🪡 On Friday we explored practices of mending with The Quilters' Guild of the British Isles and textile artist Ruth Singer. We reflected on the meaning of mending, past and present, and tried our hand at repairing nineteenth century textiles!

Tickets are now available for our event celebrating Said the Dead. In this event, Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Helen Victoria Murray of @victorianhand.bsky.social will discuss about how tactility and the symbolism of the hand can bring us closer to history. www.faber.co.uk/product/touc...

We are delighted to be partnering with colleagues from Lancaster University for a free workshop at Lancaster City Museum exploring the histories of touch! Tickets: www.eventbrite.com/e/histories-...

Also, stay tuned for the announcement of a PERMANENT post in Late Medieval / Early Modern History.

The second post is Lecturer in Global Environmental History, with a preference for those working in the period 1500-1800. Please contact me if you have any queries. hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

📢 JOB ALERT📢 Please spread the word that there are 2x1-year, F/T (Teaching & Research) posts going in History @ Lancaster: Lecturer in Modern British History (1800-2000), with a focus on the social & cultural histories of the economy, advertising, or consumerism. hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

We are delighted to be taking part in this exciting event - ‘Touching Time’ - which launches Doireann Ní Ghríofa's brilliant new book Said the Dead. Follow the link to book a ticket for 20 May, 7pm, at The Bindery, London. www.faber.co.uk/product/touc...

✍️ Our Public Engagement Fellow, rosscmrn.bsky.social, sheds light on the origins of our project in the latest Bulletin of The Royal College of Surgeons of England! Read the full article here: publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/full/10....

Our latest blog by Public Engagement Fellow @rosscmrn.bsky.social reflects on the first two Work of Mending workshops, where sewing and surgery were brought into dialogue to explore how identity is shaped through what we do with our hands. Read more here: www.thevictorianhand.uk/gallery/surg...

🫀 On Friday we held the second Work of Mending workshop at @hunterianmuseum.bsky.social, exploring pride in skill across histories of surgery and craft. Thank you to everyone who joined and we’re looking forward to continuing the conversation at our next workshop at The Quilters' Guild in York!

We launched our Work of Mending workshop series at The Quilters' Guild in York, exploring skilled hands from the nineteenth century to the present day. Thank you to everyone who joined and we’re looking forward to continuing the conversation at our next workshop at @hunterianmuseum.bsky.social!

🤝 AI is back in the headlines and still can’t get hands right. In this month’s blog, our Research Associate Helen Victoria Murray looks at Glasgow’s arts community response to a proposed AI-generated mural. Read the full blog to explore the debate: www.thevictorianhand.uk/gallery/ai-s...

We are delighted to invite you to take part in The Work of Mending workshops with @hunterianmuseum.bsky.social at The Royal College of Surgeons of England! This series of creative workshops explores the meaning of hands and handwork, past and present. Tickets: www.eventbrite.com/cc/the-work-...

🎥 In Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac (1924), hands are the protagonists. After a train accident, a pianist receives transplanted hands from a murderer, which seem disturbingly autonomous and reflect early twentieth-century anxieties about prosthetics, fingerprinting, and modern medicine.

We're so excited about these workshops. Stay tuned for more news soon about dates.

We are delighted to be partnering with @hunterianmuseum.bsky.social at The Royal College of Surgeons of England in our research on hands, craft and haptic skill in the nineteenth century! Stay tuned for news about our collaboration and how to get involved!

We’re delighted to announce the first workshops in our Work of Mending series, in partnership with The Quilters’ Guild. These hands-on, research-led workshops explore what hands do and what they mean in historical and contemporary handwork. Tickets: www.eventbrite.com/cc/the-work-...

@victorianhand.bsky.social is running a series of workshops exploring our hands as agents of making & mending in collaboration with the Quilters' Guild & @collegeofsurgeons.bsky.social. You can sign up for the QG workshops here with dates for the RCS to follow: www.eventbrite.com/cc/the-work-...

🙌 Two weeks on from The Hand: Emotions, Embodiment and Identity conference, we reflect on the stimulating contributions of scholars, artists and makers who explored the hand across historical, cultural and creative contexts. Read our latest blog here: www.thevictorianhand.uk/gallery/conf...

A huge thank you to all our delegates for joining The Hand: Emotion, Embodiment, Identity! Your ideas, questions and conversations made the conference such a rewarding and inspiring event. We are grateful to everyone who contributed and helped make it a success 🤝

✋ This 1845 daguerreotype captured the branded hand of Jonathan Walker - marked ‘SS’ for ‘slave stealer’ after he tried to help enslaved people escape Florida. Intended as punishment, it became an abolitionist symbol, though his story often overshadowed those of the enslaved people he sought to aid.

⚔️ Götz von Berlichingen lost his hand to a cannonball in 1504 and commissioned an iron prosthesis with hinged, lockable fingers for use in battle. He later adopted a more advanced model - one of the earliest functioning mechanical prosthetic hands - which he used across his military career.

🌎 What happens when a travel writer navigates the world through touch? This month’s blog explores the journeys of James Holman, the self-described ‘Blind Traveller’, and how his haptic encounters challenged the visual conventions of travel writing. www.thevictorianhand.uk/gallery/the-...

In 1895 Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered mysterious ‘X-rays’. His image of his wife’s hand - bones and wedding ring visible - captivated Europe. X-rays transformed medicine, revealing the body’s interior without surgery. Early radiologists paid a price, as missing hands became a mark of the work.

🧵 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!

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!

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

#Lancaster! Join Alison Bashford tonight, Nov 12 at 5pm, @globalaffairslu.bsky.social (with @victorianhand.bsky.social) as she discusses her new book, Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic. #HistSTM #HSTM #HistSci #BookTour #Palmistry buff.ly/jsJZ7Kp

✊ 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.

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

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...

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

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.

How might hands reveal an inner self – a soul, a character, an identity? Join us on 12 November at Lancaster University to explore this question with Professor Alison Bashford (University of New South Wales) as she presents her book, Decoding the Hand. Tickets: thevictorianhand.uk/alison-bashf...

We are pleased to annouce that Dr Ross Cameron @rosscmrn.bsky.social has joined The Victorian Hand team as a Public Engagement Fellow at @lcflondon.bsky.social! Watch this space for upcoming annoucements about public engagement activities and ways to get involved with The Victorian Hand.

Time feels tangible in these casts... Over on the Victorian Hand project blog, our Research Associate @helenvmurray.bsky.social reflects on her trip to Watts Gallery to research their extensive collection of plaster cast hands.. www.thevictorianhand.uk/blog-touchin...

🙋Don't forget! The call for abstracts for our conference on The Hand closes at midnight tonight! All abstracts should be sent to [email protected] We can't wait to go through all the incredible submissions we've received, so we can hand-craft a fantastic programme. Watch this space!

Touch transcends time... Last week, @helenvmurray.bsky.social was getting some haptic shivers whilst exploring spiritual hands in the archives of the Society for Psychical Research. Meanwhile, we're levitating with excitement to receive your abstracts for The Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, Identity.

3 weeks to go until the deadline for abstracts for our conference The Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, Identity (8-9 Jan 2026). Are you getting yours ready?✍ Send abstracts and bios to [email protected] by 22 September 2025. We can't wait to hear from you!

🙌Call for Papers🙌 We are excited to invite abstracts for an interdisciplinary conference on The Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, Identity, at @unioftheartslondon.bsky.social on 8-9 Jan 2026 Send abstracts of 300 words to [email protected] by 22 Sep - please circulate among your networks!

New publication (not on hands, but on emotions and senses) from project leads @jbhist.bsky.social and @medhistoryman.bsky.social. It's completely Open Access and free for anyone to read.

We argue that the emotional sensorium of the RME cultivated positive 'prosthetic feelings' about the army & encouraged imaginative investiment in the figure of Tommy Atkins. We put embodied experiences at the heart of discussions about the rise of popular militarism in the age of New Imperialism.

@jbhist.bsky.social & I are excited to see that our new article on the Royal Military Exhibition of 1890 has been published Open Access by @ihr.bsky.social. This takes a sensory & emotions history approach to the topic of late Victorian popular militarism. academic.oup.com/histres/adva...

The reviews for Emotions & Surgery have taken a while to come but are now beginning to appear. It's so gratifying in difficult professional times to read someone as eminent as Prof. Mick Worboys describe it as a 'landmark work ... that compellingly revises the history and historiography of surgery'😇

I'm most grateful to Amber Vella, an AHRC-funded PhD student at Leicester, for her most generous review of Emotions & Surgery in Medical History. It's deeply satisfying to have it described as a 'fantastic intervention in the history of surgery'. Thank you 🙏 pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Please get those applications in if you are interested in becoming part of our project team!

This amazing opportunity closes today so please get your applications in before the deadline! #history #publicengagement #GLAM #UKRI #AHRC #culturalheritage

Currently transcribing some letters written by Richard Owen held at LU library. One of the gems contained therein is Owen's reference to his relationship with East Sheen neighbour Edwin Chadwick in the 1880s: 'Neighbour Chadwick I see & listen to, weekly; but he never gets out of the sewers!’

Turning away from the REF-apocalypse for a second, may I remind you all that we are looking for a 3-year F/T Public Engagement Fellow to join our Victoiran Hand project. Please do spread the word to all those lovely folks in Humanities and GLAM looking for work. Deadline is 24 June, so get applying!