Karin Wulf
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kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf
@kawulf.bsky.social
13K followers 2.6K following 11K posts

Historian of #VastEarlyAmerica, gender, family & politics | Director & Librarian @ JCBLibrary | History Prof @ Brown U

#LineageTheBook OUP July, 2025 | On some other platforms and also @ karinwulf.com | Opinions here just mine. .. more

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Karin A. Wulf is an American historian and the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. She was the executive director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia from 2013 through 2021. She is also one of the founders of Women Also Know History, a searchable website database of women historians. Additionally, Wulf worked to spearhead a neurodiversity working group at William & Mary in 2011. She is currently writing a book about genealogy and political culture in Early America titled, Lineage: Genealogy and the Politics of Connection in British America, 1680-1820. Her work examines the history of women, gender, and the family in Early America. .. more

Political science 42%
Sociology 16%
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kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · Dec 28
It’s been a long time coming… so thrilled to share the cover (and Oxford UP website last in 🧵) for my book, _Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America_, pub date 7.2.25 (but will ship, so they say very enticingly, mid-June. 1/ #VastEarlyAmerica 🗃️
Book cover with various kinds of evidence of family history arrayed around the author and title, the latter is _Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America_. The kinds of materials include printed texts, manuscripts, a red book (shhhhh that figures largely in the Introduction!), a watercolor family record, Fraktur, gravestone, and a sampler. One repeated text says "born free, born free (etc)"

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 19h
Huzzah!!🎉

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 20h
💯

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 20h
This isn’t really the dynamic that @tlecaque.bsky.social was invoking - the systemic forgetting - ofc.

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 20h
I had a (v v distinguished) senior colleague who used to say all the time “we know this I wrote about this!” And it was both wrong and dismissive and so ungenerous and incurious that it still many years later (mostly) stops my impulse to but but but what about meeeee

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 20h
Yes exactly! Conversation not admonishment. But you’d really love to still be in it, you know?

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 21h
A real thing I struggle with as I get to be a real old is that things I read about, taught about, even wrote a lot about are just new to so many people. There is ofc a lot of new work! But also some continued processing that gets described as NEW and that kind of has to be ok is what I tell myself.🤷‍♀️

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 21h
Really very last, my final post for TSK was my most personal, about how STEM obsessions and tail chasing has proved an ouroboros for research and knowledge. ☹️ // scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/06/26/d...
Did My Father’s World Die with Him? Grieving the Incalculable Costs of “STEM.” - The Scholarly Kitchen
Grieving my father's death feels inextricably tangled with grieving the catastrophe overtaking the whole of our research infrastructure.
scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 21h
Last, I was glad/ sad to see my post (from work w @asheeshksi.bsky.social and @rbtownsend.bsky.social) on the humanities as the leading indicator of research infrastructure collapse hit the top ten. 😣 scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/04/02/t...
The Humanities as Canary: Understanding this Crisis Now - The Scholarly Kitchen
The Humanities have always been the canary in the coal mine of the full knowledge industry. What information can help us understand this crisis and its implications?
scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 21h
And. So worth your time, whatever your discipline or professional position/ situation. 3/ scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/08/26/g...
Guest Post — Beyond Classification: The Human Cost of Library and Information Labor Under Digital Capitalism - The Scholarly Kitchen
In an era of information abundance and epistemic chaos, libraries serve as crucial sites for democratic knowledge practices -- protecting them is critical to preserving the infrastructure of informed ...
scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 21h
I want to call out two posts here in the most read for 2025 on key issue of how libraries reflect and shape knowledge via cataloging and description -- and how politicized in every direction and stressed that system is. By Mike Olson. 2/ scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/03/25/g...
Guest Post - Classification as Colonization: The Hidden Politics of Library Catalogs - The Scholarly Kitchen
The renaming of "Mount Denali" and "Gulf of Mexico" to the politically loaded “Mount McKinley" and "Gulf of America" reveal the naked truth of what cataloging has always been: a battlefield where mean...
scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

Reposted by Margot C. Finn

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 21h
This will be the first year in a decade that I'm not regularly writing for @scholarlykitchen.bsky.social 😢, an essential source for understanding scholarly infrastructure. Highly rec. EIC @dacrotty.bsky.social's roundup of most read posts for 2025. scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/01/05/t...
The Year in Review: 2025 in The Scholarly Kitchen - The Scholarly Kitchen
Before we plunge into 2026, a look back at 2025, a difficult year for many in the scholarly community.
scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

Reposted by Margot C. Finn

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 1d
Honestly I'm just opening the book to poke around and lo. A good daily practice, I say.
Screenshot from an 18th century text of miscellany: "It often happens that those who are most desirous of governing other, who are least able to govern themselves."

Reposted by Karin Wulf

eicathomefinn.bsky.social
Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 2d
'Prof Shitij Kapur, the head of King’s College London, said the days when universities could promise that their graduates were certain to get good jobs are over'.

Which universities ever promised that? Did they not familiarise themselves with their own graduate employment data? 1/3
UK university degree no longer ‘passport to social mobility’, says King’s vice-chancellor
Prof Shitij Kapur says there are too many graduates and degree is now just a ‘visa’ to enter professional world
www.theguardian.com

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 2d
From the 18thc commonplace and miscellanies projects I started (slowly) working on late last year. I find it a very useful to spend a few minutes on this as a daily practice.
Screenshot of yellowed rough page with printed text: "weak and feeble minds are most prone to anger, and by their exceeding fierceness, generally disappoint their own purpose."

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 3d
Last year I pre-ordered and ordered my way to three copies of multiple books. I like to think of this as an excess of enthusiasm rather than a deficit of planning and organization.

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 3d
This made me laugh as my very much a terrier will do any work … that she deems worthy.

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 3d
Keeping your jackets tweedy, your elbow patches suede.

Reposted by Reece Jones, Elizabeth Saunders, James P. Collins , and 18 more

unlawfulentries.bsky.social
Anna O. Law @unlawfulentries.bsky.social · 3d
Cover reveal. It's about how & why colonies/states controlled international & domestic migration until 1888, why in the late 19th c the feds took over, & what it was like for politically disfavored groups to live under that arrangement of power. You can't understand voluntary migration history 1/
Cream colored book cover of Anna O. Law's Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship--African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants with a human figure behind an American flag

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 4d
How… exciting!

Pretty sure I can deliver on “mortifying.” 😁

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 4d
Yes! I was hoping for hopeful!

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 4d
😁

Naturally I was hoping for hopeful!

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 4d
Oh dear.
Your 2026 word Mortifying

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 4d
Thank you, Eileen!! And to you and yours. 😊✨

Reposted by Anna O. Law

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 4d
Not tanned, not really rested, but definitely ready.
unlawfulentries.bsky.social Anna O. Law @unlawfulentries.bsky.social · 4d
Scholars who do historical research, eat your Wheaties (or whatever else fuels you). In the year of the nation's 250th birthday, there will be all sorts of nonsense that we will counter-program with actual history.
a bowl of cereal with milk being poured into it and the words `` got wheaties '' written on the bottom .
Alt: a bowl of cereal with milk being poured into it and the words `` got wheaties '' written on the bottom .
media.tenor.com

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 4d
Indeed!!!

Reposted by Anna O. Law, Philip N. Cohen, Nathan P. Kalmoe , and 1 more

stephenwest.bsky.social
Stephen West @stephenwest.bsky.social · 4d
leave it to John Roberts to bring up Lincoln's 1857 speech decrying the majority opinion in Dred Scott - without acknowledging that the real point of the speech was to decry an opinion using originalist methods, and to question the deference due the court

www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/y...
Perhaps the finest explanation for the Declaration’s continuing influence comes from one of our greatest Presidents, Abraham Lincoln. Speaking shortly after the Supreme Court handed down its infamous decision in the Dred Scott case, Lincoln noted that “[t]he assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was . . . placed in the Declaration . . . for future use.”

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 4d
The hop skipping gestures. Maddening. Thanks for being more specific about why!

Reposted by Kate Starbird, Karin Wulf

unlawfulentries.bsky.social
Anna O. Law @unlawfulentries.bsky.social · 4d
Scholars who do historical research, eat your Wheaties (or whatever else fuels you). In the year of the nation's 250th birthday, there will be all sorts of nonsense that we will counter-program with actual history.
a bowl of cereal with milk being poured into it and the words `` got wheaties '' written on the bottom .
Alt: a bowl of cereal with milk being poured into it and the words `` got wheaties '' written on the bottom .
media.tenor.com

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 4d
It's the Chief Justice's annual report.

Reposted by Anna O. Law, Margot C. Finn

kawulf.bsky.social
Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 4d
Whatever you think of the politics of this it is not “history-heavy,” but alas history gestural. Pls do read the report (weirdly not linked in the CNN piece?) www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/y...