Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam. RIP Moyà (photo courtesy of Andrea Corr who is pictured next to her here)

A lovely round sunset

My favourite childhood beach

We always called this the Elephant Crag

Curly ferns, bluebells, primroses and shamrock all out on Scrabo

Six spot ladybird sheltering in a stinging nettle

Join us on Mon 20th April, 10am-1pm BST for a free online event on applying for funding! Register on Zoom: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

BARS 2026 Conference Registration now OPEN! We are pleased to announce that registration for the 2026 BARS Conference, Romantic Retrospection, hosted by the University of Birmingham, is now open.

This is how we do Easter holidays in County Down 🐣 🚜

This is how we do Easter holidays in County Down 🚜

Pieris Japonica looking incredible

Watching this massive cumulonimbus from across the Irish Sea. Is it snowing in Galloway @libraryfiend.bsky.social ?

Storm Dave arrives

Easter weekend begins . I’ve always liked Maundy Thursday : fellowship before it all goes dark

She's heard me say it a thousand times but it still knocks me out that I get to work closely with this amazing woman

Boswell Book Festival 2026 8–10 May Tickets are on sale for the 2026 @bozzybookfest.bsky.social, the world’s only festival of biography & memoir. The festival is a programme of stories taken from the inspirational lives of people past & present #biography #memoir 💙📚 www.boswellbookfestival.co.uk

If anyone is interested in reading the report in full, it can be accessed here: doi.org/10.25411/aru...

Attending an interesting seminar hosted by UK PACT on the 'Careful University' which starts by acknowledging that in academia to be 'professional' is to be 'care-free': death by 1000 cuts to those already marginalised as carers incl. citizenship (caring) roles not counting for promotion (been there)

The @bars.bsky.social Conference programme at Birmingham has been announced and we're all getting ridiculously excited about the panels and papers. As @drbeard79.bsky.social said, "So many people! So many friends!" Organisers have done a great job.

Sadly true. it also doesn’t engage with students yet claims to act in the name of “student experience”

This 👇 wonkhe.com/blogs/univer...

WE NEED YOU! Would you like to write an article for the BARS Blog? We've got some ideas for April below! If you'd like to write a blog on one of these subjects, please do get in touch! Alternatively, if you'd like to pitch your own idea, don't be afraid to drop us a message!!

The future of Rydal Mount, the final home of world-renowned poet William Wordsworth, has been secured thanks to a landmark acquisition by the Wordsworth Trust, working in partnership with The Julia Rausing Trust and the Charlotte Aitken Trust. www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=6397

BARS | BAVS Nineteenth-Century Matters Fellowship 2026 Call for Applications @ Liverpool John Moores University offers unaffiliated ECRs a platform from which to pursue their research, while also organising an academic event or a workshop. More info and how to apply: www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=6399

Frae fields whare Spring her sweets has blawn Wi’ caller verdure our the lawn, The Gowdspink comes in new attire, The brawest ’mang the whistling choir… —Robert Fergusson (1750–1774), “Ode to the Gowdspink” from The Poetical Works of Robert Fergusson (Glasgow, 1800) #poem #poetry #C18th

About half the people employed by a university in the UK are not academics, and *everybody* is busy all year round: there are no long dreamy summer vacations with nothing to do

CFP deadline this week for our Brontë Studies special issue on Poetry - the abstracts are starting to flock in - still time to send in yours!

Applications for the 206/27 round of the C19 Matters Fellowship @ljmuofficial.bsky.social are now open! Details and benefits below and here: victorianist.wordpress.com/2026/03/27/n.... Deadline Monday 11 May 2026; please share widely! @bars.bsky.social @bavs-uk.bsky.social @drhorrocks.bsky.social

The mistake that keeps being repeated is the assumption that the fullness of human outputs can emerge from building a model based on even a really large set of human inputs. This assumption embeds too many abstractions. The results will feel off to people who know the source material well.

Reading about Reflective Functioning in therapy and struck by how many parallels there are between this and literary criticism. individuals with a higher reflective function are more aware of their agency to express profound emotion (e.g. poetry invoking an understanding of what goes on inside us).

You will be unsurprised to hear that Sinéad Morrissey’s memoir “Among Communists” is a tremendous piece of writing. Special edition currently available from No Alibis. Get yours quick. Such a great read

🎺NEW BLOG POST🎺 'Dorothy Wordsworth’s Trees, Part 1: The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals' Here I explore what trees meant to Dorothy and how she writes about them in the G&A journals. More to come! will-sherwood.com/2026/03/24/d...

In the past couple of days I’ve had two men in my life “explain“ to me Northern Ireland’s record of domestic violence against women like it was a surprise finding, and as if I wouldn’t already be aware of it. In one case in particular, the irony involved was unreal.

Celestial bodies

Santana’s “Amigos” monkey keeps following me

Values-led therapy goals: The more psychology I read, the more disturbed I am at the extent to which is permeates management-speak (though often heavily inflected towards a purpose for which it was never intended).

Universities: you must complete a risk assessment and ethical review for this perfectly safe activity. Also universities: please embrace this energy-hungry water-guzzling plagiarism machine that is frequently wrong. Also, it makes you thick and may encourage you to kill yourself.

Phenomenal opening lines, in the opening essay, of first volume of 6, of the new @bloomsburybooksuk.bsky.social "Cultural History of Poverty", already my favourite publication of 2026. Seems Western / European society has always despised the poor, & has always treated poverty as a moral failing.

📢 Fully-funded PhD scholarship: Living with Print in the Eighteenth Century Based at the University of Sydney (supervised by me) and the University of Glasgow (supervised by Matthew Sangster), with time at both institutions. Applications due 21 April More details: www.gla.ac.uk/scholarships...

"As a woman, to speak first, or even early, in the effort to push against injustice or to expose an ugly truth, is to risk scorn and, almost certainly, to undergo scathing attacks."

Bit of the bright side to insomnia: watched the moon dip down in the northern sky behind the horizon, glowing red

This is horrible but not even the grimmest article I’ve read about the Sudan genocide. Western powers at best turning a blind eye and arguably complicit. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Nearly got taken out on campus by a male cyclist. I stepped back and instinctively apologised (I am but a woman, after all, and we're conditioned to) and he sarcastically responded "whoosh..." which made me want to chase him and give him what for.

It's Wednesday... 6 meetings down, 2 to go.

Good HE is really simple: quality time spent with subject experts who know and care about their students. My university and many others are deliberately abandoning this truth in favour of financial and organisational efficiency.

A reminder that the deadline for Expressions of Interest in hosting BARS 2028 is coming up - if you're potentially interested, but have questions or concerns, please feel free to drop me an email. It's a big responsibility, but a very rewarding one, and crucial for the health of the Association.

Lovely to see this. I have fond memories of both Alasdair and the Chip from my time in Glasgow.