Reflections on 2025

With the subtitle: two conferences, a fancy dinner, and three months of research leave (and counting).

First, the conferences (the most interesting and fun bit). In June, I spent three days in Leiden for the Penn-Leiden colloquium. This was not just a wonderful conference on the theme ‘the Value of Languages in the Ancient World‘, but also a celebration of 25 years of this collaboration between the two universities.

Like quite a few other participants, I had never actually been to a Penn-Leiden colloquium before, and so being included in this milestone event felt a little like crashing a birthday party. I needn’t have worried though: it was a wonderfully welcoming event, with scholars from all career stages and a wide range of fields.

It was one of those conferences that really got me thinking, and my mind kept returning to several of the papers weeks later. I found it really energising to meet people from so many different fields and get some validation of some ideas I’d been having about Livy from people who really live and breathe Latin literature in a way that I don’t. The museum was also excellent, and had some wonderful Roman material: I enjoyed the Roman/non-Roman onomastics of this dedicatory inscription by brothers Primus Immunius and Ibliomarus Immunius from Trier.

Then, in October, I travelled to Greece for the first time in many years to take part in the ‘Trends in Greek and Roman Linguistics’ conference. This was a tricky conference for me. I thoroughly enjoyed the conference itself, and found many of the other papers fascinating. It was also wonderful to see so many old friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen for quite a while, and I got some very helpful feedback on my brand new project. But I was also struggling a bit through illness (which later turned out to be pneumonia). Everyone was very kind and helpful when I wasn’t feeling well, and I very much enjoyed visiting a new part of the country I hadn’t seen before. But I did leave feeling that I hadn’t quite been able to make the most of the trip!

Publications are planned for both conferences, so I will share those in the future.

I also started my research leave this year. So far, most of my work has been focussed on planning for the future, saying yes to some exciting new publications and opportunities and (unfortunately) saying no to some equally good opportunities. Because of my illness in October and November, it’s been a slower start than I intended; but still a valuable time to plan, get organised and try to think about what I want out of the next three years.

2025 was also a year in which I did no blogging at all, for the first time in a long time. I’ve always been of the opinion that no one ever needs to apologise for their lack of blogging – you do it when it works and put it aside when it doesn’t. But over the past few months, I have been thinking a bit about why it wasn’t working for me any more, and why it was something I wasn’t prioritising. I think a lot of it has to do with the breakdown of the previous ways in which social media functioned. Like many people, I left Twitter/X, both because of the political situation and because it had become both unusable and no fun. Bluesky is fine, and I like it up to a point, but it has not (yet?) become what Twitter was a decade or so ago – a basically friendly, busy place where I went to chat with friends and people who were interested in the things I was interested in. Bluesky is quieter (which is probably better for my concentration), but the fragmentation of these networks has been difficult.

It also doesn’t help that the internet generally, including to be honest the user interface for this blogging platform, have become more and more frustrating to work with. (No, I don’t want to ‘improve my post with AI’, please leave me alone.) I prefer written information, so the proliferation of video content makes me switch off from a lot of sites as well.

I am not making any resolutions about blogging more, but I am interested to see if it’s something that I continue to find useful over the coming years, particularly while I’m on research leave. Maybe it’s also a time to head backwards to when we did have blogs and didn’t have microblogs? I think I’ll get back to reading some of my favourite Classics blogs more regularly in 2026.