Oxford is seeking an exceptional candidate for an Assoc/Full Prof in Sociolinguistics, in association with Worcester College (a strong contender for the title of prettiest college in Oxford). A fantastic opportunity to join a thriving and growing community of language scholars. tinyurl.com/53rhewe2

BAAL Vocabulary Studies SIG Annual Conference 2026 One final reminder about registration for our conference which this year takes place at Bangor University, 28-29 May 2026 Please use the following link to sign up: shop.bangor.ac.uk/product-cata... I am also sharing our provisional programme 😀

Teachers and educators are invited to join us for a full-day workshop exploring the evidence around teaching children for whom English is an Additional Language (EAL). 📅 10 July ⌚ 9am - 5.15pm 📍 Department of Education Sign up now and secure an early bird ticket 👉 bit.ly/4cvov2w

Francesca Woodward of the Cambridge University Press and Assessment in the FT warning of the inadvisability of the Home Office permitting remote English language testing www.ft.com/content/6cdc...

Please help share what must be one of the best jobs ever. We are looking for a writer to join @ourworldindata.org to work with our fantastic team including @maxroser.bsky.social and @hannahritchie.bsky.social. £80k - £120k / ideally full time / location flexible ourworldindata.org/hiring-write...

Reduce Your UCU Subscription Cost by Claiming Tax Relief As we’ve entered a new tax year, it’s a great time to remind #UCU members that you may be able to reduce the cost of your union subscription by claiming tax relief from HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC). Click the link for more details.

These "discover something" journals from Springer Nature are here to steal your research money, as those from MDPI and Frontiers (and many others). ⚒️ 🧪 Learn more here: the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post... 2/2

“In 2023, UK universities spent a total of £500m on education agents – but there is very little oversight of how these agents operate.” Important read from The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/education/ng...

Nana Sofija & deda Jova’s home, the morning after the air raid of 5 April 1999 on our hometown of Aleksinac. Their bodies would later be pulled from the rubble still holding cards from their last game of tablići. These images still haunt me. My heart is with everyone enduring such horrors now.

This is a good move. The APC system has not worked and alternatives should be tried. Other funders and major institutions should also be considering alternatives

Ready for egg pocking tomorrow 🐣

Interested in spending 3-12 months with us in Oxford as a senior visiting academic? The Leverhulme Trust has a scheme to help. Get in touch with an Oxford colleague soon, as the internal deadline for interest is on Apr 17. www.leverhulme.ac.uk/visiting-pro...

It’s all just jam! Justice for quinces (marmelo) remains unrestored.

If you are a practitioner, researcher or student who is interested in finding out more about play-based pedagogies, join my wonderful colleague @faidra.bsky.social in Oxford’s Department of @education.ox.ac.uk on 25/03/2026!

We study history to know and understand what happened. We don’t have to justify it by saying we can ‘learn from the past’. We study philosophy to understand the nature of things. Not just to teach ethics to AI. Society should spend some resource on this kind of research. Understanding is an outcome!

Registration for EuroSLA 35 (Lisbon, 24-27 June 2026) is now open 📢 eurosla35.fcsh.unl.pt/registration/

Looking forward to Devyani Sharma’s inaugural lecture.

Applications are open for doctoral and postdoctoral roles with the Census of Urban and Rural Language in England and Wales (CURLEW). Work with Prof Paul Foulkes and colleagues to map language change across the UK. Positions available in York, Bern and Oxford. www.curlew.info/jobs #langsky

Looking forward to visiting the Samurai exhibition in London, based on research by the wonderful @olegb.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Open Science in Linguistics Free EuroSLA webinar 27 February 2026 www.eurosla.org/open-science...

📣 Calling first-time authors! To mark the 10th anniversary of JESLA, we’re offering 3 prizes for papers accepted in 2026 🏆 Details & submissions: www.euroslajournal.org Open to EuroSLA members in good standing (for co-authored papers, at least one author must be eligible).

Fertility struggles are usually told through the stories of those who eventually had a child. That can offer hope - but it also quietly erases those who didn’t get there. Giving them voice matters. We need more stories like this. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Happy Christmas from the Yorkshire Wolds. ( photo taken a few weeks ago , see you after the holidays , best wishes James )

Exciting times ahead! After 22 wonderful years in York, I’ll be heading to Oxford in January to take up a Professorship in Applied Linguistics. To say it’s a privilege would be an understatement. Joy and exhilaration mixed with awe and that familiar “what-have-I-just-done?” feeling.

Hopkins Cog Sci is hiring! We have two open faculty positions: one in vision, and one language. Please repost!

For avoidance of confusion, that’s just about all academic staff, excluding Heads of Dept and- of course - Senior Management Team.

💡 Expressions of Interest: Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowships 2026 Deadline: 30 Nov Submit: Completed EOI form, CV (1 page), and proposal outline (max 2 pages) to: [email protected] Complete the form here 👉 shorturl.at/0O2f4

I wrote this morning to the VC and Deputy VC of Nottingham to urge them to rethink the plans for closing languages. You can too, addresses here. www.savemlcatnotts.org.uk

Lovely day for the York 10 mile run today 🌤️🕶️🏃🏻‍♀️

The outcome of organisational reviews captured:“Everything was over-organised and so failed to work properly. The new bureaucracy, which was supposed to impose order, was still enjoying itself writing memos and making out permits, and everything was delayed” (Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday)

stop thinking right now

🎓 13 PhD POSITIONS available across Europe! 🌍 HUM.AI.N-ACCENT is an EU-funded research project that explores the impacts of foreign-accented speech in human-human and human-AI interactions. More info: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/... #PhD #MSCA #HorizonEurope #CognitiveScience #AI

Nominate yourself to come run your own research dept in lovely MPI-PL in the woods. Or nominate someone amazing - your colleague, supervisor, former student.... Deadline for nominations 19th December

PhD Position: Accented Speech Processing - Apply now! Come work with Mirjam Broersma, @davidpeeters.bsky.social, and me at the Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University in the Netherlands. Application deadline: 19 October 2025 For more information, see www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

Tansies of York

Posting on behalf of Tamar Gollan, who is not on Bluesky: A postdoc position is open and available immediately in Dr. Tamar Gollan’s Laboratory of Aging Bilingualism at the University of California, San Diego, funded by NIH & NSF. See link for details! psychiatry.ucsd.edu/about/LAB_Go...

** New ** Seeking Postdoctoral Research Fellow (3 yrs) for ESRC project on skilled reading in Arabic. Based in my lab at @rhulpsychology.bsky.social and collaborating with @denisdrieghe.bsky.social (Soton) and Sami Boudelaa (UAE). Please share! jobs.royalholloway.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...

...I mean that even with careful prompts I would not be confident LLMs could perform the function I'd want. How do I know that any bland AI summary of a paper is going to extract what might be of value to *me* in it? I don't even know that myself before I read it...

We are worried about our students. There is a misapprehension that behaving "unhappy" gives an impression of worldliness or that it signals empathy to the world’s problems. What is worse- suppressing happiness changes your capacity for joy. www.wsj.com/opinion/how-...

If you haven’t joined the union - time to do it right now! Better and stronger together 👏 #ucu #jointheunion #universityoflincoln

The full program for our hybrid symposium on the quan/qual divide in applied linguistics is now available. October 17 - no fees or preregistration. Luke Plonsky and Bethany Gray are giving keynotes along with nine other talks and a panel discussion. corpus.cal.msu.edu/1052-2/

Call for Papers for EuroSLA 35 Lisbon 24-27 July 2026 www.eurosla.org/call-for-pap...

Deadline Nov 1: Asst prof (tenure track), Syntax and Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Ohio State University osu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/OSUCareers/j...

Jobs: Computational Linguistics, General Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics: Assistant Professor in Language Science/Linguistics, Georgia Institute of Technology

Haystacks at dawn

I screen out Frontiers emails so hadn't seen a colleague's invite to their editorial board. so the colleague emailed me directly to ask again (we're friendly w/ each other) I don't like saying 'no' to service for good colleagues, but one must act on principle against bad publishers. here's my reply

We need more in-depth reporting on UK university finances like this. Research , research funding and their relation to teaching and teaching funding could do with a similar level of detail. Here's a sharing link for 3 non-subscribers: on.ft.com/3ImSMWa

Announcing the first (and perhaps only) Multilingual Minds and Machines Meeting! Come join us in Nijmegen, June 22-23, 2026, if you are interested in computational models of human multilingualism: mmmm2026.github.io

It's #WorldChildlessWeek Here is a really useful article that discusses this "quieter experience that tends to go unnoticed" and what organisations may consider. #WorldChildlessWeek2025 #Infertility The Invisible Experience: Childlessness in the Workplace www.linkedin.com/pulse/invisi...

Interspecies love at its very best.