Is this discipline specific, or subfield specific? I have initial thoughts that aren't necessarily that critical overall...
October 31, 2026 at 7:59 PM
Is this discipline specific, or subfield specific? I have initial thoughts that aren't necessarily that critical overall...
I found myself, for reasons, trying to figure out how many chairs in modern European intellectual history one would have to endow in order to ensure the survival of the subfield over the next 30 years. I arrived at a half-dozen.
November 2, 2026 at 4:20 PM
I found myself, for reasons, trying to figure out how many chairs in modern European intellectual history one would have to endow in order to ensure the survival of the subfield over the next 30 years. I arrived at a half-dozen.
It certainly seems like the key works in any historical subfield get narrower over time. Mommsen already wrote Romische Staatrecht so we're reduced to, like, 'the role of the urban quaestor in the middle republic on days when the moon was full.'
November 1, 2026 at 1:02 PM
It certainly seems like the key works in any historical subfield get narrower over time. Mommsen already wrote Romische Staatrecht so we're reduced to, like, 'the role of the urban quaestor in the middle republic on days when the moon was full.'
I go through some of the connections in my replies to this but if you're interested in theoretical neuroscience definitely read about stochastic field theory for biology and neural nets. It's a niche subfield rn but it would be cool to see it grow more in my lifetime.
out of curiosity, is there a connection between QFT and your neuroscience research or is it something you're just studying for fun?
November 3, 2026 at 9:14 PM
I go through some of the connections in my replies to this but if you're interested in theoretical neuroscience definitely read about stochastic field theory for biology and neural nets. It's a niche subfield rn but it would be cool to see it grow more in my lifetime.
Ask @shivambhatt.bsky.social ! It is very much a subfield I evacuated from my brain immediately after the relevant final 😆
November 3, 2026 at 9:16 PM
Ask @shivambhatt.bsky.social ! It is very much a subfield I evacuated from my brain immediately after the relevant final 😆
Inspired by Clifford's work here, I did a trial sample for the subfield of Ancient and Medieval Mediterranean Genders & Sexualities drawing from the bibliographies (not content) of 28 open-access PhD dissertations from 2010-2026. Still, some useful insights! anisekstrong.github.io/PremodernMed...
November 1, 2026 at 11:01 PM
Inspired by Clifford's work here, I did a trial sample for the subfield of Ancient and Medieval Mediterranean Genders & Sexualities drawing from the bibliographies (not content) of 28 open-access PhD dissertations from 2010-2026. Still, some useful insights! anisekstrong.github.io/PremodernMed...
if you’re still around tuesday morning, come hang out with metacriticism. i’ll be talking about the roles of hope and imagination in securing any(!) future the subfield might have.
i promise it won’t be as bleak as it sounds!
i promise it won’t be as bleak as it sounds!
November 2, 2026 at 10:49 PM
if you’re still around tuesday morning, come hang out with metacriticism. i’ll be talking about the roles of hope and imagination in securing any(!) future the subfield might have.
i promise it won’t be as bleak as it sounds!
i promise it won’t be as bleak as it sounds!
Obvs, the Harvard skew is problematic, esp overweighting early Christianity; lack of access to any U-Wash dissertations for this subfield distorts the data. Folks who bridge temporal fields are fascinating, tho (Butler again) & the lack of overlap with #WOAH or @womenknowhistory.bsky.social is sad.
November 1, 2026 at 11:01 PM
Obvs, the Harvard skew is problematic, esp overweighting early Christianity; lack of access to any U-Wash dissertations for this subfield distorts the data. Folks who bridge temporal fields are fascinating, tho (Butler again) & the lack of overlap with #WOAH or @womenknowhistory.bsky.social is sad.
One of the coolest things in the world for a scholar is not just to be cited by your colleagues in your subfield that you see at all the conferences but by scholars you’ve never met working far afield from you. Just had that experience, totally unexpected and amazing, in the introduction to this:
The Good Road: A K’iche’ Revolutionary Theopolitics
dukeupress.edu
November 2, 2026 at 9:36 PM
One of the coolest things in the world for a scholar is not just to be cited by your colleagues in your subfield that you see at all the conferences but by scholars you’ve never met working far afield from you. Just had that experience, totally unexpected and amazing, in the introduction to this:
let it out, my dears, it's okay
academia is full of legends who founded whole fields while also going through it. We share the Darwin quotes all the time, but he's not the only one in my own tiny subfield of animal evolution and behavior who got crushed with mental illness and academic struggles:
academia is full of legends who founded whole fields while also going through it. We share the Darwin quotes all the time, but he's not the only one in my own tiny subfield of animal evolution and behavior who got crushed with mental illness and academic struggles:
Nikolaas Tinbergen FRS - Scientists with disabilities | Royal Society
To mark the International Day of People with Disabilities, we’re highlighting the work of scientists with disabilities.
royalsociety.org
November 3, 2026 at 3:35 AM
let it out, my dears, it's okay
academia is full of legends who founded whole fields while also going through it. We share the Darwin quotes all the time, but he's not the only one in my own tiny subfield of animal evolution and behavior who got crushed with mental illness and academic struggles:
academia is full of legends who founded whole fields while also going through it. We share the Darwin quotes all the time, but he's not the only one in my own tiny subfield of animal evolution and behavior who got crushed with mental illness and academic struggles:
Early indications are that the drop in CS tenure line jobs is more like a pivot to AI as the dominant preferred subfield in hiring cra.org/crn/2026/01/...
What Advertised Faculty Searches Reveal About Computer Science Hiring in 2026 - CRN
2026 CS faculty search analysis: Tenure-track hiring drops 33%, with 50% of all open positions focused on AI and Security specializations.
cra.org
November 1, 2026 at 4:55 PM
Early indications are that the drop in CS tenure line jobs is more like a pivot to AI as the dominant preferred subfield in hiring cra.org/crn/2026/01/...
This was a very active subfield in the study of Chinese foreign policy (until the Xi era) if country case studies are of interest?
November 2, 2026 at 7:56 PM
This was a very active subfield in the study of Chinese foreign policy (until the Xi era) if country case studies are of interest?
There are also institutional reasons identifying new "classics" is harder than it it was a generation ago. I can think of a handful of books from the past decade that perhaps warrant elevation, but I don't know whether they have gotten traction outside of their subfield. We're post monoculture.
October 31, 2026 at 9:17 PM
There are also institutional reasons identifying new "classics" is harder than it it was a generation ago. I can think of a handful of books from the past decade that perhaps warrant elevation, but I don't know whether they have gotten traction outside of their subfield. We're post monoculture.
I work in a tiny subfield, but it’s so weird to be part of the old guard now 😅
October 29, 2026 at 6:32 PM
I work in a tiny subfield, but it’s so weird to be part of the old guard now 😅
True, but that’s a small subfield. And other fields read other theory. But the discipline as a whole seems to have ditched theory as a general disposition.You get the Foucault/Scott/Butler citation effects because everybody had to read them, which made them influential across subfields.
November 3, 2026 at 8:05 PM
True, but that’s a small subfield. And other fields read other theory. But the discipline as a whole seems to have ditched theory as a general disposition.You get the Foucault/Scott/Butler citation effects because everybody had to read them, which made them influential across subfields.
Maybe it’s subfield dependent. I don’t know. But perhaps this is why I do not share the visceral anger and preening disdain some people have about LPU/MPU.
November 1, 2026 at 5:28 PM
Maybe it’s subfield dependent. I don’t know. But perhaps this is why I do not share the visceral anger and preening disdain some people have about LPU/MPU.
must depend on the subfield of law? finance gets its ski conferences while some of us econ nerds are delighted with our coconut chia puddings as we cram as many presentations into the day as possible.
November 3, 2026 at 9:33 PM
must depend on the subfield of law? finance gets its ski conferences while some of us econ nerds are delighted with our coconut chia puddings as we cram as many presentations into the day as possible.
I'm so excited to have chosen my subfield (Reconstruction and debates over gender, race, and suffrage with guest appearances from a little-remembered Girl Orator) and so not excited to have my subfield feel so extremely timely
October 28, 2026 at 1:01 AM
I'm so excited to have chosen my subfield (Reconstruction and debates over gender, race, and suffrage with guest appearances from a little-remembered Girl Orator) and so not excited to have my subfield feel so extremely timely
I do think that even within (what would traditionally be labelled as) applied maths, we need a greater emphasis on the creative parts of mathematics. I think that, within in my own subfield, mathematical biology, even though it is not really driven by proving major theorems, the "check list" ideal..
November 3, 2026 at 9:31 PM
I do think that even within (what would traditionally be labelled as) applied maths, we need a greater emphasis on the creative parts of mathematics. I think that, within in my own subfield, mathematical biology, even though it is not really driven by proving major theorems, the "check list" ideal..
There's a fair bit of historiography in most, I think? Just that it'll be specific to a subfield and won't recur across lots of theses. The stuff that does is going to be frameworks (hence the historians who are on there have theories on how to do the work)
November 3, 2026 at 10:01 AM
There's a fair bit of historiography in most, I think? Just that it'll be specific to a subfield and won't recur across lots of theses. The stuff that does is going to be frameworks (hence the historians who are on there have theories on how to do the work)
I feel like I hear ecologists say "nitch" but I'm not in that subfield so maybe I'm misremembering.
Scientist pronunciations sometimes differ from general use though. See "tinnitus" or "tryptophan"
Scientist pronunciations sometimes differ from general use though. See "tinnitus" or "tryptophan"
October 30, 2026 at 10:16 PM
I feel like I hear ecologists say "nitch" but I'm not in that subfield so maybe I'm misremembering.
Scientist pronunciations sometimes differ from general use though. See "tinnitus" or "tryptophan"
Scientist pronunciations sometimes differ from general use though. See "tinnitus" or "tryptophan"
expanded French rural sociology by bringing a Marxist perspective to this subfield.
(As a sidenote: was your prof aware that Legotien was not Althusser's mother but his *wife*?)
(As a sidenote: was your prof aware that Legotien was not Althusser's mother but his *wife*?)
November 3, 2026 at 9:20 AM
expanded French rural sociology by bringing a Marxist perspective to this subfield.
(As a sidenote: was your prof aware that Legotien was not Althusser's mother but his *wife*?)
(As a sidenote: was your prof aware that Legotien was not Althusser's mother but his *wife*?)
But where do you keep the copies? Favorite story about a legend in my subfield was that he saved typewritten manuscripts in his freezer
October 28, 2026 at 8:47 PM
But where do you keep the copies? Favorite story about a legend in my subfield was that he saved typewritten manuscripts in his freezer
For sure. Thinking about this in terms of history books, it's a tricky sweet spot to write something that is both significant for its subfield without being so niche that people working in other subfields don't see the relevance for their work.
October 31, 2026 at 10:11 PM
For sure. Thinking about this in terms of history books, it's a tricky sweet spot to write something that is both significant for its subfield without being so niche that people working in other subfields don't see the relevance for their work.
📣 Dr @mjbayly.bsky.social has published a research article in the @cambridgecria.bsky.social, titled “What’s historical about historical IR? Narrativity, the philosophy of history and world order studies.”
🔗 Read the full article: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
#AcademicSky #PoliSky
🔗 Read the full article: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
#AcademicSky #PoliSky
What’s historical about historical IR? narrativity, the philosophy of history and world order studies
Historical International Relations (HIR) represents a growing subfield within the wider discipline, offering a ‘history-first’ approach, lessening the grip of more theory and/or methods-driven scho...
www.tandfonline.com
November 3, 2026 at 2:37 PM
📣 Dr @mjbayly.bsky.social has published a research article in the @cambridgecria.bsky.social, titled “What’s historical about historical IR? Narrativity, the philosophy of history and world order studies.”
🔗 Read the full article: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
#AcademicSky #PoliSky
🔗 Read the full article: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
#AcademicSky #PoliSky