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.

Excellent news. I'm just off to the off-license then (Ik ga nu naar de slijterij)... congratulations Matt et al!

@langtestjournal.bsky.social has made our article "A survey of English language proficiency tests in international student admissions at US research-intensive universities" free to read/download for 1 year! Mahalo!

The past tense of ‘to go’ is ‘went’, but this form used to belong to the verb ‘to wend’. We call such verbs suppletive. Surprisingly, ‘to bring’ is suppletive too: ‘brought’ comes from a different verb. My new graphic tells you all about their past. In certain varieties of English, ... 1/

📢📢📢The fifth round of the IRIS Replication Award is now open for submissions and will close at midnight (GMT) on 30th November 2026. ▶️For more information or to submit your application, please follow this link: www.iris-database.org/replication-...

Nottingham colleagues @uonucu.bsky.social and UoN Unison are on strike next week in defence of jobs. Please donate to their hardship fund if you can, and please share the link 👇 #UnionStrong #DefendJobs #DefendHE #WeAreTheUniversity #UCU

Or, just tell the students if they'd like some friendly feedback, to put the bullet points into AI and help themselves to whatever style of feedback they'd prefer! That's no sillier than the suggestion here, and arguably fairer cos it's completely open.

Simply astonishing. Maybe Lecturer A should not have to mark over 100 essays in a two-week window in the first place? Invest in qualified staff and reduce impossible workloads FFS www.kcl.ac.uk/about/strate...

'Why does nothing work anymore, and what can we do about it?' Hugely honoured to be giving the Chancellor's Lecture at @yorkstjohn.bsky.social in conversation with University Chancellor, Reeta Chakrabarti. 6pm Weds 15th October - register here www.yorksj.ac.uk/events/upcom...