Featured posts
Cold Emailing in Academia (Part 2)
In the first part of this mini series on cold-emailing in academia, I discussed specifically asking about jobs that aren’t advertised (short answer: there are none, why are you even asking?). This post will give a few hints on how to make your (sensible) cold emails potentially more successful and…
DiDip at the International Medieval Congress 2026: Charters and Temporalities
This was the one thought that kept looping in our heads the entire trip. TL;DR: If you need to get to Leeds (or pretty much any regional UK city), budget an extra day for...
Representing ‘Sub-Saharan’ Boat Migrants: Global and Tunisian Media Narratives of the Mediterranean Migration ‘Crisis’
By Imene Gannouni Khemiri Introduction[1] The escalating ‘irregular’[2] migration across the Mediterranean Sea has become a major topic of international interest. While it is not a new phenomenon, the number of ‘sub-Saharan’ migrants,[3] along with the associated death toll, has recently reached unprecedented levels. In 2023, reports estimated 212,100 attempts by…
Turning Distrust into Authority: Michele Bachmann’s Conspiratorial Populism
By Sequana Birkel Conspiracy theories do not just express distrust – they can also transform it into political authority. Michele Bachmann’s career offers a fitting example of this process during the Tea Party era (2008-2012). From 2007 to 2015, Bachmann served in Congress as a Republican representative from Minnesota and…
The invisible hand in science: How ideological priors shape empirical outcomes
We found evidence that ideology impacts research results. What are the implications of this, and what should we do about it. Spoiler: not the least should we practice more open science! The Experiment and Our Findings In empirical social science, we are accustomed to substantial variation in reported outcomes. Research…
Abraham (Apel) Waitz – First Jewish Soldier in the Imperial-Royal Engineer Corps?
The manpower records of the Habsburg Army are so detailed that even a cursory survey would give a good overview of the fate that awaited most Jewish recruits. Although there were cases to the contrary, nearly all of the initial intake of Jews enlisted directly after Joseph II’s conscription edict,…
Towards a Specification for the Formal Notation of Sound Laws
Formal notations for the handling of sound laws in historical linguistics have been employed by linguists for a long time. So far, however, linguists have barely tried to describe their notation practices formally. As a result, a lot of variation can be found in the practice of sound law notation.…
An interview with Annemarie Verkerk and Russell Gray on “Enduring constraints on grammar” (2026)
In the following interview, Annemarie Verkerk and Russell Gray answer Martin Haspelmath’s questions about their paper “Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses” (Verkerk et al. 2025) Martin: Congratulations on this new paper on grammatical universals based on the Grambank data! My first question is whether you were…
Rome and the Pius Brothers: The Conflict behind the New Schism
IEG researcher Jaap Geraerts compares the schism of the Society of Saint Pius with the 18th-century Utrecht Schism and interprets both as distinct reactions to modern church councils.
Modelling medieval manuscripts in Wikidata
The undertaking described in this blog post was supported by an NFDI4Memory FAIR Data Fellowship at the Herzog August Bibliothek in March 2026. I was supported by Daniela Schulz and Torsten Schaßan on the side of the Herzog August Bibliothek...
Widening the Circle – Connecting the Waterplanet: Virginia (Gigi) Coyle as a Citizen Diplomat in the USSR
When Gigi Coyle was invited to visit the USSR in 1982 as a citizen diplomat, part of the Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program, tensions between the superpowers were at a high point. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the nuclear arms race had built up massively, Western countries had boycotted the…
Restitution and Postcolonial Justice. A Dialogical Approach
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research By Julia von Sigsfeld This article is a shortened version of the eponymous MECILA Working Paper, which was originally published by the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America in 2025 and can be read here. 1. Introduction Confronting a history of dispossession…
Fragmented Lives in Times of War – An Introduction
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research By Lidia Kuzemska This text is an excerpt from the introduction to the volume “Fragmented Lives in Times of War: Displacement Within and From Ukraine”, recently published in the series “Forum Transregionale Studien – Dossiers” at transcript Verlag and edited by Lidia Kuzemska. The…
Yearning and Belonging.A 12th-Century Authentification of Jerusalemite Relics
Nikolas Jaspert (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg) doi: https://doi.org/10.11588/heidok.00038438 Die Urkunden und die ältesten Urbare des Klosters Scheyern, ed. Michael Stephan (Quellen und Erörterungen zur bayerischen Geschichte / Neue Folge 36.2), München 1988, Nr. 10, pp. 28–30. English Translation, Nikolas Jaspert Nutu divinae pietatis F(ulcherius) sanctae Christi dei nostri resurrectionis ecclesiae patriarcha et…
Beyond Trees and Recycling – Why Sustainability Education Is More Than Environmental Education
Mistaking sustainability education for environmental education is a false equivalence that reduces and misrepresents it. SE integrates ecology, society, and economy. EE is its root, not its scope.
Watching a Register Move | An Animated Card Index and the Production of Migration
This essay follows an animated visualization built from Osnabrück’s historic foreigners’ registration index to ask, from the perspective of CRC 1604 ‘Produktion von Migration’, whether a bureaucratic register merely records migration — or helps produce it. On the screen (see animation below), the year 1943 burns in two colors. Blue…