Thaler's post (click it for graph showing striking decreases in science spending) immediately under yet another repost of this fantastic letter to London Times. And I'd just like to say: can we PLEASE have a Democratic candidate who knows we need a massive reinvestment in US arts & humanities too?

If you've published a book in 2025 related to literature and science--get your publisher or a current @thebsls.bsky.social member to nominate it for the Book Prize! Nominations are open until December 31! #academicsky

SUCH a brilliant and important essay by Tanvir Ahmed, go read it!

Just one more day to get your abstracts and proposals in for the BSLS Winter Symposium ("Alternate Histories of the Body"): www.bsls.ac.uk/2025/10/call... @adeleguyton.bsky.social and I can't wait to get stuck in to the submissions.

Anybody have access to ASAP Journal and able to download a couple of PDFs for me? :)

Nick Gaskill and I are organising a panel on Whitehead, focused on Science & the Modern World, for the MSA/BAMS conference in 2026, and are looking for an additional contributor. Email me by 25 November on [email protected] if you’re interested! #WeirdModernisms #BAMS2026 #MSA2026

When people say that Wuthering Heights doesn't have anything to do with race or that no film has engaged with race, what they mean is that for them Romani people do not count and they also haven't been paying attention. I'm going to share a little material from a recent talk. Content note: racism 1/

Friends, anyone have access to '"All Smell is Disease": Miasma, Sensory Rhetoric, and the Sanitary-Bacteriologic of Visceral Public Health' (Winderman et al.) in Rhetoric of Health and Medicine and willing to share a PDF? #AcademicSky

A little less than two weeks to send in your abstracts for "Alternate Histories of the Body"! @lejhouston.bsky.social and I are very excited by what has come in so far.

Any work out there on the experience of time in different modes of transport historically? A passage in a German novel from 1927 acts like everyone knows 15 minutes seems like an eternity in an airplane but passes quickly in a train. Was this a thing? #academicsky

Just over two weeks left to get your abstracts and panel proposals in for the @thebsls.bsky.social Winter Symposium: "Alternate Histories of the Body" www.bsls.ac.uk/2025/10/call... @adeleguyton.bsky.social and I are already thrilled by what people have been proposing.

An axiom on cafés serving specialty coffee: the better the coffee, the jankier the bathroom.

Here's a paper we wrote about how it's actually very bad that a "context of constrained funding has incentivised... providers of adult education, sports, arts and community services to demonstrate ancillary wellbeing benefits." pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40447986/

CFP: "Alternate Histories of the Body" (BSLS Winter Symposium, 30 January 2026 - Online) www.bsls.ac.uk/2025/10/call... @adeleguyton.bsky.social and I eagerly welcome papers and panels for this one-day symposium exploring alternate ways to historicize 'the body' and embodied approaches to history.

I've got an article in November's @historytoday.com on the remarkably durable hypothesis that Earth is hollow, from Halley to Symmes to underground feminist utopias to UFOs. You know the drill — to the centre of the Earth (I've probably used that one before).

📣 CFP British Society for Literature and Science Winter Symposium 2026 -- "Alternate Histories of the Body" I'm very excited to be organising this together with Lloyd Maedhbh Houston! 🥳 Send us your abstracts by November 21! #academicsky #callforpapers #literatureandscience

truly when a new word comes to your life, a klaxon goes off in the wordhoard and its wild iterations come to find you

Call for Papers – BSLS Winter Symposium 2026: Alternate Histories of the Body. 30th January 2026. See full CfP here: www.bsls.ac.uk/2025/10/call...

📣 CFP British Society for Literature and Science Winter Symposium 2026 -- "Alternate Histories of the Body" I'm very excited to be organising this together with Lloyd Maedhbh Houston! 🥳 Send us your abstracts by November 21! #academicsky #callforpapers #literatureandscience

Look on my new triceratops fabric and rejoice! (She's going to be napkins for my friend)

The only correct take on a fundamentally anti-human technology.

If you’re working on any area of fantasy and the fantastic, come and join us at Glasgow in June 2026 and do consider presenting or running a workshop! All the info you need and the full CFP is here: fantasy.glasgow.ac.uk/index.php/20... @uofgfantasy.bsky.social @uofgartshums.bsky.social

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

This review is AMAZING. Go read it if you're at all interested in rail infrastructure.

CfP: BSLS Annual Conference 2026 The twenty-first annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science will take place at the University of Strathclyde, on 9th-11th April 2026 (in person). Details including CfP here: bsls.ac.uk/conference20...

As they say, when you invent the wheel, you invent the parking violation. But Assyrians had a solution. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parking...

JOB KLAXON (fully funded PhD in Environmental Humanities in the literary studies department at Ghent University)

Martian tripods on the VPR! I wonder why... 😁

A moment of silence for all the informative footnotes that simply have to go. Your minutiae will live on in my memory in place of more useful things forever. 😢

shoutout to tumblr user kleinergeist for this post which is going straight into my powerpoint for Grendel day in my monster class this week

Shot, chaser Young men more likely to vote Green than Reform. Young men second most progressive group of any demographic. Combined right-wing vote barely bigger than Green vote alone for young men

It's out! 🥳 My 2024 Rosemary VanArsdel Prize-winning essay on the differences between the serialised and book versions of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds has just appeared in the Victorian Periodicals Review. If you're interested in science, genre, and serial novels' audiences, check it out 👇

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

The UK government will evacuate nine of the 40+ students in Gaza with scholarship at UK universities. My PhD student Shaimaa isn't included. We must now make sure they help the other students - email your MP today. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

This sounds great, and I think would translate to historicist literary criticism fairly well

Congrats to yevhenyashchuk.bsky.social for his #VanArsdelPrize winning essay “‘A Special Correspondent of the Times Sends a Telegram from Odessa’: Kyiv Newspapers, Victorian Media, and the Translation of the International Crisis in 1875–78.” Learn about VPR’s prizes at rs4vp.org/awards. @rs4vp.org

Bicycle tracks on Mars actually go way back! At the end of the nineteenth century, (some) astronomers were observing straight lines all over the surface of Mars -- the so-called Martian canals. The decades around 1900 saw dozens of theories about what those lines might be. 1/

I am so here for allll the applied fantasy research

One of the abiding pleasures of living in a Dutch-speaking place is the many signs for poets' bureaus and vacancies for poets. Of course, in Dutch these are cleaning services, but every time I walk past the poets' room in the Faculty of Arts it makes me smile.

Accidentally poured C-3PO on my coffee today

What a fabulous thread!

Hello! If you have a position at a UK university please sign this thanks

we're experiencing a reality famine in which people retreat into imaginary worlds — narrative and virtual. /x

"i asked chatgpt" yeah well i went to the doctor, i went to the mountains, i looked to the children, i drank from the fountains there's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line and the less I seek my source for some definitive closer I am to fine

Sharing this far and wide--great opportunity for ECRs and PGRs to organise a themed online symposium with the support of the British Society for Literature and Science! #academicsky

For the past year or so, my colleagues and I have been working with the authors of Our Bodies Ourselves, as well as the successor org to the Boston Women's Health Course Collective to digitize the very early printings of this once (and still) radical text: ourbodiesourselves.org/the-latest/b...