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willpooley.bsky.social
will pooley
@willpooley.bsky.social
8.4K followers 3K following 6.3K posts
historian of witchcrafts, folklore, France 18-20th c
ass. ed. French History
ed. Cambridge Elements in Magic
also #CreativeHistories
that’s an actual photo of me
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willpooley.bsky.social
will pooley @willpooley.bsky.social · Nov 10
My reintroduction: historian of french magic, folklore, witchcraft, tarot. I blog about all that, as well as writing, creative historical methods, quantification and research process.

A surprising number of you sickos can’t get enough spreadsheet chat🗃️
williamgpooley.wordpress.com/2024/05/22/s...
Sheet Happens
When I started working on witchcraft cases in France from 1790-1940, I knew I wanted to count them. This, of course, was my first mistake. The oldest version I have of the Excel spreadsheet I built…
williamgpooley.wordpress.com
willpooley.bsky.social
winbuzzer.com/2026/01/28/g...

(what’s the betting that the answer to this mystery is LLMs and crawlers)
February 4, 2026 at 7:20 AM
willpooley.bsky.social
Google books going down is just the latest in the long catalogue of “don’t rely on big tech to save the commons”
February 3, 2026 at 3:19 PM
Reposted by will pooley
jonnelledge.bsky.social
Reminder that "jaywalking" was literally made up by american car manufacturers to shift the blame for accidents from drivers to pedestrians. "Jay" was a slang term meaning "idiot" or "rube".
carolinerussell.bsky.social Caroline Russell @carolinerussell.bsky.social · 2d
“Jaywalking is permitted in London. In 1966, the police tried to crack down on it, but gave up after three months.”

People walk and cycle on roads by right, people drive under licence.

Jaywalking is not a thing in English law and Waymo must not change that.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Self-driving taxis are coming to London – should we be worried? | Jack Stilgoe
Waymo’s cars were first rolled out in San Francisco, but the English capital’s old roads, pelican crossings and jaywalkers may pose issues for AI, says science and technology professor Jack Stilgoe
www.theguardian.com
February 2, 2026 at 11:21 PM
Reposted by will pooley
tomhulme.bsky.social
*drum roll*

Here is the cover for my book, which will be published by @cornellupress.bsky.social on 15 April 2026!

I thought it would be nice to share a bit of info on who these men were and how their lives and interests inspired the design...
A book cover, showing the title 'Belfastmen: An Intimate History of Life before Gay Liberation' by Tom Hulme. It is lavender coloured with yellow text, and shows two men sat on a bench, c. 1935.
February 2, 2026 at 4:26 PM
Reposted by will pooley
histoftech.bsky.social
I just learned about something called recency bias.

It's my favorite thing ever.
February 3, 2026 at 6:14 AM
Reposted by will pooley
histoftech.bsky.social
What happens if you fail to pay your exorcist tax?

Your house gets repossessed👻
a cartoon of a skeleton and two ghosts with the letter k on a gravestone
Alt: a cartoon of a skeleton and two ghosts dancing in front of gravestones
media.tenor.com
November 3, 2025 at 3:26 AM
Reposted by will pooley
tombhamilton.bsky.social
New article by Katherine Astbury and Abigail Coppins, 'French prisoner-of-war sociability in Hampshire during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars'

Open Access here: doi.org/10.1093/fh/c...

@frenchhistory.bsky.social
French prisoner-of-war sociability in Hampshire during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
Abstract. Daniel Gordon in his monograph on Citizens without Sovereignty explored how, in eighteenth-century France, sociability enabled those without powe
doi.org
January 29, 2026 at 1:29 PM
Reposted by will pooley
smidbob.bsky.social
Just uploaded a recording of the SSFH Douglas Johnson lecture to the society's youtube channel. You can explore some past lectures there as well:

www.youtube.com/@societyfort...

🗃️#skystorians
Society for the Study of French History
www.youtube.com
January 16, 2026 at 4:05 PM
Reposted by will pooley
thisone0verhere.bsky.social
I am still shocked at just how much emailing is involved in being evil
February 3, 2026 at 5:39 AM
Reposted by will pooley
dudleymarianna.bsky.social
Will's whole thread on the threat of Reform to UK HE is on the money. And yeah, I've seen the environment already 'deplatformed' in very real ways at institution level (counterbalanced by rise of, you guessed it, AI). Please do read what a prick NF was about wind in the 00s! (and some Cons tbf)
willpooley.bsky.social will pooley @willpooley.bsky.social · 2d
what wd REF target within unis? There are the obvious things/subjects but let’s not forget their immense climate change scepticism. Reminded of @dudleymarianna.bsky.social book pointing out that Farage campaigned against wind farms and the EU with UKIP manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526182937/
Manchester University Press - Electric wind
Electric wind - Browse and buy the eBook edition of Electric wind by Marianna Dudley
manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
February 2, 2026 at 12:58 PM
willpooley.bsky.social
MS word playing a ‘fun’ game today where it deletes any document I keep open for longer than 5 mins *while I am still editing it* 🤡

just what I need in essay marking season!
February 2, 2026 at 12:12 PM
willpooley.bsky.social
Just to offer the counterpoint here, as I think it is very very important we do so: this is absolutely anticipatory obedience 101.
Much as university leaders might see it as their responsibility to “plan” for this possibility, in effect REF are getting to set the agenda without winning any election
gsoh31.bsky.social Glen O'Hara @gsoh31.bsky.social · 2d
Before anyone gets too angry about this, several things. (1) Universities in the UK, unlike the US, are pretty much under the financial and admin control of central govt. If RefUK moves to wipe them out, as they will, then some will choose life. (1/3) www.timeshighereducation.com/news/univers...
Universities try to woo Reform as party gains ground
Serious lobbying efforts under way, with right-wing party expected to be more sympathetic to elite universities than rest of the sector
www.timeshighereducation.com
February 2, 2026 at 9:16 AM
willpooley.bsky.social
it’s called magicbooking because no one understands how it works
February 2, 2026 at 7:02 AM
willpooley.bsky.social
today is charlie and the chocolate factory day.
February 1, 2026 at 7:23 PM
Reposted by will pooley
esquiring.bsky.social
"At least Leni Riefenstahl could frame a shot."

brutal.
February 1, 2026 at 7:11 PM
willpooley.bsky.social
“Papa, why wasn’t there a Mario Mangione?” 🎯

northshoremovies.wpcomstaging.com/2026/01/31/r...
Review – Melania
MELANIA. A documentary directed by Brett Ratner. Featuring Melania Trump, Donald Trump. Rated PG. 107 minutes. In theaters. Signifying nothing One of the most stultifying moviegoing experiences ima…
northshoremovies.wpcomstaging.com
February 1, 2026 at 7:09 PM
Reposted by will pooley
100days1815.bsky.social
Delighted to have had this joint article published - even if the keynote it grew out of was almost 3 years ago now! Thank you for being so patient with me @tombhamilton.bsky.social @frenchhistory.bsky.social
January 29, 2026 at 1:57 PM
Reposted by will pooley
katjathieme.bsky.social
Academics vying for a spot in Epstein‘s world. There are so many. I feel the need to make a thread, so I don’t keep confusing them. 1/
January 31, 2026 at 9:02 PM
Reposted by will pooley
wolvendamien.bsky.social
Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:
Martin Shuster sdSreptoon1hm9t97235g2u5796glgh0435l6iaf05it1l232lc20cllf4g0 · So apparently on Sunday Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in a press conference that "we have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside ... many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.” Then on Monday--one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day--the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response that: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges." As someone who spent a year at the Museum as a fellow doing research, I feel embarrassed for the institution. First, it is very clear that Walz wasn't drawing an equivalence, he was drawing an analogy. So this kind of response reminds me of the atrocious positions that the ADL has started to carve out, and why it has become mostly a sycophantic joke, now seemingly mostly geared towards currying favor with MAGA. Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime). We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century. In noting this, let me be clear that this does not erase or make less relevant the centuries of European antisemitism that fed into the Nazi project. That's the whole point: these are all related phenomena. European antisemitism influenced the way in which European colonialism and imperialism operated against indigenous populations in the Americas. Strikingly, as innovations mounted in "administering" the Americas, antisemitic policies also evolved in Europe. Administrators (oppressors) would sometimes even move from one sphere to the other and back. They were all synergistic (a brilliant examination of some of this is María Elena Martínez's _Genealogical Fictions_). (And one could, btw, also tell an important story about the development of Islamophobia in this very same orbit, since policies stumbled on in the Americas came back to oppress both Jews and Muslims in Europe). This is all to say: Walz's analogy is not at all far fetched. The history of oppression doesn't move in any kind of neat or purely linear fashion. It is oftentimes recursive, shifting, necessarily granular. Neither is it a competitive history. It is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, a *multidirectional* history. Drawing these analogies in fact *helps* us understand all the involved phenomena better. At least this is what "Never Again" has meant and means to me: it does not mean only never again for me or other Jews. And it does not mean never again only something that looks exactly like the Nazi genocide. I think also, btw, that this is what it meant for Otto Frank, who spent time *editing* his daughter's diary so that it could be available to anyone, not only to Jews. For ultimately the Nazi genocide--any genocide--is a highly mediated phenomenon: it consists of many diffuse events, marshals an immense amount of people and institutions, relies on sometimes conflicting or contradictory cross-sections of society, and, indeed, emerges out of a process that does not neatly, especially as its happening, have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather arranges for itself a kind of constellation that harnesses a range of actors, perspectives, and also histories (this is one way to understand how German colonial projects or anti-communism or ableism were no less crucial to Nazism than European antisemitism). The genocidal outcomes emerge from the structural forms society adopts. And all of this without in any way eliding the special role that Jews played in the apocalyptic Nazi worldview.
January 30, 2026 at 1:24 AM
Reposted by will pooley
lottelydia.bsky.social
Am currently comfort reading Sourcery, the fifth Discworld novel, and I’m tempted to put this in the front of all my future books
This book does not contain a map. Please feel free to draw your own.
January 31, 2026 at 8:22 PM
willpooley.bsky.social
my most petty take on interview with a vampire s2 is the weird way they anglicize parisian culture. eg the mock trial. i know why they’ve dressed these characters like this but this is how justice was visually staged in 1940s france!
Screenshot of interview with the vampire showing the theatre des vampires show all dressed up as (english) judges, hooting and leering at Louis, Claudia and her friend (not pictured)
January 31, 2026 at 8:35 PM
Reposted by will pooley
walshbr.bsky.social
How can we scaffold that growth rather than admonish students for not having it?
January 31, 2026 at 3:28 PM
Reposted by will pooley
hagenilda.bsky.social
SO SO GLAD to see a PROPER rebuttal against Silvia Federici's very wrong scholarship in the latest Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft! Thank you, Rita Voltmer!

muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...
In the 1970s, an invention of tradition connected the fight for women’s liberation with the figure of the witch. However, this narrative grounded in male fantasies of the 19th century (Bachofen, Grimm, Michelet, and many others). The German “völkisch” feminism followed this pattern, as did Second Wave feminism after the Second World War, especially in its esoteric, spiritual, and ecological branch. The narrative gained ground in the European, the transatlantic and the postcolonial Women’s Movements. Modern witchcraft research has unmasked the “witchcraft narrative” as a mere invention of tradition. However, the “witch narrative” remains alive in the work of the Autonomist Marxist feminist Silvia Federici. The spirit of Grimm and Michelet, which had been conveyed via Gage, Murray and her epigones of spiritual feminism and eco-feminism, still breathes in Federici's books. This article deconstructs Federici’s witches. They are not the granddaughters of the witches who had not been burned, but simply the epigones of the witches invented by males during the 19th century.
January 31, 2026 at 3:51 PM
Reposted by will pooley
grubstreetwomen.bsky.social
One of my most cherished classes is my 18th century novels course where the primary learning objective is "learn how read long novels." We did a "couch to 5k" approach to attention span and note-taking.
walshbr.bsky.social Brandon Walsh @walshbr.bsky.social · 4d
My hot take about the “students cannot read whole novels / watch whole films / etc.” is that they can learn to do it. None of us are born with attention spans suited for long media. It is a learned skill and can be developed with practice.
January 31, 2026 at 4:23 PM
Reposted by will pooley
lucydelap.bsky.social
100th issue and 50th anniversary of History Workshop Journal. A democratising powerhouse.
#HWJ
Speakers gather on a platform in front of a screen
January 31, 2026 at 2:28 PM