2025 has been a rotten year for most early career postdoctoral researchers, especially in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. For a better 2026, check out (or repost) this short thread on a free resource for UK-based SHAPE PhDs within 10 years (excluding career breaks) of the doctorate. 1/3

Delighted by Bertie's delight!

'His book tour brought him to Cambridgeshire, where he would marry and have two children with Susannah Cullen, an Englishwoman from Ely. They settled in Soham, supported by a local network including abolitionist friends, safe...when reactionary “church and king” mobs were targeting reformers.' 1/3

Thank you @srwride.bsky.social, and thank you for your amazing editing! 😊

Our second seminar is: 27/11/25: David Coates, ‘Amateur Theatricals: in Fiction and in Fact’, 6-7 pm us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi... #EHU19SeminarSeries

18th C theatre people, is there any text of Cape St Vincent (the adaptation of Glorious First of June) other than what's in the printed songbook? I have a point that I can back up with the songbook alone, but I just want to check I'm not overlooking the play somewhere!

Are you an early career researcher with an interest in our collection? Apply to develop an independent research project funded by AHRC. Hear more about the opportunity at a virtual town hall event on Monday 6 October: bit.ly/BL-EarlyCare...

Rusted hinges squeal and a cloud of dust chokes the intrepid academic as she opens up the document file for the chapter she abandoned months ago...

#18thc pals, pls RT: @kasiaiskasia.bsky.social & I are assembling a roundtable for the American Society for 18th-C Studies mting in Philly in April, on Olga Tokarczuk's 18th Century. Abstracts due 9/22. Pls help us think together about this fabulous novelist's wayward ways with our period & its 📚.

YOU GUYS. DAVID BOWIE WAS WRITING AN 18thc MUSICAL CALLED THE SPECTATOR WHEN HE DIED. Between this and Hilary Mantel’s unfinished rewriting of Pride & Prejudice… I cannot. David Bowie’s secret final project discovered locked in his study www.bbc.com/news/article...

Professors Jarrar and Mohammed discuss the relationship between Romantic literature and Palestinian literature, as well as what it looks like to teach such literature during a genocide.

I'd love to put together a theatre panel for this! Let me know if you'd also be interested?

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

Okay. You all ready for a feel-good thread? Because one literally fell out of the sky for us last week and it's only fair we share this heartwarming tale with you. 1/?

An open letter has been launched today (27/7/25) for members of the UK academic community (academics and other university staff) to sign, to press the UK Home Office to facilitate safe passage out of Gaza for 40+ students with offers for UK universities. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

People in #Gaza, including UNRWA colleagues, are fainting due to severe hunger. They are being starved. Meanwhile, just a few kilometers away from Gaza supermarkets and shops are loaded with food and other goods. Lift the siege. Allow UNRWA to bring in food and medicines.

You know, I'm a "knowledge worker", and one of the big reasons for me doing the job I do is that I want to *tear down* the boundaries and share knowledge with people who don't have it. LLMs *reinforce* those boundaries, which is why I loathe them.

3/4 For those interested in the details of what Eltis actually said about the cost of antislavery patrols and how it has been misused the details are here: alanlester.co.uk/blog/the-wes...

How can we better approach the histories of Indigenous peoples? Mary Katherine Newman introduces a new History Workshop series which will introduce a range of scholars, educators, and activists and the ways in which they examine Indigenous histories. www.historyworkshop....

Close to TWO THOUSAND academics and educators say TRANS RIGHTS NOW. (Sorry if you've seen this (and the historians' letter!) too many times. The lack of an algorithm means we have to keep reposting it to catch people, and this really matters.)

'a leading Shakespeare expert [Matthew Steggle, Bristol] has analysed a fragment of a 17th-century letter that appears to cast dramatic new light on their relationship, overturning the idea that the couple never lived together in London.' 1/2

We stand in solidarity with trans women and the trans community and we will always be a space that recognises the importance of trans history. Read on for a selection from our archive 🧵 1/8

This. Protect trans kids. Protect trans rights. Gender is a spectrum. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary people exist. Inter-sex & DSD people exist. Gender-non-conforming people exist. Transphobia is anti-feminist. Laws are often wrong and unjust. We must fight for a fairer future.

I don't know if I have enough of an audience here for an announcement, but the wonderful production of Joanna Baillie's The Tryal that I was in at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds is available to watch online! youtu.be/E3ksanlDElU?...

just imagine working at microsofft and thinking “let’s spend billions, steal a load of intellectual property, and destroy the planet to make an interface to write bad essays” rather than “let’s update MS Word so users can comment on footnotes”

Hamdan Ballal, one of the directors of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, has been assaulted & injured by settlers at his home in the West Bank & arrested by the IDF. No trace of him since. The vengeance is clear. Do not let Hamdan disappear. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

Calling all fans of my work both organisational and research-based:

On Tuesday 4 March we're hosting our translated drama scratch night in collaboration with @oxfordcct.bsky.social! Come along to Trinity College's Beer Cellar at 7:30pm for an evening of short extracts of theatre translated into English from French, Italian, and Finnish 🎭

I had no idea this wesite existed, and feel so intensely moved. Thank you kind stranger who uploaded this. openbenches.org/bench/21597

Daffodils, Mary Delaney, 1776.

On Sunday 23 February, the amazing Elinor Frey and Accademia de’ Dissonanti are coming to Oxford to perform a vivid program of eighteenth-century music and improvisation: The Art of Variation. Holywell Music Room, 7:30pm, free entry and no registration required! www.music.ox.ac.uk/event/25-02-...

Job alert! College Teaching Officer in English at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

The @frenchhistory.bsky.social is recruiting another associate editor to join our team, with a preference for an 18th c or revolution specialist. The journal team are a wonderful intellectual community behind loads of recent exciting initiatives 🗃️ frenchhistorysociety.co.uk/associate-ed...

One of the things I love about #DramaOn3 is the way it can offer us both familiar and unfamiliar versions of the same play. On Sunday night we had 'Saint Joan of the Anthropocene': www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... (1/2)

Email your MP to stand against genocide in Gaza!

N.B. The Tatler, written by Richard Steele, was a journal of gossip, often made up by Steele himself. So it's v possible Young didn't exist / the story here is likely exaggerated for effect. BUT such gossip does speak to real trans and gnc lives hidden behind the sensationalist stories+ rumours 🌈

We're very excited about our Theatre and Translation Roundtable on Friday! We have 3 fantastic speakers talking about translation and performance! There will be a sandwich lunch provided. occt.web.ox.ac.uk/ev...

Anyone concerned about UK universities (and you should be!) please sign this open letter to the government (the link goes to the letter itself, click through from that to sign)

If 1000 job losses were announced in one day for another industry, it would make the top headlines. This one is going to take people by surprise with huge impacts on other sectors, cities, regions, life plans...

Totally brilliant work on deciphering #Handwriting in #C18th & #C19th from Edinburgh Uni — bitl.to/3nYn It draws mainly from #Scottish sources, but I've relied on it for transcribing an early C19th English diary. Just look at the range of examples, and the careful detailing of differences.

The single cat lady motif but #18thcentury style!

Free Museum Studies Spring School (online): registration for the day (you can dip in and out of sessions) on the poster below. A forum for discussion rather than long speaker presentations.

Join Dr Minna Jefferey, Stephen Bailey and Tzen Sam for a discussion exploring the role of translation in theatre on both page and stage, from practical and academic perspectives. torch.ox.ac.uk/event/theatr... with @oxfordcct.bsky.social 7 Feb!

The Shakespeare Starter Pack #Shakespeare: texts, performances, appropriations, interpretations, reception, history, casting, woke, queer, social justice, genius. #drama #theatre #literature #TeamEnglish go.bsky.app/BKaWcfr

The first female gardeners employed at London's Kew Gardens: Eleanor Morland, Gertude Cope and Alice Hutchings. Photographed in 1896. Courtesy of @wikivictorian.bsky.social

Academic advice please? Peer reviewer on my article has asked a great question about period specificity, which is a core argument of my thesis (from which the article is extracted). Would it be helpful or bad form to point to my own (unpublished, no contract as yet) thesis in a footnote?

Happy publication day to us!! This book was such a joy to write, the product of many cumulative years of doctoral research and mentorship. So proud of you, little book ✨

Delighted to have this second of my pair of articles on practice-as-research as historical method appear. Thanks @historywo.bsky.social for having me, and to @maryknewman.bsky.social for being a wonderful editor!

Obviously the government have just spewed out the generic response to this. But I do think it's still worth just constantly pointing out how everything they've said here is wrong. It wasn't independent, it wasn't evidence based, it is a scandal

Presented at #BSECS2025 today - my first paper as Dr Dallas! Talking about Robert Southey's Wat Tyler (written in 1794, scandalously published in 1817), closet drama and radicalism. A fun bit of new work post-thesis!