Laura Kolb
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laurakolb.bsky.social
Laura Kolb
@laurakolb.bsky.social
early modernist, mostly
https://laurakolb.com/
Reposted by Laura Kolb
celebrate valentine's day by reading this thing i wrote last year about geoffrey chaucer: shooktownreview.substack.com/p/parliament...
Parliament Fowladelic
I apologize for the title
shooktownreview.substack.com
February 14, 2026 at 4:14 PM
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This will warm any annotator’s heart
Last semester, I got very excited about one endnote, then ALL the endnotes, in Wilson’s Iliad. Then @bookpostusa.bsky.social gave me the chance to write about them: books.substack.com/p/diary-laur...
February 14, 2026 at 2:32 PM
Last semester, I got very excited about one endnote, then ALL the endnotes, in Wilson’s Iliad. Then @bookpostusa.bsky.social gave me the chance to write about them: books.substack.com/p/diary-laur...
February 14, 2026 at 12:29 PM
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New Post → Laura Kolb on the joy of great annotations hitting their mark and the stellar marksmanship in a translation of The Iliad.

books.substack.com/p/diary-laur...

@wwnorton.com @laurakolb.bsky.social
Diary: Laura Kolb, “Sing, Notes”
Venturing into the Iliad with new students and Emily Wilson’s notes
books.substack.com
February 14, 2026 at 4:20 AM
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Question re: accreditation site visits for departments. Are your institutions doing these online now? In person again? Curious what these are looking like these days. (Also welcoming answers from those who serve on eval teams.)
February 10, 2026 at 12:56 AM
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It was used as a fortune-book. It was custom to write the professions of their future possible husbands in the margins, and then 'flip the pages' and then see what came out.
January 23, 2026 at 8:43 PM
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This from Meadowlands, which uses the Odyssey as a conceit to tell the story of deteriorating marriage. There are 3 broken hearts

There is the detachment of not taking sides, but also the detachment of time – the speaker looking back as an adult and seeing things differently

#poetry
#poemoftheday
January 23, 2026 at 6:54 PM
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Fortune teller game? Open the book to a random page to play? (I’m thinking of how we’d play MASH with types of houses and occupations of husbands)
January 23, 2026 at 7:18 PM
Yesterday, nearing the end of a magical library fellowship, I called up The Rules of Civility, a conduct book written originally in French but very popular in Restoration England. Curiously someone has written “A Tanner” in the right-hand margin…
January 23, 2026 at 6:55 PM
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I wrote a B-Side at Public Books, about Lydia Millet's great Oh Pure and Radiant Heart--enjoy!
January 21, 2026 at 6:50 PM
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Join us next week to learn about how an Atlas of London in 1666 has been researched!

This webinar is in collaboration with the Historic Towns Trust @historictownstrust.bsky.social

Find out more: www.balh.org.uk/event-balh-r...

#WeAreLocalHistory #LocalHistoryForAll
January 20, 2026 at 8:01 AM
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I was so happy to be in Reps that I forgot to brag about it here. The book trade, their catalogs, and how they made literature. First stab at something that is part of a bigger project. Abstract below, dm for pdf if you don’t have access.
Useless BooksBooksellers’ Catalogs, Puritans, and Our Categories of Literature
The catalog is a technology that mediates access to books and also mediates its users’ cultural categories. In a 1657 catalog, the bookseller William London effectively created a category for what we ...
online.ucpress.edu
January 19, 2026 at 6:17 AM
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“Graham Granger, a student in the school’s film and performing arts program, came upon some AI-generated art by MFA student Nick Dwyer and promptly ate it in protest.”
January 19, 2026 at 6:41 PM
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Deadline approaching!

Pls RT!

CALL FOR PAPERS

“Embodied Knowledge Practices in the Early Modern World”

Conference at the University of Amsterdam ~ Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies

Monday, 15 June 2026

1/6

@asecsoffice.bsky.social @bsecs.bsky.social @thebsls.bsky.social
January 19, 2026 at 5:06 PM
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Had an intriguing editorial discussion recently: how did people in the past talk about 'minutes' when they didn't have watches or standardised times? How does that affect your thinking?

Come down an Elizabethan/Jacobean rabbit hole with me.

1/
January 17, 2026 at 10:34 AM
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Well, color me gobsmacked, I got an NEH grant! tinyurl.com/3a37thbk
NEH Announces $75.1 Million for 84 Humanities Projects
tinyurl.com
January 16, 2026 at 2:05 AM
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Book curses! Great little blog post by Kait Astrella on these maledictions for the Morgan Library. One guy offers this book "with joyful heart in order that it may be an expiration for all sins committed by him. May he who steals it suffer violent bodily pains.” www.themorgan.org/blog/curses-...
January 9, 2026 at 4:54 PM
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We have been remiss, absent, and not here, but, for your belated consideration: Our last issue of 2025 was a special issue guest edited by @laurakolb.bsky.social and Jessica Rosenberg entitled "Comic Epistemologies." Go read! (And see TOC in next posts). www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/elr/curr...
English Literary Renaissance | Vol 55, No 3
www.journals.uchicago.edu
January 8, 2026 at 7:27 AM
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They were always going to kill someone. I think we all felt that was inevitable. But the guy shouting, in the immediate aftermath, "You gonna murder someone else? You can't kill us all, Nazis!" has it right. "Where there is power, there is resistance" is as close to a law as one finds in history
ICE agents stopped by protesters after the shooting an observer in Minneapolis, according to witnesse. ICE deployed pepper spray and tear gas.
January 7, 2026 at 10:57 PM
In the past month two essays of mine on Measure for Measure have appeared in the world. They are very different & politely act like they don’t know each other. One is in this (fabulous-looking) issue of Shakespeare Studies
Delighted the new year brings (at last!) vol. 53 of Shakespeare Studies to the world, in all its purple-edged glory: Marlowe stars in the Forum, & the NGP, Articles & Reviews all full of wit & wisdom. Congratulations to Jim Siemon for 11 years of leadership, w/ huge gratitude for our collaboration!
January 7, 2026 at 6:38 PM
Reposted by Laura Kolb
Delighted the new year brings (at last!) vol. 53 of Shakespeare Studies to the world, in all its purple-edged glory: Marlowe stars in the Forum, & the NGP, Articles & Reviews all full of wit & wisdom. Congratulations to Jim Siemon for 11 years of leadership, w/ huge gratitude for our collaboration!
January 7, 2026 at 6:31 PM
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My son asked me tonight (after her appearance in bedtime stories for a year or two) whether @laurakolb.bsky.social really studies Shakespeare (yes) and whether she really trains seagulls to perform the plays (i think no).
January 5, 2026 at 2:31 AM
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A story Stoppard told several times, in several places:
November 29, 2025 at 6:10 PM
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Gorgeous looking student production of "Glassheart" at USC!
www.instagram.com/modernminori...
November 3, 2025 at 10:18 PM