the internet at one point in time, and you had to take all the losses and gains that that involved, no hybridisation etc, what year would you pick? I'll start: 1997
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I have this postit note on my desk that says "LINK ROT" but I don't remember why
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
I am convening an MA course in Qualitative DH and I would love to offer students a reading that sketched out what the emerging community and conversation was like in and around the Other Site we don't use any more, during its halcyon days (12-19?). Does anyone know of a piece that does this?
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Why would you get married... in the cricket season? they wheeze
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
It's striking, listening to Phil Tufnell, how many tricks he has to hide how very clever he is.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Hmm, muses Jonathan Agnew, is this a squall? Or merely a sea-fret?
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
I know I'm not Australian because it makes me rather sad to see Pakistan having such a rough time of it today.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Unsurprisingly, this message will not reach command-and-control UK universities like my own. But I don't see another route that allows our degree-granting institutions to retain any credibility at the moment: www.highereddive.com/news/ai-can-...
highereddive.com
AI can complete ‘almost’ all written assignments for MIT undergrads, report says
To adapt, faculty must be able to quickly update their curriculum without “multi-committee, year-long review processes,” a university committee said.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
If theres a more strangely humiliating life stage than sellotaping over the snick in the plastic of a brand new half gallon of milk, please dont tell me
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
My best, most-ungiveable, advice to young people would be that, when your heart is getting broken over and over for a period, as it will, do it around music you'll have no particular interest in twenty years' time.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
The greatness of Danny Elfman's performance as Skeleton Jack owes to his decision to cast Jacques Brel in the role of King of Undead with absolute sincerity.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Autocomplete is the self-playing video of text. There is a simple joy to typing in a field with no autocomplete.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
A pinhole projector is still an amazing piece of technology.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
I could not more decisevely signal being in my 40s than by putting on Modern Life is Rubbish, which came out when I was 10, and cleaning the bathroom.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Has anyone written the essay about The Fold in Tristram Shandy? Surely someone has, right?
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Discovering, for the third time, Glenn Gould's recording Brahms' Intermezzos. I find it really moving to hear Brahms thinking so carefully and penetratingly about ideas and their embedding, or being ironised in, other structures. And his ideas are often so beautiful.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
There are two types of people on this earth; people who have never read Russell Hoban, and people who are _begging_ you to read Russell Hoban.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Because I slightly know myself, I am not a gambler. But if I were, I'd put a big chunk of disposable income on Harry Brook being next Captain of the England Test side. 🧵
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
New bookshop in Durham! Verdigris Books in Covered Market. I don't really have any money. But everyone wants new local indie shops to stick around, and that takes money. But they have a phenomenal selection, as you can see.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Rumbling through Jerusalem as i do the dishes tonight, allergies taken my tenor to a baritone. It's insane that Blake's poem became institutionalised as it did. Probably because Parry inflected Blake's rage with nostalgia; perfect accompaniment for -- description of -- self-pity in a dying empire.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
This is what I'm saying!
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
You can learn a lot about a certain, precious fraying thread of English character by listening to the BBC's coverage of an England test match. You hear your team get methodically crushed, while seasoned, lifelong pros tell you all about it. Not for minutes, or hours, or a day, but for five days.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
Has the Beinecke flogged its digitised mss to Sage? Am I having a stroke here?
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Hearing the TMS try to contain their laughter at Zaltzman is so lovely.
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Siobhan Thompson @vornietom.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Ah, the humble mashed banana. Nature’s jam, they call it
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
My 5 y.o. has a new category system for understanding bad guys: "probably funny actually" and the irredeemable "too tough to hug"
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
I can't with the world some days, man. My seven y.o. downloaded pokemon go to the family tablet literally last night. He is so excited about it.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
"Epithalamium To Our New Critical Freedoms" (derogatory)
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 07/06/2026
Just remembered that Ian Dury played DeFlores in a 1998 film of _The Changeling_ and that he wore ?eight thimbles? on his fingers, which he would tap grotesquely during his soliloquys. Thanks, the 90s. You were, in some ways, a wonderful place.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 07/06/2026
New hair-slice just splintered: exam scripts from students who have used AI that they "genuinely" write like it, but who did actually write their own exams
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
It is absolutely wild, given his overall career (which is, whatever you think of him, ... striking) that Stanley Fish's most durable legacy is, and should be, as an interpreter of Milton
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Gooseberry (ready for Spring 🌷) @eisforenkidu.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
Yes people who can't get medicated for ADHD for whatever reason often either turn to cigarettes or just drink exorbitant amounts of coffee.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Nothing like the great marking crisis of 2026 to make me go through and eat every expired yoghurt in the fridge
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LRB Bookshop @londonreviewbookshop.co.uk · 03/06/2026
eavesdropping on a couple of english lit academics in st. john, i overheard confirmation of what is surely going to be the biggest literary news story of the year
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Is anyone running oral exams in English Literature courses, and how has it gone for you? I'm now halfway through marking, and it is an utter bloodbath. I can't do this again, or, I need to believe that alternatives to this broken metric are possible.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
I mean, surely the reason that there's good conservative art but that MAGA hasn't made any is that pound eliot etc are still fundementally propositional? MAGA adherents don't have anything to propose; they aren't "conservative"; just _being_ in MAGA is doing what artwork would do otherwise
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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
not entirely surprised that the person leading this effort has also been a hard driver of the AHA’s anti-Palestine politics
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Omar Wasow @owasow.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Simile Vanilli
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
new gasp of horror unlocked students writing "premium" to mean inaccessible
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
As a people, we are not tremendously gifted at heat. Likewise, something tells me that the norms of UK journalism are ill-adapted to high-density periods of ill-considered swimming. There's something achingly English in a sweet, lame, L. P. Hartley way about "getting into difficulties".
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
If you don't work in the academy and want to know why academics in the UK are all so bloody miserable -- apart from AI! -- you should really read Collini's piece. It's a service for him to have laid out the structural crisis as clearly and succinctly as he has here. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
lrb.co.uk
Stefan Collini · Squadrons of Pigs: Bonfire of the Universities
The problems with Britain’s universities are systemic and deep-rooted, not just local or contingent. Yet political and...
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
A strong irony here is that the descriptive text for this study is itself slop.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
Half-term. Kid asks to watch tv, runs off to pee. I move from my marking stack of slop exams to turn it on. Al-Jazeera. I watch a woman crawl along the ground in the dirt and then get blown up. I switch on Pokemon. My kid comes back in. Parenting in 2026.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
I think I wish that the university worked the way students think that it works. Where professors can take actions, for instance.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
The very best scripts on this module I'm moderating were, I'm fairly sure, written by humans, and it is poignant to think that exciting, subtle, risk-taking, thoughtful and masterly work like this is going to be, quite sensibly, foreclosed, quite soon. 21-yr-olds won't get to do that anymore.
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