Had a chance at my day job to climb the scaffolding round the Radcliffe Observatory Tower. A treat for lovers of 1790s Coade stone and dusty Oxford vistas

our jimmy was telling us a story about when he used to work for waterstones Aberdeen

Am I getting a migraine or is the AI-powered BL playbills database lightly deranged

Btw, despite it being wildly unclear if any Robinson debate is still going ahead, there's still an anti-fascist demonstration planned for next Wednesday (17th) at the Oxford Union - the local Raise the Colours flag-fetishists are gathering, so we need people out there

At the London-Paris Romanticism seminar on May 8th with Tim Heimlich, discussing our new books on Wales and Empire in the Romantic era (the 'Wales Novel', Cook's voyages, Welsh settler colonialism, Celtic racialization, etc.) Would love to see some of you there! londonparisromantic.com?p=5165

Haunted by a slide from the online Health & Safety training I did last week, that just declared, a propos of very little and with no follow up: PEOPLE ARE NOT NATURALLY COMPLIANT

TIL that JM Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, PG Wodehouse, Jerome K Jerome and AA Milne were all in the same dubiously named cricket team, and they were famously rubbish en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allahak...

OK but there is at least a case to be made that Pride and Prejudice is totally set during the French Revolution?

Tom Stoppard spoke at an event I worked a decade ago. He insisted on being introduced to all the event staff, even the lanyard-wearing admins like me, and repeated everyone's names back to them while looking into their eyes. Most charming person I've ever met and it's not even close

So delighted that this long-gestated brain child is now out and in the real world. I'll be talking about it at the English Faculty in Cambridge, @cam.ac.uk on Thursday of next week at 5pm. Do please come along if you're in town!

Today is the OFFICIAL publication day for TEXTILE SHAKESPEARE! Please indulge me: I want to say a little (perhaps rather a lot) about it and share my acknowledgements - and a discount code! Appropriately,🧵1/10

Accidentally bought Goth potatoes

Love how the right-hand column reads like a list of recently elected Reform councillors

Lots of things in the British Museum were stolen and should be returned! Lots of things weren't! Uncritically repeating 'Everything in the British Museum is stolen' reinforces the imperialist narrative that only the British had agency over a passive monolithic Other! Hope this helps

Of course they had to cover up what happened to all the children at Lowood School. They didn't want panic to spread

The general reader can improve their experience of most nineteenth-century novels by assuming that the Angel in the House character is secretly murderous. Jane Eyre (obvs). Esther Summerson. Fanny Price slipping cyanide into the clear soup. JANE FAIRFAX

If you are a supporter and reader of @contingent-mag.bsky.social one of the biggest things you can do to help us at the moment is get this CFP to the NTT folks in your life. The fracturing of social media has made it very difficult to get the word out esp. to adjuncts and VAPs.

Mine was an (otherwise unobjectionable) novel set in the nineteenth century in which a professor called a boring task "like folding laundry". 1) Nineteenth-century profs did not do laundry 2) only people with modern washer-driers think *folding* is the worst bit of laundry

Look at this cat I'm catsitting, he looks like Percy Bysshe Shelley

Look at this cat I'm catsitting, he looks like Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mary Robinson already making fun of AI bros in 1799

Some thoughts on how authors resort to autobio(mytho)graphy in order to deal with their complex status in the cultural imagination - available here, OA, in my article on the British poet #StephenSpender: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... @fwf-at.bsky.social @acdh-oeaw.bsky.social

‘Dapaan altered my perception of how conflict shapes culture, and how culture, in turn, resists disappearance. Stories are a way of knowing the world and these stories are my stories and will remain with me …’ Read this review of @psemolina3.bsky.social’s book: inkstickmedia.com/dapaan-the-s...

‘It is said, two things can change at any time in Kashmir, the weather and the haalaat.’ It’s pub day for award-winning journalist @psemolina3.bsky.social’s moving, powerful, thought-provoking debut. Dapaan is now available at all major bookstores and online. Get your copy today.

This is the last page of the first Penguin edition of Virginia Woolf's Orlando [Pixies voice] GOT ME A BLOOMSBURY AH-HA-HA-HO SLICING UP MARS BARS AH-HA-HA-HO

Her biographer says of Elizabeth Inchbald that "she was at last forced to give up her determination never to play Lady Sneerwell in 'The School for Scandal'" in 1778. Does anyone have any ideas what Inchbald objected to? I'd have thought Lady S was quite a fun role

No written word can do justice to the power and beauty of the stories I heard in Kashmir. But I tried. Thrilled to announce the India edition of my book, with lovely cover art by Basita Shah, is out on 7th July. Pre-orders here: amzn.in/d/7NuVhNn @westlandbooks.bsky.social

Yes. I loved uni teaching and I think I was quite good at it, but after ten years the precarity was making me miserable and exhausted, so I stopped. So many senior people seemed to find that surprising

An older relative, who is not and does not look like Alan Bennett, has been mistaken for Alan Bennett several times, including once by Jonathan Miller

My book, "Welsh Revivalism in Imperial Britain" (or "True Britons and Celtic Empires", if you'd prefer) is now AVAILABLE FOR HARDBACK PREORDER Your library needs more about bardic antislavery, imperial complicity, and druids with telescopes, no? boydellandbrewer.com/978183765195...

It's a strange truth known to veterans of the great Flipped Classroom nonsense of the 2010s that the loudest voices shouting that stale UK higher education pedagogy needs radical change always turn out to have horrifying teaching practice that they insist is universal

Does Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon have a niche Bluesky afterlife yet? Can we start one? It's got a reputation as unreadable, but that's only true if you're not in the market for postmodern jokes about, like, Sir Eyre Coote

Does Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon have a niche Bluesky afterlife yet? Can we start one? It's got a reputation as unreadable, but that's only true if you're not in the market for postmodern jokes about, like, Sir Eyre Coote

As recent tensions between India and Pakistan come to a head, we have shared an excerpt from ‘Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict’ by @psemolina3.bsky.social on our blog. ‘It is said, two things can change at any time in Kashmir, the weather and the haalaat.’ Read it here ➡️  tinyurl.com/2vu835b7

As recent tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir come to a head, we are sharing a sample of ‘Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict’ by @psemolina3.bsky.social available from @blackwellbooks.bsky.social 📖 sample to peek inside and share www.jellybooks.com/cloud_reader...

"Why do we...lionize this...pseudopopulist orientation and...denounce the kind of writing most of our colleagues engage in in one way or another? Why do we reflexively believe that difficult writing...writing deemed opaque or inaccessible, is an inherent problem?" www.chronicle.com/article/ever...

my asecs talk polygenism, monogenism, brownness I want to begin by saying the talk I’m giving is not the talk I meant to give. As you’ll see I start in one place and end up somewhere else. I apologize if my doing so takes us off topic.

The vet told me that Doris "has the kidneys of a much younger cat" so obviously I said "well I'll tell her she must give them back", and he earnestly replied "no I just meant for comparison" in case you ever wondered what those Bluesky commenters are like in real life

Early stock available now. Use DAPAAN25 as a promo code for 25% off when ordering from the Hurst website (www.hurstpublishers.com/book/dapaan/)

Columbia Journalism Dean Jelani Cobb on the recent arrest of a member of the university's community who was one of the organisers of the protests against the war in Gaza Read his Reuters Memorial Lecture in full in this link reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/full-te...

Ipsita Chakravarty isn't very active on Bluesky but her new book on storytelling and oral history in Kashmir is beautiful and devastating and you should consider pre-ordering www.hurstpublishers.com/book/dapaan/

Ipsita Chakravarty isn't very active on Bluesky but her new book on storytelling and oral history in Kashmir is beautiful and devastating and you should consider pre-ordering www.hurstpublishers.com/book/dapaan/

BLUESTOCKINGS is now out in paperback! And what a fabulous cover it has, filled with richly deserved accolades 👏 If you too want to be "spirited" & "intelligent", pick up a copy at your local bookshop or online! uk.bookshop.org/p/books/visi...

The eighteenth-century actress Kitty Clive once described the eighteenth-century actress Mary Ann Yates as "totering about to much, and flumping down to often", and in other news I am the eighteenth-century actress Mary Ann Yates

Good news! My beloved little wonder book is freshly published by @cambridgeup.bsky.social ! Digital access is available for free through 27 Feb 2025. Please share! Please welcome this beauty into the world! #C18L #18thcentury DOI: doi.org/10.1017/9781...

Finishing my seminar slides on *Pamela* (1740) & remembered her wax work. The wax work is the detail that gets me every time #18C #Pamela

Someone with more disposable income than me please buy these letters and revel in all the beautiful FOLDS and SEALING WAX: www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1...

I love when words turn out to be older than they seem. Like: Jane Austen could have known what an android was. People you're allowed to imagine, without violence to historical possibility, having brunch: John Ruskin, Queen Victoria, Thomas Hardy

Haggis is fine; I'm just here for the rumbledethumps

My very last issue (on ♿️) has now come out with BMJ Medical Humanities: I have stepped down from my role as Editor in Chief. There are a lot of factors—after 17 years editing two consecutive journals, it was time. But there’s more, and I feel we should talk about the climate of #academic publishing