Hello, all. I'm writing this thread to ask for your help. I know it's a bit of a downer at the start of a sunny spring weekend, but please read to the end. (1/?)

Exciting opportunity to collaborate with our own @interwarcrime.bsky.social and Lincoln Bishop University on the history of teacher training colleges, with an openness to alternative presentation formats

Everyone please clap. Today I have successfully set one (1) boundary at work.

Not the key point, but all the 'Andrew Mountbatten Windsor' coverage shows how quickly and easily the entire UK media complex can switch to someone's new name/title, even after using their old one for decades, when it's an incredibly pampered white male deviant. So, you know, it's not *that* hard...

Re-upping our PGR-organised ECR conference on Place - send us an abstract by 1st May for a (hopefully) sunny day in June 😎

Bring on the additional paperwork! 🥰 And be prepared for the inevitable theatrical takeover…

TODAY!

Our brilliant PhD students have organised a conference - Placing the Nineteenth Century - and you’re all invited! Friday 26th June CFP deadline: Friday 1st May We’re all excited for our keynote speaker, @drclaireocall.bsky.social 🤩 Please share - and send us an abstract!

I think about it all the time too. It’s wild how everything just….got ignored (though not surprising). Wrote about it a bit on today’s substack open.substack.com/pub/morganll...

Call for Contributions: 'To Be Forever Known: The Brontës and Poetry', a special issue of Brontë Studies, edited by @drbeard79.bsky.social 500-word abstracts due by 1st April. More details on the blog: www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=6317

Very pleased to share details of a new permanent academic job opportunity in Creative & Cultural Industries at University College Dublin. We are seeking candidates with a PhD whose work engages with the commercial creative industries. Deadline: 6 March 2026 universityvacancies.com/university-c....

We should not shy away from understanding the underlying message of all this, & so much else in the media: that it ought to be socially acceptable to be able to pick a marginalised group and hate them, to make yourself feel good. No. It ought not.

If you need AI to do these things, I do not believe you are qualified to be a lecturer. This could have been an interesting article on the importance of honing aspects of our craft such as storytelling and performing, but instead is just another call to abandon our human creativity for efficiency.

We see there's a new playwriting prize seeking to "counteract overtly political theatre". Just to be clear: We welcome woke plays. And viciously satirical plays. And plays about lettuces becoming political icons. We welcome all plays, and all plays are political. More soon 👀

“Who wrote this, Ibsen? Stop talking!” and other things I shout at the TV when I’ve clearly been spending too much time with work…

British Library staff asked for a decent pay. Instead they got ‘a few money-saving present ideas’, such as ‘consider not giving presents this holiday season’. They are on strike this week. I wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

Still a few days left to send in an abstract for what promises to be another brilliant BAVS conference! 👩‍💻

I’m so tired. Must be all the taking I’ve done. Image: a Home Office X post saying “Britain welcomes migrants who contribute to our economy and society. High earners, entrepreneurs and skilled frontline workers like NHS staff will be fast-tracked to settlement - rewarding those who give, not take”

The first school to market itself as AI free is going to corner the market on people interested in actually learning. And I would not be surprised if rich families and the children of people creating this tech were the first movers.

For our next seminar, the wonderful @digivictorian.bsky.social is hosting our just as wondrous PhD researchers, Liam Pope, Laura Grande Mateu, Emily Hayes, & Emma Butler, for our #19thCFlashTalks. Join us for a pre-Christmas treat on Wednesday 10th December from 6 pm. Free, online, all welcome!

Dickens is going to Denmark! Will you go too? CFP deadline: 4 January Conference: 13-16 July in Aarhus on ‘Thinking Dickens’ dickenssociety.org/home

Thread of all HE threads 👇 Super depressing, but sort of nice in the midst of it all to know that you’re not alone in this experience…

TOMORROW - join us!!!

Never thought I’d be boycotting a work Christmas Carol concert, and yet here we are. UK HE really needs to sort out its priorities 🙄

one of the coolest things about ChatGPT is how you can actually just never use it. you can fill your whole entire life with simply not once using it. it's incredible.

THIS WEEK - join us on Thursday for some amateur theatricals and at least semi-professional zooming 😉

NEXT WEEK - join us!

And once you’re nicely beveraged, join the Theatre Caucus at 8 in the Hampton Ballroom for Lady Audley’s Secret!!! @navsa2025.bsky.social

Call for paper for a special issue on the Brontës and poetry - on their work as poets - on poetry in the novels - on poetic influences and legacies - hoping for creative responses too! Abstracts due April 26 Articles due December 26 #Romanticism #Victorian #Gothic Please share!

Preorder for The Theatre Artist's Guide to Consent-Based Pedagogy begins in ten days! I am so grateful to my dear friend and collaborator Kim Shively for researching, writing, and revising with me along the way to this resource for theatre educators! #theatre #education #theatresky

Three German universities offering post-docs for researchers "who cannot conduct or continue their work in the USA appropriately because of actual political pressure. " www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskoll...

Join us at the end of the month for David Coates’ paper on Amateur Theatricals 🖤🖤🖤 Hosted by @catherinequirk.bsky.social Free, online, all welcome!

Happy Nope-vember to all who celebrate!

If you’re looking to support on the ground Jamaican orgs, We Change Jamaica focuses on gender equality and LBGTQ+ inclusion & they are putting together aid packages for queer & trans Jamaicans who don’t feel safe going to shelters. gofund.me/09619a41e

“This revocation is part of Trump and his hogmen’s reworking of America’s immigration and visa system….This move also seems clearly to be part of a wider, authoritarian attack on things the government considers un-American: people of color, literary culture, and those it considers critics.”

Our first seminar was fabulous and has been recorded of you missed it - don’t miss our November event on Amateur Theatricals hosted by the very professional @catherinequirk.bsky.social! Register in the link below - free, online, all welcome!

Interested in the history of Seven Dials or London or the 1920s and 1930s? I'm doing some walking tours of the Dials with @stanfordstravel.bsky.social on Sat 15 Nov. There's loads to see, but Seven Dials is so small you don't need to walk far. manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/events/songs...

This #OAWeek, have a read of open access books in drama & performance studies, available via Bloomsbury Collections: https://bit.ly/4hmSM5A

Our @ehunineteen.bsky.social seminar series starts next week with @drreznicek.bsky.social talking to me about care in Romantic novels - register in skeet below! Free, online, all welcome!

Calling all c19 theatre and performance folks - you don’t want to miss this!

The full line up for our 2025/2026 #EHU19SeminarSeries is available to book now in the thread below! Join us for a free, online, and friendly discussion about cutting-edge research in nineteenth-century studies!

We are delighted to announce the first seminar in our 25/26 series: the wonderful @drreznicek.bsky.social will be presenting on ‘Too Bodily: Disability, Care, & Belonging in Romantic Novels’ on Wednesday 29th October at 6pm. Free! Online! All welcome! Register here: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

You can read 'Caryl Churchill's Eco-Socialist Feminism' by Elaine Aston (published by Cambridge University Press) for free online until 22 October: www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Fascinatingly, most of the things in the replies to this are…things I’ve not seen 😂

When it comes to intimidating racist protests including outside our homes or place of worship, Black and Asian people are supposed to just accept it and the government saying “we hear you” and “it is right to protest this” and “I love flags me”. No thought of “cumulative impact” for us!

Job alert! University of Auckland, lectureship in English, in the long 19th century: jobs.smartrecruiters.com/TheUniversit...

The English Department at Hunter College, CUNY is very happy to announce a Tenure Track position in #Medieval British Literature at the Assistant Professor level. Applications from scholars in interdisciplinary and/or global approaches are especially encouraged to apply. cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...

I wonder if Carney had to crowd-fund his trip to the Women’s Rugby World Cup final, or if it was just the team who needed to do that…? 😒

ChatGPT Edu is built for conning education executives into subsidising and edu-washing planet-burning slop machines via non-consensual access to young people’s creativity AND DATA while attacking their ability to learn. At a university.

Michael Field in Context (Cambridge University Press) is out today! I'm so excited that this volume is finally out in the world. It features 35 chapters on so many different aspects of Michael Field's lives and work. Find out more/order for your library here: www.cambridge.org/gb/universit...