Thomas Hendrickson

Hey, want to be colleagues for a little while? My department at MSU is hiring a resident artist/scholar in Classics for the next academic year! Happy to answer any questions if you’re interested. Otherwise, please help us spread the word!

I saw that one of my students just made a (doctored) L&S-style entry (formatted as if found on @logeiongklat.bsky.social ) for an invented Latin word. What a delight. Behold: flamamammama!

I (randomly) had to read 100 essays for math-camp applications a few years back. Of these, 99 were excited or very excited about AI. One wrote against AI, something like "Mathematics is fundamentally an expression of human creativity, and you can't brute-force your way to better understanding."

🚨🚨🚨🚨Calling SCS members: would anyone be interested in writing an essay reflecting on Nobel Prize winner Anne Carson for the SCS blog? 500 to 1500 words, ASAP. Publication within days of submission. @scsclassics.bsky.social PS: Is the first Nobel Prize for a Classicist since Mommsen?

Lots of interesting pieces on Latin pedagogy in the new TAPA.

Hot news for the sea lion in my comments bothering everyone about how training data is fair use www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-...

The Medium Aevum Essay Prize 2027 is now open to submissions! 📅Deadline: 12:00 midday (GMT) Tuesday 1st December, 2026 👩🏾‍🎓Eligibility: Graduate students and those who have completed a higher degree within the last three years 📝Submission: An essay of 6,500-8,000 words 🏆Prize: £500

I love early modern subtitles:

Word of the Day: Falsus-Burgus.

Exciting times ahead for those of us working in the Vatican Archives and Library. It looks like they're expanding into the parking in front? infovaticana.com/en/2026/09/1... Just, please, please, keep these places open during the building work. That 3-year closure of the BAV was deeply traumatic.

I would love to visit a bookshop organized not by genre, but by smell.

Jumping onto this (and building on the work of Julia Hillner, cited here): if you're interested in bringing some of these sources into the Latin classroom, this open-access edition includes the letters of Galla Placidia, Anicia Juliana, and other imperial women: pixeliapublishing.org/book/letters...

Is there any good historical fiction about the third century crisis? I would read the heck out of that.

I'm there right now! Just walked into some guy's house (door was open?). Lots of good cheese here, and I'm pigging out. Huh, furniture in this place sure seems big...hang on,

Me (laboring): How can write a letter of rec that conveys something genuine, something specific about this student? Naviance (Letter Upload Site): How bout some slop?

Spotted this on Naviance this morning when I was uploading a letter of rec. Are they *encouraging* recommenders to use LLMs?

Spotted just before the First Day of Class: an omen that all my cringy bad jokes will all land this semester.

"wordy old prose" kind of sums up my interests

Has anyone encountered this abbreviation before? (It's 18th century-- too late for Cappelli.) By context, I would guess "etc etc" but that's just a guess.

Would you believe: this real "cleaning robot" was created (by a 6-year-old) almost entirely from materials found in the recycling bin. I'm starting to think that *paying* for children's toys is a huge scam.

Lexicographer wanted at the TLL! Deadline end of August. Somewhat surprisingly, the advert doesn’t say how good your German needs to be – the TLL is based in Munich, and it’s in the nature of the job that you need to be in the office – but of course the dictionary itself is written in Latin anyway.

Support our journal and become a Friend of Ceræ We’re pleased to introduce our Friends of Ceræ supporter program, a new initiative designed especially for our wonderful supporters and readers all over the world!...

Sick of all this Odyssey discourse. What I really want in a movie is something kid-friendly, maybe a comedy. You could still have classical figures, like Callimachus and Apollonius Rhodius... That's right, this whole thing has just been a lead-up to NIGHT AT THE MUSEION

My six-year-old, digging out in the yard, declared herself to be an archaeologist named "Mud Chuckles." The name checks out.

With myself at left: engaging in smalltalk. With myself at right: talking at people about my nerdy interests

Posting my favorite gajillion-ton museum catalogue here: "Terme di Diocleziano: la collezione epigrafica"

I have a Latin student right now who loves math-- so lots of reading Newton/Leibniz/Euler/etc. It's a lot of fun to be reading something soooooo different from my usual.

New book day:

Latin nerds: if you were going to introduce students to the Gradus ad Parnassum, which edition would you use?

Reminds me of the Fondo Momigliano at the library of the Scuola Normale in Pisa. I wonder how many other academics' libraries have been kept together?

Grabbing my wallet and rushing to my time machine....

👀

Now that the Society of Pius X is out, can we have a Society of Pius II (dedicated to reading erotic novels written in Latin)?

Well, I guess that question has now been answered.

It's too bad that the inter-rex was always male. Robs us of the term in-be-queen.

There's only a few days left to get your abstracts together and emailed to @hannah-historian.bsky.social and I for an edited collection on "Letters as Paratexts in the Early Modern World"! See the CFP in the post below! Deadline 15 June! #earlymodern #bookhistory #premodernhistory #medievalsky

As we say in Minnesota, "No thanks but no thanks"

Finally targeted by the fake book club scam. I was beginning to feel left out.

Kalshi also DM'd me asking me to work their predictions (as conjectures) into the critical apparatus of a Latin edition!

TOM BOMBADIL, TECH SUPPORTE: Hey dol, merry dol! Floweres and starres and rayne! Turne off your machyne and wayte, then turne it on agayne!

I had somehow missed this, but Anna Pisarello's open-access tiered reader of Cicero's "Pro Archia" won the Bolchazy Pedagogy Book Award from CAMWS-- it's great to see the book get that recognition: pixeliapublishing.org/2026/06/05/p...

Love the motto: È bello doppo il morire vivere ancora.

I don't love the experience of flying, but I DO love long, uninterrupted periods of reading. I think tomorrow is going to be a fumetti flight.

Looking for Medieval Latin philologists: Postdoc specializing in Digital Philology in München job-portal.lmu.de/jobposting/4...

That's what I'm talking about. (Well, no, I'm not actually talking about it, but I'd like to be.)

"The Letter Z in Light of Latin Inscriptions (First to Seventh Centuries AD)"-- this is what I'm here for!

I love the quotation marks around "return date." Like they don't even pretend that I'll be returning them by then.