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Claude Willan

@claudewillan.bsky.social
1.4K followers 1K following 4.4K 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 · 13/10/2026
It is striking that by comparison to what is coming, what you have endured thus far is no longer classed as "pain"x
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
I think Rutter saw what Classic FM saw, 10-15 years earlier. But I think about eg Gaelic Blessing and it owes more to Brian Wilson than to Howells.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Thankfully he had not percolated up to Oxford, but a prep school was saturated with it. Public school had some. The Victoriana of Harris-Dyson-C V Stanford (and later Howells) had Oxford in a chokehold relieved mostly by Byrd at one end and Langlais at the other
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
I grew up singing a fair amount of Rutter in the 90s, a kind of Lloyd Webber of Protestantism; I think he is a devious and skilful hack who debased the choral popular imagination and set the mould for eg Whitacre
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Which of her published work was this?
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
jfc why even try you know
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
you know what you make a good point here are you sure the committee saw this in time
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
There's a piece in float about the artist who cuts holes in buildings -- and Joan of Arc -- and Zeus -- and Wally -- and gloves -- she reaches more deeply into a very particularly-shaped ideational space than any poet writing today.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
My Anne Carson post is that there really are some new forms, in Nox and Float especially; she finds spaces in material and materiality that are not otherwise, to my knowledge accessible. I never thought that this would happen and I'm so very very pleased it did.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Please, Peter! We are incentivising transformable deliverables-first partnerships with the military and AI sectors for all humanities scholars* ... what else do you understand by "education"? *this is not made up
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Oh I feel this so deeply.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Given that, as an old-fashioned sort of place we have tended to believe that "writing is a technology that structures consciousness", it seems a bit counterintuitive really to make it impossible for students to learn how to structure their consciousnesses.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
My university appears to be rolling out compulsory AI which is ... I'm going to say it is bad.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I gave mine away to a student who loved it, and I kind of wish I hadn't!
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I remember this! I gave up running events and they were mad.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
It is a wild ride that has stayed with me and has had a huge influence on my critical practice. Enjoy!
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Gosh. "Turn left at the Picasso" was always my mother's anecdote about him. A spent force in the real world, one hopes, but much intangible damage to be held to account for in the past nonetheless.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Some such I imagine they are happier to hit "file" on than others.
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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
Should have done so! Just dropped my brand new phone and it shattered. Plus ça change.
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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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Reposted by Claude Willan
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
Oh I miss blogrolls!
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
presumably "the year before i started to make all that money", right?
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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 · 21/09/2026
"This couple, a butterfly astronaut and a copperplate engraver, have only $880,000 to spend on their dream Brooklyn co-op... is a doorman a _must_?"
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Oof. That's been true for a while but it cuts more and more deeply.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Not so, yozh thrives!
Pictures of a 30-year old stuffed hedgehog
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I'm very excited about this! How do you find it?
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
an iterable methodology!
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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 take them outside sometimes. Apparently the experience of being rained on does some things for plants, esp cacti, that watering doesn't replicate.
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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
My son's beaver troop clear half an acre on the banks of the Wear. Horrible stuff.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
You need the ram of a small HPC cluster to load those
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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 · 18/08/2026
I dare ask. What was it?
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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 · 13/08/2026
I found myself opening a window at the height of the eclipse to hear if they had, again.
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Claude Willan @claudewillan.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Very distinctly. A hot summer afternoon in Belgium suddenly felt like Alpine twilight.
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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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