Natasha F.
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natashaf.bsky.social
Natasha F.
@natashaf.bsky.social
190 followers 340 following 44 posts
🇿🇦 Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Ancient Greek Literature. Also on a mission to inspire younger students to read more widely than their assigned novels and textbooks.
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Still can't believe there was a time when I thought ancient Greek vase paintings were boring.

commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pa...
Reposted by Natasha F.
The German word ‘Pferd’ and its Dutch cognate ‘paard’ are horses of mixed breed parentage.

Their common ancestor came from Latin ‘paraverēdus’ (substitute post-horse), a word composed of an Ancient Greek element and a Gaulish one.

Zoom in on my new infographic to learn everything about it:
Reposted by Natasha F.
“I tell my students, who believe passionately in explaining the work they’re sharing, ‘You know, when you’re dead, you can’t go around explaining this thing—it has to be right there on the page.’ ” —Louise Glück buff.ly/uXAASEg
Few authors do epigraphs as well as Ali Smith does. Pictured here, the first epigraph from the novel The Accidental.
Reposted by Natasha F.
Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching
Reposted by Natasha F.
How did artists of the early modern period depict African people?

Join our online course (13 Nov–11 Dec) to explore how these images shaped ideas about race and ethnicity in Europe — from saints and magi to portraiture and decorative arts.

warburg.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

#ArtHistory
The Representation of African People in Early Modern European Art & Culture
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warburg.sas.ac.uk
Thanks for the link! I've saved it to read it properly once my marking is finished - looking forward to it!
This looks fascinating.. Are you presenting this anywhere soon?? Would love to sign in and listen if that's an option!
"Yet education’s vocation has never been speed. Its vocation has been the cultivation of reflective freedom, the ability to pause before conclusion." - Sandy Leaton Gray
I wrote a blog post on AI and the need for sapience. Pause. Enjoy.
"If AI will one day become the infrastructure of knowledge, then the role of educational institutions is to ensure that knowledge remains tethered to meaning". #AI #HEI #EduSky @drleatongray.bsky.social @ioe.bsky.social blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/2025/10/...
I was a bit nervous about joining the Septuagint Society of South Africa in 2024 - but the first paper I delivered there has just been published in the Journal of Early Christian History!

Susanna Cries: Attending to the Auditory Dimension of the Susanna Narrative www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Susanna Cries: Attending to the Auditory Dimension of the Susanna Narrative
Since antiquity, the story of Susanna has inspired interpretations that focus on its visual dimensions. The auditory dimension of the narrative has received much less attention. While some scholars...
www.tandfonline.com
Visited the Kgodumodumo Dinosaur Interpretation Centre yesterday. 10/10 - truly a fantastically curated exhibition. Paleontological insight and evidence perfectly balanced with Basotho legends and proverbs.

Also spotted @amayor.bsky.social's The First Fossil Hunters in the museum café!
Reposted by Natasha F.
An old military maxim often attributed to Napoleon is “an army marches on its stomach” and I feel the same way that a university thinks via its library. The slow and steady financial diminution of research libraries and the librarians who staff them is, to me, a slow-rolling higher Ed catastrophe.
Reposted by Natasha F.
Great news!
JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month

www.jstor.org/action/showL...
Reposted by Natasha F.
It’s the Autumnal Equinox in the UK today.
Persephone’s Katabasis, Demeter’s goodbye.
Reposted by Natasha F.
My modest proposal for how to acknowledge AI work is to use the Latin phase "Fieri Iussit," which means "commanded to be made." It acknowledged the Emperor's orders on Roman buildings.

You didn't make the thing, but you commanded it be done, so the proper acknowledgement is "Ego hoc fieri iussi."
"It’s true that scholars no longer have the exclusive claim to territory that they once had. But it’s what you do with what you find."

Eliot Weinberger, interviewed by Srikanth Reddy for The Paris Review's 'The Art of the Essay'
“We’re stuck with a certain vision of what an essay should be when in fact its possibilities seem limitless. That’s what attracted me to it—it was this kind of unexplored territory.” —Eliot Weinberger buff.ly/PIJNDC7
Trying to channel my inner Yeats: "Months of re-writing. What happiness!"
Reposted by Natasha F.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

-Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy
Translator's note by Cecelia Luschnig on the necessity of reading aloud in the translation process:

"In an earlier version of my translation of Alcestis, I used the word 'pusillanimity,' which is literally unspeakable, as became apparent in a classroom reading."

#greektragedy #classicsbluesky
Reposted by Natasha F.
The latest issue of Akroterion, Journal of the Classics in South Africa, Vol. 69 (2024), is now available.
akroterion.journals.ac.za/pub
Akroterion
Journal of the Classics in South Africa
akroterion.journals.ac.za