Your June reminder that if you're a UK-based holder of an Arts, Humanities or Social Science (SHAPE) degree, or equivalent, within 10 years (excluding career breaks) of your PhD, you are warmly invited to join the British Academy's Early Career Researcher Network. 1/2

Durham looking lovely today post thunderstorm

The blackbirds have been wreaking havoc on my planting beds this year but look, he’s just a little guy at the scene of his crimes

THIS is what Starmer PROMISED when he stood for Labour leader. Judge his failure against what he was supposed to deliver, not Westminster-Bubble nonsense where he’s allowed not to mean it.

As temperatures in London soar we'd like to invite you all to the visit the library which is lovely and air conditioned. Feel free to drop in to use our computers, have a quiet sit down, study or even look at some of the wonderful items in our collections. Free and open to all!

Return of Martin Guerre musical (by the creators of Les Mis?!?!) coming to the Old Vic in October! Just when I don't have classrooms full of budding #earlymodern scholars to drag there. Still demanding a school trip though... (and blasting the cast album through the corridors)

Fabulous to see this finding aid out! There are indeed a /lot/ of pitfalls for people studying apprenticeship, when it comes to women—resources like the one Helen has put together are so important. #apprenticeship

Today I went looking for the index of apprenticeship disputes in the Lord Mayor's Court of London, ed. by Prof Michael Scott. Google's AI has helpfully suggested I watch a relevant video "for a look into historical London apprenticeships and the disputes handled by courts during that era:"

Pls enjoy this comic moment from Hilda Runciman’s diary, as she & Walter sailed around Italy in April 1938: During a gust a tragedy happened to our worthy but lugubrious looking chief officer. His cap was blown off + alas next his hair blew off too a distressing revelation, +irreparable loss!

His arrival was foretold in ancient murals

I have entered the final 3 months to dissertation submission, also known as the [CITATION NEEDED] thunderdome

I had a dream last night that I went to a secret fantasy Dunkin’ Donuts and ordered 6 insanely delicious donuts heretofore unknown to humankind; on waking up I could only remember one (a ricotta-filled donut that had been put in a waffle iron). Currently pondering the feasibility/physics required

Trying to reconcile this and also the 6 fig salaries being paid to most upper administrator positions with the recent FT report that several unis almost ran out of money last year. Big “help me budget this, my family is dying” vibes

I think sharing hard things is as important as sharing success. So, in the last 12 hours I have: - completed a thesis abstract, about which my supervisor was very complimentary! - been rejected from a postdoc I was really hoping would come through - moved a skunk that died behind my mom’s garage

Me, for 3 years: how am I ever going to write enough to get to 100k words on my dissertation, that’s a comedy level of words Me, at 3.5 years: ….oh

May the Fourth Be With You (scenes from the music of Star Wars with the Royal Northern Sinfonia)

I’ve just attended my first US PhD defence as a spectator and y’all weren’t kidding about the “snake fight portion”

Incredibly, going to uni and doing apprenticeships have coexisted for a long time!

Big Monday mood from JQ today

Love to have a landlord who argues that having a working ignition on a hob is “a matter of convenience” so he shouldn’t need to replace it

This was written about a different discipline but the lesson is the same - it's the prefect explanation of why we should NEVER use LLMs in family history research. "Serendipity doesn't come from efficiency. It comes from spending time in the place where the problem lives..." Get your hands dirty!

Some days writing means a playlist of soft classical hits; other days it’s caramelldansen on loop

CFP: Edinburgh Bibliographical Seminar & Workshop, 20-24 July, on library catalogs & registers as evidence in the history of math, science, and tech! Deadline 21 April. Please share widely. Generous travel funding available, so don't be put off applying: sigma.mathsworlds.org/activities/e....

Dr Bailey 🎉🎉🎉

It's happening all over the post-92 bit of the sector. Moves are afoot in places not making headlines yet and the cover excuse is the TPS pension. The question now is will organised labour react and will this get the urgency it demands from academics in USS?

Another delight from this weekend’s book fair in Edinburgh: a contemporary leather label belonging to an Amelia Keir pasted in a sammelband of installments of L’Ami des Enfants, a late 18c children’s serial, “d’un petit format portatif pour les Enfans.” #herbook

Pretty cool thing in a Newcastle imprint from 1760: a paper tear repaired before printing

Robert E. Lee got his ass beat at Gettysburg by a professor of rhetoric and oratory from Bowdoin College and generations of reactionary fantasists have died mad about it.

Cutting Slavery modules whilst doing this is wild

Crossing the Tyne

"Texts were collected by scraping and parsing freely available digital sources" is no longer an adequate methodology statement, if it ever has been.

"The [assessment] model has long treated the production of a thing as the symbol of learning. AI has made it trivially easy to produce the thing without any of the learning."

'A Thucydidean world is not something to be welcomed. Thucydides’ account of the thirty-year war between Athens and Sparta...takes in a devastating epidemic, social breakdown, polarisation, civil war, catastrophic failures in the workings of democracy and an attempted oligarchic coup.'

When I give talks about the exploitation of GLAM by the AI industry I’m always asked “how can we defend ourselves from bots scraping our metadata?” I have no idea. That’s a question for an engineer. What I can and do say is that we shouldn’t be supporting this industry in the first place.

I am reading Butler’s Earthseed series for the first time; currently on Parable of the Talents Encountering her fictional right wing, fascist presidential candidate and his MAGA slogan in the wild, imagined by her circa 1998, is certainly an experience

The Customs of London in the historical context of the early modern period is really just a completely wild legal structure. Impossible to figure out the particulars of something (unless it went wrong) because no one wrote it down because “everyone knows we’ve always done X”? Insane way to govern

What a terrible feeling to be reading Parable of the Sower and watching the characters, written in the 90s, talk about the measles epidemic of 2025.

I really do keep forgetting that most organisations have administrative bodies that are more like “Veep” and less like the Sith Lords

We’re on what feels like day 65 of endless rain in the northeast and I’m starting to understand why all these English Victorian heroines had to go to southern France for their health

anyway the consultation shuts tomorrow, one minute to midnight UK time: www.gov.uk/government/c... Amnesty have some good guidance here. Go on: media.amnesty.org.uk/documents/Am...

The survey is live until 12 February; please take a moment to comment.

In Neil Gaiman’s “I did nothing wrong ever” statement he says there’s been no good journalism about him or his assaults. There has been, of course. Thing is, he said the same thing in 2018 when @moryan.bsky.social reported on issues behind the scenes on American Gods www.moryan.com/a-burn-it-do...

The Capricorn Cake from clove coterie’s astrology cakes series is ready to go—a vanilla poppyseed olive oil sponge with blueberry and rosemary compote filling, a vanilla cake soak, and a violet-chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream

Thesis submitted! 🍾🍾🍾 If you'd like to read something that contains both bibliographical formulae and discussions of rimming, then it may be for you!

Democratic Senators: “someone should DO something! Someone needs to INVESTIGATE!” Me: …and is the someone in the room with us now, or…?

For any other residents of NH, there is still room in Sen Maggie Hassan’s voicemail; and I even spoke to an actual staffer in Shaheen’s office after 2 rings, so please do call: Hassan: 202-224-3324 Shaheen: 202-224-2841

You are using war powers without congressional approval? Believe it or not, jail!

This eggplant parm recipe by Claire Safitz was introduced to me by @18thcenturysam.bsky.social (occasionally I am very lucky and she makes it), but making it as I do every Christmas season always leaves my kitchen looking like the site of some obscene disruption www.bonappetit.com/recipe/bas-b...