Sonja Drimmer
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sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Sonja Drimmer
@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
12K followers 930 following 4.9K posts
Associate Professor, History of Art & Architecture, UMass Amherst. http://sonjadrimmer.com/about-forte (She/her)
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sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
That last line. Fintan O’Toole doth not play. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
What it also created-and more importantly continues to create— is the sense of a Democratic Party that is struggling to articulate any coherent vision of America's place in the world after its defeat by the Taliban. The US stands, in theory, for a global order based on respect for the universality of human rights and the imperatives of international law. Apart from all moral considerations, its inability to stand up for those principles makes it look merely ineffectual. Against Trump's rampaging amorality, the Democrats offered a bleeding-heart sympathy. ("The scale of suffering," Harris said of Gaza in her acceptance speech at the convention, "is heartbreaking.") Being the party that feels the world's pain is not a good answer to a president who invites his supporters to share the unalloyed joy of being able to inflict it.
November 9, 2025 at 8:57 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Does not matter how hungry I am. I live here until he decides to move.
Selfie on the couch with my big labradoodle lying on my lap for naptime
November 9, 2025 at 8:51 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
This is why this is a problem for democracy. See my full piece on this here www.artnews.com/art-in-ameri...
= Art in America But the problem is not skepticism. Nor is it only that anyone can create and widely distribute a faked image. It's that this ability has given everyone a permission structure to doubt. Everyone, in other words, has been granted license to choose which images they will and will not believe, and they can elect to unsee an image simply because it doesn't confirm their priors: the mere possibility of its algorithmic generation opens it to suspicion.
November 8, 2025 at 7:01 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
What’s up fellow kids.
A photo of Chris Willman, the gray bearded man in dad glasses who wrote this piece for variety.
November 8, 2025 at 1:35 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Explicit, explicit
scriptor una manu scripsit
quia canis in gremium eius dormit.
Selfie of my husband on a couch with our dog flat out on his back half sprawled on top of his while he (my husband, not the dog) has a laptop on his lap
November 7, 2025 at 1:43 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Explicit, explicit
scriptrix una manum scripsit
quia canis in gremium eium dormit.
[someone else can fix my Latin]
Selfie on a couch with a big labradoodle in my lap
November 6, 2025 at 8:08 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
hyperallergic.com/604897/how-s...
With the advent of the photographic portrait, European intellectuals took these pseudo-scientific endeavors further, leveraging this latest technology to lend credibility to the emerging field of psychology. The polymathic eugenicist Francis Galton, for example, believed that criminality manifested in the face. Associating facial features with behavioral tendencies, he invented “pictorial statistics” to fabricate composite portraits of the “criminal type.” Using software to seek out signs of a valued personality trait in paintings may not exactly be phrenology, but its intellectual forebears are. Operating with complete ignorance of this history is just one area where such scientific studies can go horribly wrong.
November 6, 2025 at 7:55 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Look, I know it's fun to be ranking on Douthat but true feminist praxis in 2025 means ridiculing the faux intellectual women he interviews. Because this is all very ridiculous.
So I think I will restrict myself to the judgment on which I am confident, which is that the pathology in our institutions known as wokeness is distinctively feminine and feminized. And that, in a very literal sense, our institutions have gone woke because there are more women in them than there used to be.
November 6, 2025 at 2:28 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Screenshot of Merriam Webster entry for "Cope."
November 6, 2025 at 1:28 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
This pupstanding citizen did a big vote!
A labradoodle sitting with an “I voted sticker” on his chest. Don’t worry! It wasn’t really stuck on him.
November 4, 2025 at 10:14 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
I love what a weirdo my dog is.
Me on the couch. My dog is lying down next to me and his head is hanging off the couch while his front legs are sprawled out in front of him.
November 1, 2025 at 11:38 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
It's almost as if these issues are so routine now that to bet the entire future of higher education on digital technology seems untethered to the realities of the stability of that technology's infrastructure.
October 29, 2025 Starting at approximately 12:00 p.m. on October 29, 2025, Microsoft is investigating issues with Azure. This is a widespread outage on a global scale affecting services beyond UMass Amherst. Campus community members may experience issues logging in to IT services with single sign-on (SSO), such as SPIRE, Canvas, and OneDrive, or with other services that are dependent on Azure.
October 29, 2025 at 6:44 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Looking forward to my visit to Williams tomorrow, where I’ll be presenting a chapter from my next book! events.williams.edu/event/the-po...
The Politics of Printing Money in Late Medieval England - A Lecture by Sonja Drimmer, UMass-Amherst Thu, October 30th, 2025 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm
October 29, 2025 at 12:57 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
My lap is very good for naps!
A labradoodle shown with his head resting again my leg.
October 28, 2025 at 11:48 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
See?! Isn't this great? It was done by the partner of a former student of mine too!
Photo of my husband's forearms. On his left arm is a series of rectangles of various shades of red stacked atop one another. On his right is a version in blue. They are from Josef Albers's book, the Interaction of Color.
October 28, 2025 at 8:53 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Here's a question for folks who know about tattoos. Let's say my husband wants one of this Joan Mitchell work. How (im)possible would it be to find an artist who could do this?
A scan of a print by Mitchell, which comprises the colors purple, orange, blue, and teal scribbled in horizontal strokes that overlap one another like crayons across the surface of creamy paper.
October 28, 2025 at 8:46 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
I need Xanax just reading this.
There are hints of a corporate coworking space-like the soundproofed phone booths that serve as test-taking cubicles-and clear signs of the school's tech-evangelist, entrepreneurial ethos. In the room for 5- to 7-year-olds, a large TV on one wall displays circle charts that update every minute with completion rates and other metrics from each student's personalized learning software. Against the opposite wall is a display of toys with price tags listed in "Alphas"" one of many motivational awards students can earn by hitting various learning metrics. One Alpha is equivalent to 25 cents, and a small Fortnite Lego set costs 350 Alphas. (That's about six times the retail price.) Students can also earn visits to local amusement parks, lunch at restaurants, or trips to the grocery store.
October 28, 2025 at 1:02 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
I realize the “AI” part is horrifying, but it’s calling this “education” that is also the nightmare.
At the Austin campus, guides said, students benefited from various opportunities. In one workshop, students designed custom slide sandals, then got to order them from the company. In another, a student says they created a model city for Tesla and won a two-day trip to Disney World. For hitting their learning metrics, they could possibly earn hundreds of dollars over the course of a school year.
October 28, 2025 at 1:01 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
What I am saying here is: using "AI" to show how bad is "AI" is itself a grift that further entrenches its use. static1.squarespace.com/static/55577...
Casting errors as valuable for self-reflection without providing concrete examples of how that reflection has been beneficial does little more than create a permission structure for the failures of this technology.
October 26, 2025 at 12:00 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Yes! And as I have written elsewhere. Spoiler: there is no hope to getting "AI" to do anything more than this.

www.artnews.com/art-in-ameri...
None of this impugns Wasielewski’s incisive commentary on machine learning— the book musters the most skillfully limned assessments of its functionalities and limitations when applied to works of art to date. But I don’t share her optimism that a rapprochement can be achieved, since the “war” isn’t between humanists and scientists but rather between humanists and the administrators and legislators defunding and legislating us into extinction. If there is any hope of nurturing critical machine learning to induce a jolt to art history, then it will need to do more than disclose the violence of its brute reliance on inherited categories, which, using traditional forms of humanistic research, Wasielewski portrays so well.
October 26, 2025 at 11:52 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Now also feels like a good time to remind fellow educators and academic of this, an excerpt from a piece @cnygren.bsky.social and I co-wrote a few years ago. journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/da...
Axiom 9: Being downstream of governmental power does not absolve researchers of moral agencyOur concerns are not limited to the discipline of art history, but rather extend to the broader cultural service into which such art historical research can be pressed. With predictability and regu-larity since the eighteenth century, efforts to align the study of art with the most cutting-edge science have implicitly and explicitly served racist and imperialist agendas, from Winckelmann’s hierar-chy of the human races to stylistic taxonomies enrolled as empiri-cal reference points for native, and national, characters. Art histori-ans have labored to reckon with these legacies in our histories and methodologies. Yet as we write, scholars in “cultural evolution” are reclaiming these older, utterly discredited, and odious arguments by means of Artificial Intelligence. This is an atavistic backslide into our discipline’s primordial past, which, with similar irony, was obsessed with notions of “progress.”25 We are increasingly con-cerned with a a version of “art washing,” in which computer sci-entists use algorithmic analysis of artworks to lend cultural cache to aspects of a surveillance regime to which many citizens might otherwise object. Though the larger societal instrumentalization of AI – its use for facial recognition and government surveillance, in particular – are distant from the aims of art historical inquiry, art historians who partner with computer scientists should be aware
October 24, 2025 at 9:58 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
A common misconception based on my name is that I am German (I am not!) but at last I actually had a legit reason to include this in an article I wrote!
as the owner of a Teutonic forename responsible for similar--incorrect--presumptions about my provenance, I can relate
October 24, 2025 at 9:41 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
You might find useful this essay that I co-authored with @cnygren.bsky.social . This link will download the pdf directly static1.squarespace.com/static/55577...
How We are Not Using AI in the Classroom By Sonja Drimmer & Christopher J. Nygren Premise Prompt engineering is a term that has become commonplace since the widespread availability of generative AI applications like ChatGPT. The idea is that the outputs of the large language models (LLMs) on which these applications are based are only as good as the prompts that are input: vague prompts result in equally vague outputs. And thus was born the race to train for careers in prompt engineering. Unfortunately, the bubble seems to have burst before even the first generation of students was trained for this career outcome. We were given a prompt as an invitation to participate in this newsletter: “How are you using AI in the classroom?” While we have accepted this invitation, we are engaging in the most humanistic act we can imagine—refusing the prompt.
October 24, 2025 at 8:23 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Did good work today, accumulated many pats.
A massive lawn chair in the center of the UMass Amherst campus with the university name on it. My dog, a large fluffy labradoodle is sitting in front of it.
October 21, 2025 at 9:49 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
I know how to pander.
A Powerpoint slide showing St Sernin of Toulouse with the caption "medieval radiatin chapels" and photos of Chappell Roan from the VMAs last year with the caption "Medieval Chappell Roan."
October 21, 2025 at 3:27 PM