Around 10,000 university workers being made redundant this year. Labour policies are definitely cutting through in higher education …

Not enough attention is being paid to the effective closure of the bulk of one of the 2 or 3 most important public archives for modern British history. A terrible own goal for the BBC as a public-service agency.

the Duncan Tanner prize not only showcases the very best of early career scholarship in modern British history year after year, but the committee also give every entrant considered and generous feedback on their scholarship. it's win/win - do enter your work! academic.oup.com/tcbh/pages/e...

Extraordinary story from @sheffieldtribune.bsky.social: A London lawyer bought hundreds of Sheffield freeholds. Then the ‘very aggressive’ letters arrived. One woman: “It broke my heart, that was my savings towards a new car...He has just wiped me out.” www.sheffieldtribune.co.uk/a-london-law...

hOw dO wE wiN YouNg mEn? please note that answers including "building a multiracial working class majority" will be answered with charges of bigotry but answers including "be racist and transphobic" will be welcomed as Hard Truths that Must Be Heard

In our new journal article, @tomhulme.bsky.social and I chart the biographies of three queer men who lived in N. Ireland between the 1900s and the 1970s. We show how their lives and sexual subjectivities were shaped by knowledge from beyond Ireland. muse.jhu.edu/pub/15/artic...

NEW QUEER HISTORY ARTICLE from me & @charlielynch.bsky.social! muse.jhu.edu/pub/15/artic...

Piers Morgan is as angry about Glamour honouring trans women as he was about Eastenders showing two men kissing in 1989 and for exactly the same reason.

Nice to receive author copies of the new 3-volume Cambridge Urban History of Europe today. I have a chapter in vol. 3 on the growth and internationalisation of the field. Let me know if you use it in teaching #urbanhistory

Cara-Friend staff had a fantastic time tonight at the @rainbowrefugeesni Halloween meet up! 🎃

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

there's a genre of man that makes it a virtue to hate cats and love dogs, because in their tiny pea-brain the former are girls and the latter are boys

Interested in the history of Seven Dials or London or the 1920s and 1930s? I'm doing some walking tours of the Dials with @stanfordstravel.bsky.social on Sat 15 Nov. There's loads to see, but Seven Dials is so small you don't need to walk far. manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/events/songs...

📚New book!!! So happy to share that ‘Why Historic Places Matter Emotionally’ has just been published by Cambridge University Press. Outlines a conceptual framework for ‘emotion’ comprised of responses, attachments, and communities built from evidence from places across England and Scotland.

fuck, music reviews used to be brutal

This is great news - delighted that Sunil will be our visiting Wiles Lecturer in History at QUB next May. The book is outstanding.

"Original and captivating." The #WolfsonHistoryPrize judges on why they have shortlisted Kieran Connell's (@kieranconnell.bsky.social) 'Multicultural Britain: A People’s History' (@hurstpublishers.bsky.social) for the 2025 prize.

Public housing posters, 1930s

This is how you blurb

Okay, I missed the actual anniversary date for this, but it has I realise been THIRTY YEARS! since the late rockstar historian Roy Porter and I published The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950 yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300...

I wrote about the stupid white paper. In summary, with these people in the driver's seat and apparently unbothered by consequences, we're so cooked.

Really chuffed that over 40,000 folks have had a read of my piece on the "colourful sex lives of Presbyterians in 18/19 century Ulster" #ICYMI link here 👇#HistSex #NewBook @theconversation.com @unioflimerick.bsky.social @ria.ie theconversation.com/the-sex-live...

To be clear: deportations to increase cultural homogeneity is the text book definition of ethnic cleansing. Demands that come even close to this are so far outside any democratic norm and the rule of law. What has happened to a country when this is not condemned in the strongest possible terms?

Really cool work here… returning to a time and place that was a foundational moment not just for urbanising Britain but also for the discipline of urban history and using new techniques to challenge a deeply embedded viewpoint! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

For this week's #WolfsonHistoryPrize 2025 shortlist showcase, we'll be spotlighting 'Multicultural Britain: A People’s History' by Kieran Connell (@kieranconnell.bsky.social) (@hurstpublishers.bsky.social) www.wolfsonhistoryprize.org.uk/past-winners...

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

Monday morning view… @tricksterprince.bsky.social

one of my favourite findings from my work on Belfast is how Harlem’s queer culture was a direct inspiration for many Irish men, to the extent that “strange brother” - the eponymous title of a 1931 novel partially set in Harlem - was a local code word!

I spoke to the Belfast Telegraph about my book, being shortlisted for the @wolfsonhistory.bsky.social and the state of multiculturalism in the UK and Ireland today www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/qub-his...

We're excited to announce the call for papers for #MBS26, the next Modern British Studies conference, at Birmingham in June 2026. We'll be launching the #MBS Association at this event, to support further regular conferences in Modern British Studies. www.birmingham.ac.uk/events/moder...

Every decade, university administrators excite themselves over the prospects of firing all the faculty and 95% of the staff. Early 2020s: LLMs Early 2010s: MOOCs Early 2000s: Wikis

I’m not going to pretend 2m is not a lot of money, but also… it’s 100% worth it for this stunner

@tomhulme.bsky.social gave a moving, entertaining, and generally absolutely brilliant talk on this vital book yesterday, in which I learned so much about my home city, and its people and culture. Would strongly recommend this book to anyone

www.waterstones.com/book/belfast... - Waterstones also has 25% off if you order next couple of days! An academic book for £15! 🥹

My next book has a cover! I Will Not Abandon You is a new history of queer women under Nazism that calls for us to rethink how we understand fascist persecution as well as the very foundations of progressive politics today. You can preorder it anywhere you buy books bookshop.org/p/books/i-wi...

love this article

For reasons, it would be v. helpful to have information from a broad range of academic and non-academic (incl. GLAM) users of the BBC Written Archives OTHER THAN historians, briefly on: 1) What you've used it for and 2) How the proposed changes would impact on your research. Reposts welcomed.

Delighted to see my article exploring how Britons planned for retirement in the mid-to-late 20th century out in the world! It tries to capture the mixed feelings prompted by ageing & retirement whilst connecting those themes to wider histories of social democracy, selfhood & financialisation.

Join us for a roundtable on 'The Modern British City' in January at Senate House, London, with Simon Gunn, Erika Hanna, Owen Hatherley, Peter Mandler, Otto Saumarez Smith and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, followed by wine! www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

For Dublin folks, I will be @tcddublin.bsky.social on Wed 15th Oct, 2.30pm, giving an early taster of the intimate queer stories of men who feature in my forthcoming book... www.tcd.ie/trinitylongr...

The VC of Leicester has been announced as the new Chair of UCEA. He's been VC of Leicester since 2019. He's the one responsible for forcing out scholars in ways that employment tribunals showed was not permitted. The the kind of guy UCEA values. www.collectiveinkbooks.com/zer0-books/o... #UKHE

Our Minister for Education, here, blatantly conflating anti-Israel sentiment/protest with antisemitism, solely for political reasons, and merrily chucking universities under the bus at a time when they are in crisis for other far more mundane/fixable reasons. With friends like these…

I have a piece in this weekend’s Observer in which I use the legendary Apache Indian to take down the definitely not legendary Robert Jenrick observer.co.uk/news/opinion...

New article just published from the ‘Queer Northern Ireland: Sexuality before Liberation’ project. Charlie lays out in brilliant (and often depressing) depth how the complex forces of psychiatry and religion shaped the responses to male homosexuality in the decades after WWII.

“…the successful candidate will be expected to provide their own axe. Previous experience of chopping is desirable.” www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOY189/d...

📣 We're looking for a new Bibliographer to join the #UrbanHistory team! This is a great opportunity to get involved with a world-leading academic journal and find out about the latest urban history publications. Apply by 5pm on Friday 6 November. Contact Roey Sweet for more details.

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

New on NOTCHES 🚻✨ “Dolled up to the nines to go to a flippin' public toilet!”: Cruising in Belfast During the Troubles by Niall Herron. How did queer cruising unfold during the Troubles, and what can it teach us about sexuality, space, and conflict? Read the full feature here: wp.me/p6JJ6S-4Pq

Men in balaclavas set fire to a mosque in East Sussex last night. It's only appearing on the BBC's local coverage, rather than its main national headlines, despite coming just a week after the (also under-reported) firebombing of an asylum hotel in London last week www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This amazing article from @vic-parsons.bsky.social via @wearequeeraf.com shows the absolute criminal state of trans healthcare in the UK. Scotland has a 224 year wait for a first appointment. Yes, you read that right. www.wearequeeraf.com/gender-clini...