There are currently more bananas on Orkney than there are people. “Tesco is also arranging to send bananas to the outer isles” ahhhhh www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

UK trans people and friends - can you help us spread the word? Manchester patch decorating workshop this Wednesday - free, accessible, relaxed. Link to reserve your place below, and more about the project here - thank you! goodlawproject.org/campaign/the...

I am so close to £2000. It costs Step Forward £500,000 a year to keep the doors open, helping around 5000 vulnerable youth in Tower Hamlets. Anything you could give would be absolutely life changing to these kids!

I'm writing about pearls and lapidary medicine, and a couple of things that I think are actually, possibly, new news about the medieval poem Pearl and its context. lucyallengoss.substack.com/p/medieval-m...

Do you know an aspiring historian in Year 12 at a UK state school? Encourage them to join us in Cambridge for a free History taster day on 16 April hosted by our students, staff & Fellows. Find out more & apply online by 1 April at caths.cam.ac.uk/tast.... @camhistory.bsky.social 📸 Caroline Gonda

📚"Covers designed by folk who didn't bother to read the book" Episode 1: Florence Marryat's Blood of the Vampire (1897). This book features a female vampire who doesn't know she's a vampire, who drains life not blood, and is enjoying a holiday in a Belgian seaside town. #BadBookCovers #C19th

always read tricia matthew

I am running London2Brighton 100km and raising money to support Step Forward - a youth centre in Tower Hamlets supporting queer, trans, and gender non-conforming youth - so important at a time when these vulnerable youth are under attack from almost everywhere! If you can, please donate and share!

Semi-regular reminder that I specialise in English literature from about 1550-1830, have a misspent 15+ years of experience, and am always open for any teaching/research/consultancy/archival work that might be going, in the London area or remote. No job too small!

Solidarity with the transgender & intersex communities in India after the Amendment Bill was bulldozed through houses of parliament replacing self-identification with mandatory medical certification. My #KilljoySolidarity with you in this fight. Friends, sign & fight! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I still have things to say about Bridgerton… lithub.com/is-bridgerto...

Happy 100th birthday Frank O'Hara! www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57556/...

it’s frank o’hara’s hundredth birthday! be gay! write poems! write poems about your hot friends! fall in love with beautiful dancers! write poems for them! love art more than any man living! frank!!!!

Today marks one hundred years since the poet Frank O’Hara was born. His manifesto, ‘Personism’, is for me one of the most brilliant things written in the twentieth century about the nature of poetry. Here is a key passage: 1/6

imagine taking even one moment to consider why women from Afghanistan might want to come to the UK to pursue education and concluding that it’s definitely for scam reasons

HAPPY BIRTHDAY FRANK

Good morning from Boston University. Pride flags EVERYWHERE

Also my favourite French portmanteau, alongside their word for mansplaining, which works a lot better than mansplaining: mecspliquer ('mec' guy + 'expliquer' explain) The German is excellent too: herrklären ('herr' mr/man + 'erklären' explain)

❤️❤️❤️ for that gorgeous production, and for The Yard, and for Jay's work there, so much of which I've been lucky enough to see. Looking forward to what comes next ✨

My new book is out in June. Pre-order it now, and you’ll be doing me and the lovely @saltpublishing.com a massive favour More importantly, you’ll get a dozen stories about dealing with dying and death, to cheer you up in these carefree times www.saltpublishing.com/products/a-d...

My favorite description of the Creature in Shelley's Frankenstein is the subjunctive possibility, in Chapter 5, of his still being in Victor's apartment, "alive, and walking about."

A *few* books currently in the reading room for cataloguing. They're from the collection of our first librarian, Élie Bouhéreau (1643–1719). Spot the odd one (or two) out!

I wonder if people understand that for many of us the pride flag is not just an expression of queer identity it is a REJECTION OF THE CLOSET SPECIFICALLY. That is- its display is explicitly meant to COUNTER the conditions of queer invisibly, which has been at the heart of our marginalization. 1/

suspiciously solid precipitation (third kind of weather today)

and while we're on the subject of Sapphism...

Ladies Strachan and Warwick were not displayed to the world in a satirical print in Samuel William Fores' printseller's shop, Piccadilly, 1820, ditto www.layersoflondon.org/map/records/...

Quince: how to bring the moon inside though?🌙 #MoonMad #SlowShakespeare www.english.cam.ac.uk/research/slo... An iconic moment in the @bridgetheatre.bsky.social Dream 2019/2025: asking the audience for a 'calendar' (which needed to be 'unlocked'), finding something dodgy on it, then taking a selfie❤️

Anne Lister did not messily sleep her way through half of Yorkshire society so that you could debate whether there were lesbians in Regency Britain.

This is exactly what students will tell you, vehemently, that they don't want. Yet here we are.

Even putting aside endless debates about degree quality or student experience or job prospects for academics: what about the functioning of universities as places where human understanding & knowledge is advanced? Where do people imagine that stuff happens? Where do they imagine it will happen?

If you can, join us in DC on 18 April at the Folger for Shakespeare’s birthday lecture: www.folger.edu/whats-on/sha...

"The new technology, which can automate “low-value” tasks for faculty such as rubric generation, content alignment and discussion reviews, “frees educators to focus more on mentoring, feedback and meaningful learning experiences,” This labeling of "high" and "low" is entirely disingenuous

Wolverhampton are slashing lit courses, Durham are allowing student work to be marked using gen AI, Edinburgh are on strike again next week, Oxford have entered some unholy partnership with Chat GPT. The prospect of a future without functioning higher education is starting to feel really frightening

My lovely spec fic writers' retreat is running in rural France again, though later than usual: 4-9 October. You have space and time to work on your own project, supported by one-to-one meetings with me, in friendly company. More information here: www.retreatfrance.co.uk/yoga-mindful...

I had to get this out. Mistakes probably. Solidarity always with all survivors of secrets. open.substack.com/pub/feminist...

Calling all killjoys in Boston, NYC, Philly and DC. Come along and say no loudly and together to the abusers and the harassers and the fascists and the systems they create that create them 🔥🔥

every cat owner fears one day being asked to read from a transcript of their own conversations with their cat in a court of law

epistemicide

“Some 11th graders were invited through Google Classroom to earn service hours at an ICE detention facility.” I guess there are more dystopian sentences, but I’m hard pressed to come up with one. abc7ny.com/post/bellevi...

This may not be as striking a headline as immediate redundancies in the triple figures, but it is as impactful in overturning what academia is. The consultancies are removing research from education, taking the bite out of what university is and does.

There's a great story by Khadra Ahmed about the detective work, incl in the latest Foyer newsletter. readfoyer.com/article/meet...

It is lovely that the Art Gallery of Ontario can now name the Black woman in the gorgeous #18thc portrait they acquired 6 yrs ago & also date the painting. It's from 1775. She is Eleonora Susette, enslaved by the Dutch governor of Guyana, accompanying his widow on her return to the Netherlands.

I didn't think I could be more impressed with his communication skills, but he's just given a history lesson and lesson international solidarity (and continued to sound genuine and colloquial throughout) on the occasion of what I mostly know as some rivers being turned green and lots of alcohol...

I see the Bakerloo Line Extension has finally got the go ahead. Praise be!

Was just talking to a student about how this is an amplification and acceleration of a long-standing problem: how students try to approximate a dehumanized register that they imagine academic writing is supposed to sound like

“A reckoning for academic elites may be coming, but perhaps, as with other such movements, the old boys’ network will once again swing into action.” Brilliant piece by @lsmwilson.bsky.social about Epstein, power, misogyny and male elite fragility.