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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

But I'm always happy to see Iberia on the up, anyway!

Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Thanks, that makes sense. One big difference between the US and the UK for late antique seems to be how much of this stuff is taught directly out of religions departments, with the expectations for languages/methodology that comes with that. I wonder if that bleeds through to medieval history hires.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Also remarkably European/Mediterranean. Or is that just normal? Struck me as interesting on first glance.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Thanks. Sad, but not the worst outcome.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Is Late Antique, Islamic, and Byzantine Studies gone, too?

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

The refurb of the Sydney Jones this summer has really hammered home to me how much of a necessary research tool open stack are. (And tbh the SJ ones are usually remarkably good).

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

There's some old school heat in Gregorian Reform (mainly in French)

French article title reading: 'De quelques assertions fausses, outrancières ou déraisonnables. À propos de la réforme "grégorienne" et de la méthode historique'.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Note that Barry tried to fund St Benet's Hall when it was in financial difficulties, but was turned down by the university because they had fears regarding the proposed funding's impact on the Hall's academic independence. www.cherwell.org/2022/10/14/u...

cherwell.org

University refused St Benet's £40m lifeline...but why? - Cherwell

The University of Oxford blocked a £40 million rescue offer to keep St Benet's Hall open this summer. Instead it closed on 7th October 2022

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

The Canterbury Institute derives at least some of its funding from the John and Daria Barry Foundation (US hedge fund wealth). The Barry Scholarships, at least, come from this source.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Pharos is at least partly funded by Paul Marshall, acc. to this useful piece. www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-p...

Chart showing the donations of Paul Marshall, including £700k to the Pharos Foundation, via the Sequoia Trust.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

I read a successful cover letter from a colleague (who will remain anonymous) that was six pages. I do not recommend this! (But clearly wasn't a deal breaker).

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

My sense is that the two page rule is long gone in practice (though everyone still pays lip service to it when giving advice). People I know who've served on recent job panels in Lpool told me that three pages is perfectly normal. (A recent job I applied for in Ldn said "no more than four pages").

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Yes, and I think leadership in history departments should lean into the fact that part of what makes our discipline unique is its attention to the deep past - to the long flow of time. Fighting over the same presentist policy-focused issues as e.g. pol sci seems like a losing game.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

I wonder how much of the business school boom in the UK was propped up by international recruitment, and was therefore very vulnerable to political pressure around immigration.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

(I'm always stuck by how Whiggish most historians' accounts of their own disciplines is, contrary to their sensibilities in other areas of history).

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Yes, this rings true. He's also right to see this across departments, too. I think that a lot of people's professional identity is bound up in being a modernizing force, whatever that entails, against old, unreconstructed academic culture, and we can too easily get bunched in with the ancien regime.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Yeah, it's a point the BA reports make: there's no joined up thinking on any of this. The only solid research route now is to go for big grants and work from there.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

I'd love to see that data, too. Premodern modules do fine in Liverpool, from what I can tell. I don't know about other places. Tbh I'm not sure that a lot of UK HE management is even pretending to be balancing the needs of research against teaching when it comes to the humanities these days.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Yes, that's definitely true, esp. on dissertations (I wrote mine on the 20th c. fwiw). I think that most depts, when talking to students, are very keen to highlight choice, rather than to make the case that people should range widely across the chronology.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

And partly, of course, that people just don't read across the whole field as much anymore, so they don't really have a read on what is new, exciting work. Re: British history, I really don't know. Oxford has Brit hist baked into the curriculum, but most places don't, afaik.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Re: Hist dpts, there does seem to have been a real loss of faith in supporting pre-modern work. Its partly that it doesn't align easily with UKRI priorities (around impact outside of academia, policy, etc.); partly that our colleagues sometimes see us (wrongly) as a conservative phalanx.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Yeah, there's a lot of people jumping from sinking ships at the moment in UK HE. So, most jobs that come up actually result in a net loss of positions in the field. (E.g. the two big jobs this year, the KCL and the Oxford one, both went to already perm ppl; unclear if either will be replaced).

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Interestingly, ancient history seems to have held up better. There have been a number of late antique hires in Classics/Ancient World depts in that time (e.g. jobs teaching Latin/Greek that happen to have gone to good LA researchers). Tells you a lot about the priorities of History depts.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

In our little field, it's a very recent phenom. There were a few hires in 2021 (the year I entered the job mrkt). But since them, I think no history department has permanently hired any pre-1000 Europe/Mediterranean historian who wasn't previously perm elsewhere. There's one exception: Glasgow 2023.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Ah right, yes that makes sense. I suppose that it's exacerbated in the US by not having mandatory retirement (which is rare here, but used at Oxbridge and St Andrews). Here, I don't think there are many very geriatric dpts; there was some decent hiring in the 2010s. But it's dropped fast since 2020.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

More than the UK, or more than previous periods of recent US history?

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Someone on here pointed out a while ago that Harvard's lit department currently has *zero* assistant profs for precisely that reason. These figures are about the UK, and I def know of some very top-heavy departments. There are usually also ECRs around, but on external grants or temp teaching gigs.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Also anecdotally, I know that VCs like to announce '200th anniversary profs' and the like. I wonder if central unis are doing more of this.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Could have done. I'm not well informed on the politics of senior posts tbh. Anecdotally, I've noticed a couple of very top-heavy departments lately when I've been applying for jobs. It might partly be a cohort effect (i.e. people hired in times of relative abundance are coming of age).

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

And of course, some jobs just *are* professorships. E.g. the Chichele Prof. of Medieval History. I think they could hire whoever they want for a post like that, and they would be a prof. by virtue of having the job.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

I *think* that's the rule of thumb in Oxford, though Oxford is unusual. Each uni will have its own processes (I know someone in Liverpool who just got Senior Lecturer status off the back of their second book). I think that, in general, it is common for very good scholars to never become profs.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

(Of course, one question is how much it is a case of a large cohort of junior/mid-career people becoming senior, versus new senior posts being established, as noted in the thread. I don't know the answer to this.)

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Really remarkable stats. The point about senior posts surprised me. I can envisage a situation in 10-20 yrs time where e.g. endowed professorships continue to advertise, but the cohort of research-focussed mid-career people ready to step up is basically non-existent. Academic quality will collapse.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

I grew up in Leeds and only really heard that word a few times, though it's definitely out there. Leodensian is a nicer term imo. Very rare to hear it, but it's known to my generation through a Kaiser Chiefs lyric.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

They had a very weak attempt at a rebrand in 2022!

The FT's 'How to Spend It' rebrands as HTSI, with alternative readings of the S given as 'style', 'surf', 'save', etc.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

He was thinking about US college admissions in particular. He wanted to add a lottery element into the process, partly for the basic moral reason that those who win out should be forced to reckon with the fact that it was not all their own doing.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Michael Sandel was doing the rounds a few years ago arguing that meritocratic ways of thinking can have bad side-effects, inasmuch as they occlude the role of luck and make people think that unequal outcomes are deserved.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Have you seen this piece by P.E. Dutton? It's an account of a 9th c. scribe accompanying military forces on campaign in "Hunnia", all based on a single colophon. The Desert War of a Carolingian Monk | Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies | Duke University Press share.google/hwsRD5lbFEVv...

share.google

The Desert War of a Carolingian Monk

How small can microhistorians go? The article proposes the advantages of “particle history,” the intense investigation of small, often isolated and dislocated fragments, and how they connect to the wo...

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Reposted by Dave Addison

Fernand Peloux @fpeloux.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

Parution en ligne des actes d'une journée d'étude (2024) sur les échanges de textes entre les péninsules ibérique et italienne dans le haut Moyen Âge, à l'occasion du centenaire de la naissance de Manuel Díaz y Díaz. www.mirabileweb.it/edgalluzzo/m...

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

This is a truly wild ride. A professor of economics claiming that AI is working class liberation. Hmmm. wonkhe.com/blogs/ai-sha...

And here is where the class dimension becomes unavoidable: wealthier students have always had access to human “AI” – private tutors, professional editors, writing coaches. The university’s AI policy effectively punishes working-class students for accessing the free version of what wealth has always bought.

The defence of this model often claims that “writing and idea development are interconnected.” But this argument privileges a specific type of complexity, the kind that aligns with Western academic traditions. It dismisses other forms of knowledge as lesser. Bob Marley was not a great writer in the academic sense, but he demonstrated through song that he was capable of profound philosophical thought. No-one listens to Redemption Song and thinks it would be better as a peer-reviewed journal article.

The university’s insistence that writing and thinking are inseparable is not a pedagogical truth, it is epistemological imperialism that has mistaken the technology of one culture for universal human cognition.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

I had no idea how embedded it was until the recent outage!

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

Getting universities to reduce reliance on Microsoft/Amazon Web Services etc. will be like trying to turn round an oil tanker. But I do hope this moment will begin to catalyse something.

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

The second point is definitely true. Relatedly, a distaste for overt, suited professionalism. Truer of some universities than others ...

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Dave Addison @daveaddison.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

In my experience this happens a lot more in England than the US. I'm not sure what follows.

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