iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 30/09/2026

But have you considered that some humanities types are ANNOYING???

Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 30/09/2026

HAHA CHECKMATE LIBERAL ARTS 2 BAD PEOPLE WHO MET AT LAW SCHOOL MEANS THAT LIBERAL ARTS ARE JUST AS BAD AS THE VAST NUMBER OF TECH BRO FASCISTS

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 28/09/2026

looking through the 2027 @historians.org program and this will be an interesting roundtable #medievalsky aha.confex.com/aha/2027/web...

Feudalism: The Utility of a Construct
Elena Shadrina, Princeton
Stephanie Leitzel, Cornell
L. M. Bondioli, Harvard
Frederik Buylaert, Ghent
Adam J. Kosto, Columbia
Stephanie Leitzel, Cornell
Abigail Sargent-Loy, Central Connecticut State

This roundtable will address the utility of the concept of feudalism for the study of medieval Europe and for comparative history more broadly. Once foundational to interpretations of medieval society, political economy, and institutional development, feudalism has fallen out of favor among medievalists in recent decades. Critiqued as overly schematic, anachronistic, or insufficiently attentive to regional variation, the term has often been set aside altogether. Rather than attempting to revive feudalism as a totalizing ideal type, this session seeks to reopen debate by reflecting on its potential as a comparative and analytical tool. Bringing together scholars of legal and institutional history and political economy working on premodern Europe and West Asia, the roundtable will use feudalism as a heuristic that may help historians integrate diverse strands of inquiry – economic, social, legal, and cultural – to develop a more holistic approach to the study of the past. Moving beyond historiographic debates that treat questions of lordship, vassalage, landholding, and jurisdiction as discrete institutional or cultural phenomena, the discussants will consider how the notion of feudalism can help root these in contemporary material conditions and labor regimes, foregrounding the intrinsic links between property, production, politics, and power. The participants will also ask how a critically formulated and historically grounded understanding of feudalism may help us identify parallel features in otherwise distinct societies, as well as whether, and how, feudalism can be meaningfully distinguished from other socioeconomic arrangements such as capitalism.

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 28/09/2026

You gotta read these things to Ashokan Farewell

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 27/09/2026

This is funny in ways they don’t realize

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 23/09/2026

the article lives in this great volume (mostly in German) on "political medievalism." all the articles are open access though, so go download it! www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 23/09/2026

please to see that my latest academic article is out now: "Ghost in the Machine. Crusade Medievalisms in the 21st-century United States" I take on the ghost of Samuel Huntington and some right-wing tropes in scholarship open access so free to read --> www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 22/09/2026

Hell yes let’s gooooooooo @jtpmedieval.bsky.social #medievalsky Preorder —> bookshop.org/p/books/char...

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 18/09/2026

basically this bit from the article

The medievalism of castlecore offers people, especially women, a way to critique this tech-bro futurism without directly engaging the politics of the moment, which not everyone wants to do, especially on social media. What’s more, it’s a way to engage in a kind of history that points toward a different kind of world, without being accused of being Luddites or becoming toxic nostalgics. This is a different way of using historical aesthetics than what you see from the tradwife community, which takes nostalgia for an imagined past seriously, or at least projects seriousness as part of its propaganda tool. Here, the sense of play, the silliness, and even the dragon-themed sex toys of castlecore signal differently.

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 16/09/2026

this is extremely helpful, colleague. thank you.

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 14/09/2026

buddy, I'm glad you've sat through meetings (maybe even more than me in my 20+ years!) but it actually is quite simple that there are people who are involved in the process of education (faculty and students) & then a professionalized class of higher ed admins who are in "workforce development"

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 10/09/2026

just the dumbest fucking shit. is this 2011?

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 08/09/2026

using this slide in my intro medieval world lecture today

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 07/09/2026

Counterpoint: do not try to be like JD Vance, one of the most unpopular people on the country

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 06/09/2026

It’s spooky season 💀🦇🎃

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 05/09/2026

sharing again for the weekend crowd. the humanities aren't in crisis, they're under attack -- because they're dangerous to people in power, because they ask their students to imagine possible worlds.

from the article: "Our tendency to see religion as a matter of personal, interiorized belief has led us to view its study as intellectually niche—or, to put it in neoliberal corporate speak—as a “low-skill” distraction. This is true of how we view the Humanities in general, of course—that, as Lauren Horn Griffin has so well explained, they’re seen as little more than “personal enrichment.” But that, she continues, is a right-wing act of controlling unruly ideas, of pushing to the margins disciplines that ask difficult questions of “invisible” power structures—say they’re irrelevant, deny them resources, call them “unprofitable,” make them disappear. But faculty, especially but not exclusively in Religion and other Humanities disciplines, often work directly against these forces. Because the discipline of Religion is attuned to issues of (presumed) interiority as well as actions in the public sphere, it’s these faculty who are some of the best situated to ask uncomfortable questions of those in power—be they federal policymakers or university administrators.

At (regional) public universities like ours, this means highlighting a population that is quite different by class, race, gender, and sexuality than found at, for example, the Ivies. Humanities education, including Religious Studies, helps inure students to authoritarian thinking. At their best, the Humanities are attentive to the frictions that create lived experiences—particularly those that are oftentimes marginalized. The Humanities explain how things have been different, could have been different, could be different now, and may be different in the future. They are about possible worlds."

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 03/09/2026

this is what I'm using my CMS for this semester

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 03/09/2026

I like this bit especially because it's true

Our tendency to see religion as a matter of personal, interiorized belief has led us to view its study as intellectually niche—or, to put it in neoliberal corporate speak—as a “low-skill” distraction. This is true of how we view the Humanities in general, of course—that, as Lauren Horn Griffin has so well explained, they’re seen as little more than “personal enrichment.” But that, she continues, is a right-wing act of controlling unruly ideas, of pushing to the margins disciplines that ask difficult questions of “invisible” power structures—say they’re irrelevant, deny them resources, call them “unprofitable,” make them disappear. But faculty, especially but not exclusively in Religion and other Humanities disciplines, often work directly against these forces. Because the discipline of Religion is attuned to issues of (presumed) interiority as well as actions in the public sphere, it’s these faculty who are some of the best situated to ask uncomfortable questions of those in power—be they federal policymakers or university administrators.

At (regional) public universities like ours, this means highlighting a population that is quite different by class, race, gender, and sexuality than found at, for example, the Ivies. Humanities education, including Religious Studies, helps inure students to authoritarian thinking. At their best, the Humanities are attentive to the frictions that create lived experiences—particularly those that are oftentimes marginalized. The Humanities explain how things have been different, could have been different, could be different now, and may be different in the future. They are about possible worlds.

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 02/09/2026

I am very skeptical. I mean with this error rate it makes most of this useless!

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 29/08/2026

Pancakes waffles in the wild

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 27/08/2026

Welcome to Bluesky. Please familiarize yourself with the following accounts to understand the range of opinions it is acceptable to express

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 27/08/2026

I wish for 5 seconds some of you would stop being fucking wreckers and shills for Fox News and read something. You're the only ones who care about Piker and his dumbass shit.

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 27/08/2026

It’s also great because this guy is just doing Fox News talking points to attack the Dems

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 27/08/2026

doing one of my first lectures for my survey of the medieval world and included this slide for @lollardfish.bsky.social

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 25/08/2026

Maybe maybe you dumb middle school lunch table fuck you’re not the center of the universe

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 25/08/2026

Horrifying AI slop & college date rape spot just dropped

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 25/08/2026

We’re just feeding people to the CTE machine

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 24/08/2026

further update! I DO NOT agree with this take in the new translation. Freaking yikes. Donatists were not "like the racists of their day."

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 20/08/2026

some of you need to read theory

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 20/08/2026

Extremely tired of people who profit from this telling the rest of the world that it’s inevitable and no you’re the myopic one

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 19/08/2026

also, final (?) thought, that we absolutely should change how a lot of humanities/ social sciences teach & integrate the study of religion into history/ lit/ politics/ etc we don't have to do the 1890s German/ 1970s/80s UK & American academic thing of segmenting off religion from other disciplines

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