Katherine Arnold

Very glad to start a new week with the release of a new article: "Trading the Globe's Flora from the German Provinces: The Unio Itineraria in Esslingen, 1825-1845" (Itinerario) and co-written with the lovely Ella D. Müller ✨ #envhist #histsci #collections Available OA: doi.org/10.1017/S016...

I had the privilege to read an earlier version of this work at a colloquium some time ago and it's great to finally see it out in the world! Katherine and Ella have done a wonderful job of weaving together colonial, global and plant histories in an exciting way.

There are 470 seats in Congress up for election in November. Of these only 12 candidates merited the AAUP's endorsement by meeting the criteria of supporting their excellent higher ed agenda. www.aaup.org/news/aaup-en...

Today's decision by Labour to approve new drilling in the North Sea is climate vandalism. It's a betrayal of all of our futures, and Labour has abandoned all credibility in the fight against climate change. This is a victory for Shell over the people. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cw...

Y’all. We trained up a cohort of historians of capitalism in response to the Great Recession. I know, I’m one of them. The expectation was that during the next economic crisis people could turn to us for context and guidance. The crisis is here, so are we, but our profession is being eviscerated.

"shouldn't be this hard" is an all-encompassing, feel-it-in-your-bones summary of modern American life -- of difficulties big and small, existential and annoying -- that should be at the core of every Democratic candidate's message for years to come.

Our latest editorial outlining our AI policy is now out. TL;DR: "Using AI necessitates plagiarism, exploitative labor, environmental harm, and results in definitionally derivative writing."

“It’s extremely concerning the way the structural issue of equity is being weaponised by some big developing countries. It’s true that IAMs are mostly built by global north countries & therefore biased. But that’s not a problem that can be fixed just by giving the IPCC an extra few months to work" 👇

Spoke with a homeless Ghanaian man at Berlins main train station last month, and his biggest frustration was being blocked from the job market. He was absolutely desperate to work. But to women like this, he’s just “Ghana town”.

Andy Burnham says UK authorities are “clear” there was Russian interference in the Brexit referendum as @catneilan.bsky.social reports in today’s @theobserveruk.bsky.social observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

🚨 ALERT 🚨: All of Stuart Hall's notebooks have been digitized and are freely available to browse and read??? stuarthalldigital.bham.ac.uk/archival_mat...

NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:

Starbucks’ rollback of its climate commitments is just the latest example of why voluntary climate standards like net zero are only useful when coupled w/ credible threats of regulation or (gasp!) *actual* rules on climate action. Mini 🧵

The pitch here seems to be, ‘we’ll build the houses and infrastructure we failed to build during the 14 years we were in government, but we’ll do it in the most damaging and lowest quality way possible’. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Access the 2026 report on the teaching of empire and recommendations here: ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid...

US datacenter discharged large amounts of pollution for almost a year with no permits

Very happy to announce the seminar programme of the Decolonising Plant Knowledge research network @crasshlive.bsky.social for Michaelmas term 2026 www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/research/net...

I was wrong. It’s happening

I'm on strike for the next five weeks with @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social because management continues to threaten mass compulsory redundancies. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

A titanic, pioneering figure in more than one field of history.

ERC Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship applications went from just 7.000 applicants in 2022 to over 21.000 this year 🤯🤯🤯

The Fifth World Congress of Environmental History is Coming to Toronto in 2030! We are excited to welcome @iceho.bsky.social and environmental historians from around the world to Canada! niche-canada.org/2026/09/18/t... #envhist #envhum

Academia in the unregulated AI era. We need boilerplate language specifying draft manuscripts cannot be uploaded into an LLM @aaup.org @local6741.bsky.social Adding to list..

Story time. Got a paper rejected. No big deal. It happens. Except one reviewer explicitly stated they were unfamiliar with our methods and asked a GenAI to explain it. They then used this to trash the paper, oh, and the journal forbids AI use in reviews. Livid is mild to describe my feelings.

The programme I run - the MSc in Contemporary History - will be axed, amongst so many others. We've also been told our undergrad courses will need to have a minimum of 20 students over a 3 year period. The bonfire of the universities has truly come for Edinburgh.

Really excited to announce the online launch of The Ethics of Medical Photography Toolkit, the result of two years of work between academics, archives and museums. Register here forms.gle/PYBjxGNDitDp... to join us on Friday 16 Oct at 3 pm BST online #histmed #photohist #ethics #medhums

I'm just going to keep yelling this louder and louder until it clicks: weird overpaid AI nerds hand-wringing about human extinction are trying to distract you from the extremely deadly and serious harms they are causing yesterday, today and tomorrow www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

It was a real pleasure to contribute a piece to this fantastically interdisciplinary volume organized by Danielle Sands & Daniel Whistler, in collaboration with colleagues in the Library & Archives at @rbgkew.bsky.social 🌿 #envhist #histsci #plants www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?do...

It was a real pleasure to contribute a piece to this fantastically interdisciplinary volume organized by Danielle Sands & Daniel Whistler, in collaboration with colleagues in the Library & Archives at @rbgkew.bsky.social 🌿 #envhist #histsci #plants www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?do...

We have a book cover!

“You do my dad's legacy and the legacy of all these victims no honor by using this tragedy to spread hate…I've had to grow up and spend the past 25 years seeing people use it to hate on our Muslim brothers and sisters, to hate on people who don't look like them."

So rather than increase faculty payroll and lower student:teacher ratios, UMass would rather spend it on Claude. I would argue that a better investment would be hiring 100-200 tenure-line faculty.

It's just weird isn't it when the British Museum is running a sold-out exhibition, when The Odyssey reports $1billion at the box office, when the V&A has just opened the most innovative and accessible museum model in Europe....and this is what our minister for research comes out with.

SCOOP: An anonymous census report claimed thousands of noncitizens voted. But @davidgilbert.bsky.social and I found that not only was the report based on bad data, its authors include members of a Trump-aligned think tank and a former member of DOGE. @wired.com www.wired.com/story/a-us-c...

So if you protest a genocide you are automatically a "terrorist" but hold up a major shipping route while wearing balaclavas and you are a "protester" and the police "engage with you"? www.bbc.com/news/article...

Just copy & share everywhere please. Absolutely thumping.

For those of you who have been paying attention to the Duke Herbarium over the past ~2 years, here's more news: it's going to UNC Chapel Hill. Happy to see it's not closing entirely, but this is also part of a larger pattern of cuts + losses from multiple angles. dukechronicle.com/article/duke...

No fucking shit buddy. This is what we were trying to tell you.

The Trump administration is pressuring the National Park Service to give a piece of Yosemite National Park to a private developer. This isn't Trump's first attack on our beautiful national parks. Here's what you need to know.

Is doomscrolling bad for you? A meta-analysis of 42 studies (N=46,912) finds that consuming short-form videos is linked to increases in inattention & impulsivity; reductions in working-memory span & self-regulation; elevations in anxiety, depression & stress; and a surge in addiction symptoms.

RE: freedom of speech, academic freedom, and race science. In this (long) thread, I’m going to 1) establish my bona fides on academic freedom and race science, 2) show why academic freedom and freedom of speech are different and… 1/34

Gov. Andy Beshear ordered flags at state offices lowered for a week in tribute to Dolly Parton, who he named a Kentucky Colonel in 2024.

There is still time to submit a proposal for our conference "Revisiting Geopolitics and Empire: A Transimperial Approach", taking place next year in Leipzig! networks.h-net.org/group/announ...

New publication, early view - any typos courtesy of not using AI! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... Also check out the articles by my colleagues in the special issue “Lab, Field, and Companion Species: Tracing Nonhuman Histories in Times of Imperial Expansion"