Iris Long, Scientific Mentor to AIDS Activists, Dies at 92

UNSUNG HERO: Iris Long was an unlikely AIDS activist. A married chemist from Queens, she barely knew any gay people. She joined ACT UP to use her expertise to fight for treatments. May her memory be a blessing.

By Richard Sandomir, w/ a small assist from me.

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/h...

Who's responsible for deadly antisemitism? Everyone will hate the answer A new report makes clear how profoundly both the left and the right have failed to address a growing crisis

I wrote about how 2025 was the deadliest year for Diaspora Jews since 1994, and why everyone on all sides of the political spectrum is getting it wrong. forward.com/opinion/8195...

A turquoise book cover with a orange-red design on the front, Illuminating Media: Transmitting the Renaissance in England, 1400-1550.

Hey hey, it’s now official on Concordia UP’s website, 20% discount code KENNEDY2026 at CUP (CAN) or Chicago (USD, link in next post) for Illuminating Media: Transmitting the Renaissance in England, 1400-1550! concordia.ca/press/illumi...

I spent the morning writing a narrative bibliography of my own work, at least partially to work out where I'm going next: www.williamcarruthers.co.uk/blank-3

I would like a reporter to ask the next politician who invokes the concept of “just war” within a Catholic tradition to explain, just very simply, that doctrine.

Also, for more on the Journal of Epistolary Studies, please see their website here! jes-ojs-utrgv.tdl.org/jes/index

Reposting this with a few hashtags to try and catch more interest! #earlymodern #skystorians #16thc #premodern #bookhistory #materialculture #RenRef #Reformation #medievalsky #medieval

Please feel free to share this, or reach out if you have any questions, comments, or concerns!

Submission guidelines: Please submit a 500-word abstract and a 200 word biography to drbarrytorch@gmail.com and hannah.sparwassersoroka@mail.mcgill.ca with subject line “Journal of Epistolary Studies Submission” by 15 June 2026 for a Fall 2027 publication.

We construe early modernity broadly, and welcome submissions concerning the period 1350-1800. We also look forward to submissions with global perspectives and investigations.

Graphic, textual, and layout choices in epistolary texts and their paratexts
The gendered, racialized, and embodied realities of publication and epistolary culture in early modernity
The economics of early modern epistolarity and print
Critiques of epistolary and paratextual scholarship conventions

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Dedicatory epistles and epistles to the reader
Appended letters
Epistolary material in frontispieces and other illustrations
Letters, their circulation as books of letters, and informal publications
Personal dedications in books

We are interested in thoughtful engagement with historical material, close readings of texts and paratexts, the circulation, networks, and behavior of using epistolary material, and critical reconsiderations and complications of these categories.

In particular, this edition seeks to consider the socio-cultural functions and meanings of epistolary material embedded in print and manuscript culture.

This special edition of The Journal of Epistolary Studies takes up the use of letters as supplements and enhancements to the early modern book writ large, and how epistolary, book, and material culture can and did work together in the early modern world.

#CFP for #earlymodern folks! @hannah-historian.bsky.social and I are putting together a special edition of the Journal of Epistolary Studies on "Letters as Paratexts in the Early Modern World"!

Here to second your suggestion! I have to say, if I ever get a chance to lecture on the Avignon Papacy and/or the Great Schism, “pope-off” would be immensely useful! I might even put it in writing!!!

Designing Our Digital Past: Anchoring Digital-History Tool Development in the Historical Method Through Design-Based History Research Many of the tools digital humanists use have come from a variety of disciplines outside of history. As a consequence, many digital-history methods sections focus on how a tool developed by non-historians might support, or need to be adapted for, particular historical questions. Few digital tools have been developed by and for historians with a specific eye to the methodological and theoretical explorations of design principles that are necessary to anchor digital-history-specific tool development in historiographic practices. This article introduces Design-Based History Research (DBHR) as a methodological bridge between the practices of digital-history tool design, the use of digital methods to create historical argumentation, and social-science-inspired methodological innovation. Design-Based Research (DBR) is an educational-research approach to studying learning theory that supports theory building by integrating theory into the design of new tools and environments, in a manner that allows the designers to rigorously study the theory, and the relationship between the theory and the tools that embody it (Puntambekar, 2018; Sandoval, 2013). In practice, this means that DBR focused on software design incorporates theoretically motivated decisions about user interface features, user activities, and data-structure choices into an initial tool/software-package design and then studies the design package in use as a way of iteratively refining the theoretical principles in each of the tool's design phases. DBHR is an adaptation of the DBR approach, with a theoretical approach grounded in the unique needs of historians and historiographic practices. We aim to illustrate DBHR by describing the design and use of Net.Create, a user-focused network-analysis tool that prioritizes historiographic practices (evidence interpretation, citation preservation, and historiographic debate) in its feature development and user-interface choices (Craig & Danish, 2018). We document how the needs of digital historians shaped the current design of Net.Create, explore the connections between specific tool features and their operation, and delineate how those tool features support the digital-history needs we identified. As part of this iterative-design process, we will also address some of the human-computer-interaction observations, user-entered network data, and qualitative-network-analysis approaches that shaped each stage of our feature development around digital history practices. Our DBHR process ultimately led us to prioritize the development of three features that support and encourage sustained historiographic debate at each phase of a network-analysis digital-history project: simultaneous entry and visualization of capta, data that is gathered and contested rather than downloaded or received, in order to support and encourage historiographic debate during the data-gathering phase and prior to a formal analysis phase easy-to-use revision of network taxonomy and network data, to support interpretation, reinterpretation and re-input of evidence and data by many collaborators simultaneously, synchronously or asynchronously, during the initial analysis phase data provenance features that expose the researchers' positionality and preserve the original citations for each network datapoint, to support the integration of close-reading analytical practices both by the research team and by other historians after the communication of results to a public audience By documenting the historiographic roots of each of these features, we hope to offer a systematic articulation of digital history tool design not simply as software development but as a pathway to the concurrent and intertwined development of historical theory, digital-history tools, and collaborative historical methods.

So excited that eight years of research are now public in the Journal of Digital History: @jdanish and @kalanicraig present a Design‑Based History Research framework and Net.Create, a network analysis tool for digital history.

Also, sorrysorrysorry, JD Vance said, “If you're going to opine on matters of theology, you've got to be careful, you've got to make sure it's anchored in the truth,” TO THE POPE?! THE CATHOLIC POPE?! THE VICAR?! OF CHRIST?! IF YOU ARE GOING TO OPINE ON MATTERS OF THEOLOGY?! Excuse me. As you were.

Oh I’m having the time of my life. This is hilarious.

I don’t think you need to worry about running from the French in this case 😂😂😂😂

Ooooh! Thank you for the recommendation!

But I’ve heard such repeated and wonderful things about your book! ❤️

I'm looking for help building my own schedule and guidance of what to pay attention to when cleaning - a list of daily tasks, guidance on how frequently things need to be cleaned, etc etc

Y'all, I am so tired of being advertised to by the algorithm. Does anybody use a book/guideline/app to maintain a cleaning schedule for an apartment that they *actually trust*?! I keep getting ads to buy this app, or that app, and I'm looking for help that doesn't have a monthly subscription.

The Mar-A-l'Avignon Papacy

Sorry, the Avignon Papacy is in the news!?! My degree in premodern papal history is relevant!!?

BREAKING: Following the American threat of an “Avignon Papacy,” Robert Kennedy has begun a Diet of Worms

all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant

Btw my press funded a small study into best-practices for alt text for illustrations, especially of illustrations of art. The resulting guide is short and clear and available free to download.