🧵 We are delighted to be partnering with The Quilters’ Guild! The Guild aims to give quilt-making the status it deserves as a craft and an art and its Quilt Collection preserves our patchwork and quilting heritage. Stay tuned for more information about our collaboration and how to get involved!

A terrible policy.

Such an exciting collaboration 😍

Can confirm the talk was wonderful! Can also recommend the book, which would make a fab Christmas present for anyone you know who loves history!

Lovely to be at Alison Bashford’s talk @lancasteruni.bsky.social as a part of the @victorianhand.bsky.social project.

We were thrilled to welcome Professor Alison Bashford to @globalaffairslu.bsky.social yesterday to discuss her new @uchicagopress.bsky.social book, Decoding the Hand. Thank you to everyone who came along to hear insights into the entangled histories of science, medicine and magic!

🚗BEEP BEEP🚗 Reminder that next Tuesday (18 Nov) Dr Rachel Moss @menysnoweballes.bsky.social will be giving the annual Carantes Samain talk online, this time on the extreme right and medievalism! See the link below about how to RSVP. All are welcome! Fáilte roimh chách! carantes.org/2025/10/15/o...

I'm doing some walking tours of Seven Dials with @stanfordstravel.bsky.social on Saturday Nov 15. Come for coffee, cheese, & overpriced street food, stay for overexcited historian, whistle stop tour of the Dials, & sideways look at 1920s and 1930s London. www.stanfords.co.uk/event-songs-...

What's lost when we lose staff, departments, programmes and faculties in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and what's that got to do with organ donation? Amid the looming losses faced by Cardiff, Edinburgh, Lancaster, Leicester and Nottingham (among many others), here's a worked example. 1/8

✊ From the late 19th century, socialist movements adopted the raised fist as a symbol of unity and strength. One of the first depictions was by Hungarian artist Mihály Biró in 1912. His image of a fist emerging from factories toward parliament in Budapest visualised the power of collective action.

Another #Handoftheweek - enjoy and please share 🙏

'Those arguing for more post-publication peer review acknowledge that the consequences of a greater volume of non-peer-reviewed papers appearing online—and therefore available immediately to large language models such as ChatGPT as well as to non-academic readers—would need to be managed.' Quite.

General registration is now open for our upcoming conference The Hand: Emotions, Embodiment and Identity at London College of Fashion, 8-9 January! Visit our website to register: www.thevictorianhand.uk/conference

You can now register for our exciting conference that spans disciplines, time, and place and offers exciting hands-on sessions. Please sign up soon as spaces are limited!!

📜WILLS ON THE RADIO!📜 The brilliant Chris Hoban was on local radio talking about the wills project and playing some songs! This one is perhaps my favourite: based on the will of London widow Alice Walter, proved September 1665. TNA PROB 11/317/428. #EarlyModern 🗃️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXwB...

'Study in SHAPE disciplines – social sciences, humanities and the arts – develops the skills that underpin a modern workforce: critical thinking, communication and creativity. These are not peripheral to the industrial strategy but essential to it.' 1/3

Yup. Appreciated this article from a couple of months ago: archive.is/UFBHo about the disorientating disjunction between the popularity of / need for history and the shrinking of history departments.

This month’s suitably spooky blog post is from our Research Associate, who has been speaking with the dead in the archives of the Society for Psychical Research! Read here: www.thevictorianhand.uk/gallery/spir...

Check out @victorianhand.bsky.social new blog post on the unsettling evidence of hands in the archives of the Society for Psychical Research.

Halloween Reading 👻

Announcing a brand new series launching this #Halloween 👻 Manchester Studies in the Supernatural explores how the #supernatural shapes human experience across time and place. Bridging disciplines and challenging boundaries, it welcomes bold new research on the #occult and the #unseen

There are less than two weeks left to apply for the British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowships. The scheme supports senior researchers in the humanities and social sciences towards the completion of a major piece of research. Find out more and apply: https://bit.ly/3VMeTZ9

📢CFP: Annual Olivette Otele Prize 2025/26! Our annual prize for Black UK-based history PhD students is now open for submissions! 📆Key dates: - Abstracts due on 28th November - Notifications on 19th December - 8000 word essay due on 27th Feb (1/3)

📣 We're hiring! Join us for a fixed-term part time role at the Library as our Research and Engagement Officer. We are seeking a highly motivated and knowledgeable individual with a postgraduate qualification in Holocaust Studies or a closely related field. Find out more and apply: buff.ly/KuadEMU

"We’ve made it about individuals, because the academic research system is very focused on the individual level, and that’s something we really need to break,” she said. Yes, break the focus on individuals. After all, the system is doing its best to break individuals altogether at this time. 1/3

We are delighted to announce that the plenary speakers for our upcoming conference are Dr Sarah Jackson, Professor Peter J. Capuano and Caroline Seymour! Visit our website for more information: www.thevictorianhand.uk/conference

In colonial India, William Herschel introduced fingerprinting in the 1850s to authenticate identity on legal documents. Influenced by colonial ideologies, his experiments laid the foundations for modern forensic identification, codifying the hand as a scientific marker of identity. #handoftheweek

'The Rev Clive Foster said Windrush scandal survivors were questioning whether “history is repeating itself” as UK politicians target legal migrants.' Essential, timely reading.

My review of @benltjackson.bsky.social's excellent book!

Higher fees may give Higher Ed a bit more time. I doubt it. I think this White Paper will speed decline. By squeezing lots of really big unis' international recruitment while making home undergrads even more profitable, they'll make the Big Guns take even more with lower and lower grades. (21/?)

My reaction to the Government's White Paper on Post-16 Education and Skills. As it pertains to universities, it's a total botch that somehow manages to both raise fees and hack everybody off. The worst of all worlds, a bit like the rest of Labour's offer. Do have a read if you're interested. 👇

'A report from the PCE pilot had been expected this month, but the team behind the REF said the publication had been delayed to “avoid pre-empting” decisions being made about the exercise while its implementation remains on pause.' Surely something they could/should have announced last month? 1/2

The Victorian Hand's #handoftheweek is all about the fingerprint and the handprint and roots in racialised ideologies. Do check it out and follow us!

'New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested.' 1/2

This year one of the great joys of my work has been contributing to the advisory board for a new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. And last week the exhibition officially opened!

"That’s not the fault of the public – it’s not been in the historical discourse..." London museum identifies black Waterloo veteran in rare 1821 painting: www.theguardian.com/culture/2025...

There's just a day to go until @manchesterup.bsky.social publish my latest book Songs of Seven Dials: An intimate history of 1920s and 1930s London. I thought I should explain a bit about where the book came from. 1/15

📣Out now on #firstview! Rachel Rich, Lisa Wynne Smith (@historybeagle.bsky.social), Sarah Fox (@sarahfoxhistory.bsky.social) & Adam Crymble (@adamcrymble.bsky.social) on 'Self-Fashioning, Food, and Masculinity in George III’s Monarchy' #FoodHistory 18thc 🥧🥦🍞🗃️ 👉 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Check out this talk on a great new book, hosted by @victorianhand.bsky.social and @lancasteruni.bsky.social

For weekend readers:

BREAKING: British Green Party membership passes 123000 and approaches 124000; so that is >more than the Conservative Party<! Completely unprecedented. Do spread the word…

Whoop, whoop! The new queer wildlife documentary 'Second Nature,' narrated by the inspirational Elliot Page, will premiere in New York on Saturday. 🐠🏳️‍⚧️🐧🌈🐘 It looks awesome; check out the teaser. Hopefully it will be available in the UK soon. www.secondnaturedoc.com #lgbtq #nature #film #PrideInSTEM

See the fantastic work of our colleague Alana Harris @dralanagharris.bsky.social on the history of Horton cemetery #Epsom #London www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... #WorldMentalHealthDay

We’re launching our #handoftheweek series! This week is Dr Hippolyte Baraduc, who tried to photograph the human soul via 'the most perfect organ after the brain', the hand. Baraduc’s photos blend science and occult, showing how hands were seen as windows onto the inner self in the 19th century.

Do you want to read about the weird and wonderful history of hands? Check out @victorianhand.bsky.social and our #handoftheweek series, starting today!! Please share widely.

Labour should hang their head in shame. This is beautiful it sums up what makes Britain great. Well done @zackpolanski.bsky.social we need more like you to lead our country.

If you think that professors exist as repositories of knowledge that students ask for answers, you’re missing the entire point of a college education. We’re here to teach students how to do research, how to analyze and argue, how to think for themselves — how to find the answers on their own.

Check out this event and its details on our website: www.thevictorianhand.uk/alison-bashf...