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fmussgnug.bsky.social
Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies @UCL | Environmental Humanities | Utopia | Apocalypse | Anthropocene Studies | World Literature
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How might history help us understand the material and social significance of heat? In what ways do these histories connect with domestic structures, gender & patterns of consumption? Join us for an Anthropocene Histories seminar on Histories of Heating🔥 📆4 June,3-5pm| 📍online 🔗 shorturl.at/a7VZD

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

Lovely to hear so many different languages at Eurovision 2025. Is this the most polyglot Eurovision in history? Does anybody have stats? 🇪🇺

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

📣Join us for the first seminar in our Interdisciplinarity: new reconfigurations of the social and natural sciences seminar series! Georgina Born and Andrew Barry will speak about AI, Environment and Art on 20 May from 5-6pm in the IAS Common Ground. Sign up here👉 shorturl.at/fSi6c

submitted 35 days ago • 0 comments

Join us for this Anthropocene Histories seminar where Kristin Asdal & Tone Huse discuss how the ocean, in the years proceeding WWII, has been harnessed to become a space of ever-intensifying capital investment and innovation 🌊 📆14 May, 3-5pm 📍Online - zoom 🔗 shorturl.at/qQGsE

submitted 36 days ago • 0 comments

How long until it occurs to the US government to offer political asylum to members of the now-banned, far-right German ReichsbĂĽrger?

submitted 36 days ago • 0 comments

Innenministerium verbietet "Königreich Deutschland" #Reichsbürger #KönigreichDeutschland #Vereinsverbot

submitted 36 days ago • 11 comments

Fredric Jameson’s early work on the fallacies of island thinking sheds light on Starmer’s gratuitous, pointless, hurtful remark about an “island of strangers”: island fantasies = nostalgia for feudalism where a coherent critique of capitalism appears impossible. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

submitted 36 days ago • 1 comment

m.youtube.com/watch?v=sezc...

submitted 36 days ago • 0 comments

Italy’s national holiday on 25 April 2025 will mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation from Fascism. This is how the City of Rome is marking the occasion:

submitted 63 days ago • 2 comments

Poland’s underground “flying universities” of the 1970s and 1980s are a hard act to follow, but an interesting model. In the Humanities, this kind of education would not require summative assessment, I think, but could be entirely focused on Socratic dialogue.

submitted 63 days ago • 0 comments

How odd that Dino Buzzati’s wonderfully odd, satirical SF novel, “Il grande ritratto” (1960) is now available in A.M. Appel’s elegant English translation - reviewed below by the great Michael Wood - but that the Italian original remains out of print. Mondadori, please act!

submitted 63 days ago • 2 comments

submitted 65 days ago • 0 comments

Great text by @naomiaklein.bsky.social and @astra.bsky.social: “The Rise of End Time Fascism”. Today’s far-right mimic what U. Eco called the “Armageddon Complex” of mid-century Fascism, but no longer trust their own “apartheid fantasies of bunkered salvation.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

submitted 65 days ago • 0 comments

News from Rome: we’re about to launch a new lecture series on The Politics of Literature at Roma Tre University. Our first speaker will be Ana Claudia Suriani da Silva, who is going to talk to us about writers’ diaries during the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985). All welcome.

submitted 65 days ago • 0 comments

This week, I had the pleasure of discussing Sandra Newman’s @sannewman.bsky.social brilliant novel, “Julia”, with the students of my graduate seminar on Inhuman Worlds. Interestingly, I read it as a futuristic dystopia while they read it as counterfactual history. 1984 lies firmly in their past.

submitted 68 days ago • 0 comments

If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.

submitted 85 days ago • 329 comments

I’ve taken the Senate floor and will speak for as long as I’m physically able to lift the voices of Americans who are being harmed and not being heard in this moment of crisis. Watch here:

submitted 78 days ago • 11119 comments

Loved being at the Passa Porta Literature Festival, talking to authors David Nicholls & Peter Terrin about space, place & their writing. Wonderfully rich: Island fiction. Heterotopias. Beckett, Stevenson, Melville. Yorkshire, Monte Carlo & abandoned basements. And lots of maps. www.passaporta.be

submitted 79 days ago • 1 comment

@chrischirp.bsky.social: thank you for this excellent article: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

submitted 83 days ago • 0 comments

Good set of questions from @tjheffernan.bsky.social. Extremely relevant also beyond the Canadian context

submitted 86 days ago • 0 comments

Good set of questions from @tjheffernan.bsky.social. Extremely relevant also beyond the Canadian context

submitted 86 days ago • 1 comment

submitted 89 days ago • 0 comments

@tommylynch.bsky.social and @stephenshapiro.bsky.social: here comes a list of twelve of my favourite British post-2000, post-apocalyptic novels:

submitted 89 days ago • 1 comment

Two British novels with a post-apocalyptic setting that I would happily teach again and again, until the end of the world: Julia Armfield, “Private Rites” (2024) Jessie Greengrass, “The High House” (2021)

submitted 89 days ago • 2 comments

New genre for American academics: apology/shame clause in routine professional correspondence with Canadian and Mexican colleagues.

submitted 90 days ago • 1 comment