Not sure what 'secure' even looks like for most of right now, be it early, middle, or late career.

A good summary of how it’s going. Finished my PhD 9 years ago and am still stringing things together. As the first Anon says, what does ECR (or Mid-career) even mean anymore? That kind of career linearity depends on first vaulting over the fault line of secure/insecure - now a nearly impossible task

Modern British History maternity leave cover (7 months in first instance) teaching position, predominantly 20th century, UCL History Dept. Starts 1 October 2025. Friendly department with excellent students and great library resources. PhD required. Deadline 24 July.

I took photos at BL of a 19thC UK magazine and I'd like to use one in an article. I have limited funds. Is my assumption the mag is out of copyright correct? If I took the photo at the BL do I need to tell/pay them? If I bought the mag (ebay?) and photo'd it at home, could I reproduce it freely? 🙏

Our response to the recent Supreme Court ruling ‘For Women Scotland Ltd. v. The Scottish Ministers’: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

New open letter: Historians for Trans Rights Please sign ✍️ Co-ordinated by @parkesland.bsky.social

Excited to welcome @lauratisdall.bsky.social to the IHR tomorrow for this talk. Please register if you're interested!

📢 Reminder that first @cont-brit-hist.bsky.social Term 3 seminars @ihr.bsky.social kick off on Weds 30 Apr 5.30pm (in-person only) with @lauratisdall.bsky.social on 1980s teenagers, experiences & 'Grrrr'! Do come along to find out more. Register via link 👇. @kieranconnell.bsky.social #skystorians

Chilling

Have put together a class on music, identity and the 90s, and am reminded that a key perk of this job is, for example, asking students to read Neil Kulkarni’s blog on Britpop/Whiley/Lamacq neilk.substack.com/p/please-ple...

Bit of a long-shot, but does anyone have a copy or scan of the infamous Select magazine issue/cover from April 1993 that helped launch the idea of 'Britpop' - Brett Anderson photo, 'Yanks Go Home' headline etc..? It would be very helpful for some teaching I'm doing next week! Thank you :)

Reading Jean Baudrillard’s “Forget Foucault” for the first time. Big MF fan, but ouch! Also, Semiotext(e)’s Foreign Agents series in its 80s design: very cute, very moreish, like Fitzcarraldos. Mine is last library-stamped 05-NOV-1997. But JB is coming back round, I’m sure 🤣

Creeping fear my academic job covering letter reads a bit like this 🤣

Mass Observation list of interests, Jan 1937. Tag yourself

Read Traverso’s book on the “subjectivist” or “homodiegetic” turn in history-writing over the weekend (Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography). He nails down some of the stylistic conventions of books in which the historian-author is present (1/3)

Mentally preoccupied with the idea of a 1993-96 “dark Nineties” that slips past the usual Cool Britannia stuff + encompasses Mike Leigh’s “Naked”, Ravenhill’s “Shopping and Fucking”, Tricky’s “Maxinquaye”, Sarah Kane’s “Blasted”, “The Holy Bible”, heroin chic and maybe the KLF burning a million quid

Check out my recently live webpage on smuggling gangs and coastal policing based on research with original docs at the National Archives. #19thc beta.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-...

Taking a break from eating mince pies to get started on reviewing proofs for Selling Sexual Knowledge today. I don't think I've mentioned what this book is actually about on social media (and I need to psych myself up to get started on this), so here's a little 🧵 about it if you're curious:

Had a few folk ask about the exciting QMCBS conference/cfp. There are some shared Qs in there which shaped some things we did a few years back at another British Studies Centre at Bham. The new event looks great to me – good folk involved, interesting plenaries, compelling agenda etc... (1/13)

Only a month to go until the CfP deadline for the 'Legacies of Section 28' conference, which will bring together historians, educators and activists to explore the context and impact of the legislation. Send in your abstracts and please share with your networks! royalhistsoc.org/calendar/leg...

This Sophie Smith essay on the Pelicot case and patriarchy will be returned to and returned to, I think, for the way it renders something so apparently shocking so completely plausible and exemplary. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Just back from the Tate’s “1980s” exhibition. If you know the period, much of the work will be familiar even if it retains its power: in fact, the exhibition feels like the endpoint of a canonisation of 80s British photographers (Gupta, Pollard, Parr, Killip etc) that has been going on a few years.

Fun to find this acid rework of Auden/Grierson’s “Night Mail” (1936) buried at the back end of Aphex Twin’s new collection of offcuts 🚂 youtu.be/X2t2l7pf5xY?... youtu.be/zmciuKsBOi0?...

V cool to see @manchesterup.bsky.social choose our volume Men and Masculinities in Modern Britain as their History OA highlight of 2024 The book came out in Jan and we've since had 21,500 downloads - way more than we hoped for @tricksterprince.bsky.social manchester.benchurl.com/c/v?e=192271...

This was a good opportunity to reflect on our edited volume on *Men and masculinities in modern Britain: a history for the present* a few months after it was published open access with @manchesterup.bsky.social You can read the book here www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781...

My experience after years of E&S roles: teaching loads are intense, job security and progression is nil, and disciplinary research continues but is squeezed into spare time - meanwhile the “pedagogical innovation/scholarship” dimension of E&S is mostly a fiction to dress up real emphasis on volume

A really exciting programme for our IHR Contemporary British History seminar next term > all welcome

📢 What a line-up for Term 2 @ihr.bsky.social @cont-brit-hist.bsky.social seminar series. 4 fab papers + 1 roundtable. Take a look at what is on offer & sign up for seminars via link: www.history.ac.uk/seminars/con.... We look forward to welcoming you (Cait, Helen, Pat, Dan, Kieran, George & Ben).

I’m really fascinated by the story of Rosemary Tonks and think I’d enjoy her books. Anyone read any of them and able to advise on a nice place to start? Don’t mind whether novels or poetry or both.

Academic bluesky is getting kind of dizzying as an experience, because both the cruelty (stories like this) and the optimism (wholesome research) are intensifying + conjoining to such an impossible degree www.timeshighereducation.com/news/univers...

My article 'Impotence and Incompetence: Edward Krasiński’s Art and Writing' is out in Oxford Art Journal! Come for Krasiński, stay for Białoszewski and Gombrowicz. This has been years in the making, but I had so much fun with it. It's open access! academic.oup.com/oaj/article/...

Spent a bit of time this week researching the life and writings of the trans “human ethologist”, esotericist and society hypnotist Charlotte Bach, here in a homemade composite photo alongside her male alter ego, Michael Karoly. zagria.blogspot.com/2009/05/char...

Had decided I was against true crime TV in principle, but then the Lucan thing on BBC reeled me in... Exploitative for sure. But also compelling - indirectly, at least - on the 1970s class system, imperial adventuring, marriage and sex, gender and 'madness', identity and falsehood, counterculture..

Students are reading Tom Nairn on the Windsors, published in 1977, the Jubilee year - an essay on the “mountainous dunghill” of bourgeois monarchy and the “royalist polyfilla” failing to stave off national collapse. A polemic, but hard not to think “yeah, you’ve absolutely rumbled us here mate”.

Doing prelim work for an article on the 1970s UK trans conferences and psychoanalysis. The idea is that, while we can certainly document how “official” analysis was a technology of oppression, we can also see how some trans folk were developing a “wilder”, non-clinical analysis aimed at liberation

Does anyone know of a good overview of national identity/identities in Britain in the 20thC (or postwar)? Ideally chapter/article-length, suitable as an introduction for undergraduates. Thank you!

Stuart Ward’s chapter in Untied Kingdom abt the Sagana Lodge, the Queen and the meanings of home at the end of empire is just such a good, teachable text. One of those gifts that is “expert” but approachable, and so neat in its circling/modulation of a main theme/argument while keeping some nuance 🙏

Somewhat regretting my life choices re setting an 80 page Sylvia Wynter article for a class later this week. Students are probably regretting it even more. V embarrassing “back to school”, “of course we’ll all have time to read it!!” hubris on my part - happens every year.

Enjoyed catching Tropical Modernism at the V&A this morning - only a pity it closes before I meet my new slate of MA students of British culture and decolonisation. Shows really well the encounter between modernism, colonialist views of the “tropics”, and midcentury anticolonial internationalism.

Overall, though, it’s remained quite a niche pursuit? The “Workshop” circle has always been supportive, which makes sense given the centrality of psychoanalysis to the New Left. I wonder if we will see some new work now that another return to Freud is happening in the humanities and pop culture.

Some great tips in reply to this: - Lyndal Roper - Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape - Michel de Certeau - Graham Dawson’s Soldier Heroes - John Mack on TE Lawrence Joan Scott’s (relatively) recent work on fantasy and feminist history also springs to mind…

Anyone got any favourite examples of psychoanalytically-informed history? Not histories *of* psychoanalysis, but histories through and with psychoanalysis? I’m thinking Sally Alexander, some of Catherine Hall’s recent work, Ronald Fraser, Mike Roper…but what else?

Enjoyed reading Steedman read Woolf (not) reading Renan: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Do any UK academic (esp humanities) friends have a side hustle that is actually workable/worthwhile on top of a part-time teaching job? Been thinking about: - private tutoring - freelance writing - freelance archival research - something low stress, local and non-academic (not sure what!)

I enjoyed reading this new article by @andrewpopp.bsky.social today. Recommended! Adds something new to recent work in British history on neoliberal subjectivities, & a nice, specific account of the Enterprise Allowance and its uses - a fixture of pop histories of 1980s DIY doi.org/10.1080/1744...

Can safely say that this has been the quietest summer for fixed-term hiring in History I have seen in nine summers on the market

One new + especially grim aspect of this mutating/deepening/intertwining precariousness in HE: prospects of underemployed teaching fellows are materially dependent on some depts hoovering up students and others falling into crisis, as “prestige” unis try to cover their UG provision at short notice

I've been reading Lord Wolfenden's memoirs, published in 1976. It's a short, sweet book, more diverting than I was expecting. You can definitely trace through it a genealogy of the midcentury 'liberal hour' that has roots in the particular philosophical and moral climate of interwar Oxford.

Updating my reading lists for 24-25. I'm mostly teaching on 20thC Britain during+after Empire. Here are a few recent things I'm adding: - Kieran Connell, Multicultural Britain - Noreen Masud, A Flat Place - Alan Lester, Truth About Empire - Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality Any other tips?