CELL is very heavily involved in running this MA in Early Modern Studies at UCL: there's an online event this week, should anyone be interested. New courses this year on Iberian empires & Shakespeare in European context, and as ever, a strong focus on archival research and students as researchers!

A quick plug for our @rsaorg.bsky.social San Francisco '26 session on building and using early modern libraries rsa.confex.com/rsa/2026/mee... Saturday, 21 Feb, 2.30pm–4pm.

*small embarrassed voice* A little plug for my article on Devon book sales c. 1700, which has gone online open access. tl;dr book auctions weren't just a London/Oxbridge thing: a flourishing second-hand book market centred on Exeter included auctions from the 1680s. doi.org/10.1093/libr...

If there's anything more exciting than seeing a book you work on in an exhibition, it's surely being invited to talk about it. Very excited for this event next month! 📷 Lancelot Browne's annotated copy of Avicenna in Arabic at the @rcpmuseum.bsky.social exhibition, 'A body of knowledge'.

Ah, RSA time. You wants library history? We gots your library history.

I'm thrilled to be teaching a short course on Arabic Studies in Early Modern England with Prof. Alastair Hamilton at @warburginstitute.bsky.social next month. We'll need to meet a minimum number of bookings to run, so if you're interested, sign up asap! warburg.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

Rare books people! Following some lively & productive discussion at the @livesandletters.bsky.social conference last week, I have a question: how would you describe inscriptions like these?

Have you ever wanted to do historical research, but not been sure how to go about it? Join our heritage researchers @rach-anderson.bsky.social and @petermitchellnhsn.bsky.social in Oct for a specially curated course on finding your way through the archival maze: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-introdu...

So @theturing.bsky.social has decided they no longer need Humanities (!) - so the The Alan Turing Institute’s Humanities and Data Science Interest Group are having one final event: "Network power: the humanities and data science in collaboration" In person and online, Oxford, 25th Sept. Pls share!

Looking forward to delivering the first version of my work theorising the concept of provenance at this conference!

The programme for this symposium has just been announced and it looks superb! Featuring @laurajcleaver.bsky.social alongside IES fellows and students. Book now! 09 September 2025–10 September 2025, 9:30 am–6:30 pm www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of...

📣 Exciting Bedwell news 📣 I’m thrilled to have assisted with a new exhibition at Bruce Castle Museum, ‘Getting the Measure of William Bedwell: Maths, Measurement and the Arabic World’. Top tip: pair your visit with a walk around the corner to see his church for full WB/early modern Tottenham vibes.

do read friend @jonnelledge.bsky.social's newsletter, it's got a nice little shout out to me and my obsession with bookwheels -- you can see the work that inspired the obsession at www.bookwheel.org

Deadline tomorrow!

Registration open! Excited about this roundtable bringing together the brains of @sameen-mohsin.bsky.social @kabcommons.bsky.social @worsted.bsky.social from @mrcwarwick.bsky.social & Ansar Ahmed Ullah from the Swadhinata Trust 19 May, 6-8pm, @rshc.bsky.social: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/changing-t...

Hello all! In common with pretty much every other research institution, since the BL cyberattack we've been making sure our website livesandletters.ac.uk (and the research it contains) is good and safe.

I have a new post, about the alluring non-spaces in sketches: ofsmith.substack.com/p/partial-pi...

I was lucky enough to spend much of last year surveying Arabic manuscripts at the @nationaltrust.bsky.social and @britishlibrary.bsky.social, tracing the provenance of individual items and identifying trends across the collections. If you’d like to read more there’s a link to my report below!

We’re having a symposium at @livesandletters.bsky.social! Come and geek out with us over early modern libraries and the books that filled them. Abstracts due May 16th, full details here www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of... #bookhistory #earlymodern

Call for Papers: ‘Built with books: shaping the shelves of the early modern library’ Deadline 16th May 2025 9 –10 September 2025 at UCL, London

Our project on early donations to the Bodleian Library meant that @drallotment.bsky.social and @annalujz.bsky.social spent many hours at the Bod working on provenance research, the fruits of which can now be found inside SOLO, the Bodleian's online catalogue. ebdo.org.uk/2025/03/31/i...

We can't thank @annalujz.bsky.social enough for her work as the project postdoc, which, frankly, is an entirely inadequate description of the role she played.

Do you like humanities data? Do you like project documentation that goes into quite a bit of detail about what that data is/are*, the methodologies used, the decisions that were made, and the alternatives that weren't? Then hoo boy do we have the pdf for you! *delete as appropriate

It is a tremendous data set, Anna and company! Congratulations on getting it out. The documentation alone is one of the best I have ever seen.

What better way to make our bluesky debut then sharing the news of our latest dataset release, from our Shaping Scholarship project about early donations of books, manuscripts and money to the Bodleian Library! Do download, play around, and get in touch! www.ebdo.org.uk/data