So pleased to be launching @c21literature.bsky.social ’s inaugural roundtable review w/ @olihaslam.bsky.social ! Thank you to our fabulous contributors for their work on this excellent piece 👏👏👏

Interested nonfiction writers! Do you have a book project you'd like to get off the ground but aren't sure where to start? I'll be offering one-on-one consultations from February! DM me here or contact me through my website to discuss if it could be right for you

‘They are no longer strategizing for voluntary adoption by those who come to recognize the technology’s utility by electively applying it to the problems they face. They are planning how to cross the chasm by forced adoption.’ By @mattseybold.bsky.social

I hate to tap the sign but again: this is all made to make in-person education and access to knowledge transfer a preserve of the elite. Human education for the few, bots for the many.

you cannot convince me that any of the ai training being offered by any of our universities is substantively different from ai skills hub dot org dot uk

Hell of a thread on the UK government's AI training

BREAKING: A gender-critical challenge the City of London's trans-inclusive arrangements at Hampstead Heath ponds has been refused permission, just as consultation responses show majority back trans inclusion pa.media/blogs/pa-edi...

400 jobs at risk. A campus set to close. This film explains what’s happening at the University of Essex and why staff, students and the local community are organising to stop it. 📍 Southend rally | 5 February

Check out the CFP for this pair of VIRTUAL mini-conferences on SLOP and NOSTALGIA, held by DLC+. I attended some of the previous mini-conference they put on it and it was great. Highly recommend. Keynote by the great Tess McNulty @dlcplus.org docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

And so it begins... 3 UK universities (Essex, Sussex & Kent) have just gone public about walking away from their Elsevier Read & Publish deals, despite Jisc's recently announced agreement. Expect to see more of these over the coming months. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/three-m... #OpenAccess

JOB! I'm hiring a postdoc for 2 years on my ERC MaMo project. Looking for someone with strong quant methods, ongoing work close to the project's aims, and a desire to publish in sociology. Start flexible in the next 12 months. Formal call out shortly, but contact me first.

Meanwhile, one of the key front lines in any geopolitical confrontation - the university sector - is busy (1) hollowing itself out and (2) making itself dependent on US tech. Okay guys! Let's see where that gets you. 😬

The Centre for Uses of Literature at the University of Southern Denmark is inviting applications for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships 2026 (MSCA-PF). www.sdu.dk/en/forskning... @bacls.bsky.social @c21literature.bsky.social @englishassociation.bsky.social @ies-sas.bsky.social

Work with us! The School of English is seeking to appoint a Lecturer in Creative Writing (Prose). Closing Date: 27 Feb 2026 For more information and to apply please see: www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

2 year Postdoctoral Research Fellow opportunity at the University of St Andrews on my project "Aesthetic Values and the Social Dimensions of Science" www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/... #philosophy #philsci

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

BBC journalists have been banned from describing the kidnapped Venezuelan leader as having been kidnapped. The BBC News Editor has sent this to BBC journalists.

fwiw it’s been about six weeks since Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras who had been convicted of trafficking drugs into the US

This report in Nature on the costs of competing for & administering scientific grants is shocking: "In other words, European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained." www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

This is genuinely horrifying. Fact-free far-right agitprop given accolades by credible media across the political spectrum.

A brilliant article, and one that is going to have a big impact on what I want to be doing next year.

Professional societies keep beclowning themselves buying into a lie about what an LLM "summary" is. They are inherently counterfeit: not an epistemic product of the ideas in the source, but summary-shaped text linguistically based on *other* works (in the training corpus) that use related language.

An interview with @randongenerator.bsky.social and @sandropology.bsky.social, the guest editors of our latest issue 'Novel Media / Media Novel' 👩🏽‍💻🧑🏽‍💻👨🏽‍💻 c21.openlibhums.org/news/873/

Ongoing decimation of British universities part 252: Apx. 1000 academic staff at University of Essex just received formal ‘risk of redundancy’ letters via email. Please share @ucuessex.bsky.social @ucu.org.uk

HESA put the academic staff numbers in 23-24 in Essex at 1560, and given voluntary severence schemes it's likely to be lower now, so this is at least 2/3rds of all academic staff in Essex receiving risk of redundancy letters.

Philosophical Logic has joined the OLH! Read their open letter on mass editorial resignation and the push to make academic research “as accessible as possible to both the academic community and society at large”.

Books are like children in one important way - both take a village to raise. Thank you to my village, all over the world, who have helped me along the way. None of this could have happened without you. www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cultural-...

As I wrote in 2020... "The web makes up a large chunk of the data feeding GPT3 and kin. Posting the output of large language models online builds a feedback loop that cannot improve quality. All ingredients for an information heat death are on hand."

In yet more devastating news, the VC has confirmed her plans to cut 80% of academic staff from Essex Pathways, our foundation year department. This would effectively close down all our existing foundation year programmes through the back door. But it's not a done deal yet. Please share urgently.

Every sympathy for University of Essex (and pressures facing them) but this is very bad news for Southend. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... Essex university to cut 400 jobs as overseas student numbers plummet

We’re hiring! 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

the only way to make this stupid and pointless system even more unfair would be to remove the reviewers—and now they can!

Framing GenAI as a battle between teachers and students is a red herring. Students and educators are on the same side. The real opposition are the data extraction firms and brokerages and their allies among the managerial class.

so it begins

horrendous. solidarity w my former colleagues at essex

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, because my book is out now, fresh off the press! Happy book birthday to “Literary Autobiography: Contemporary Novelists and their Self-Representations” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) 📕🎉! doi.org/10.1007/978-... @hss.springernature.com

This is what I called hegemonic defeatism, looking at the French case We're about to see a lot of people who pretended to be against the far right when it was easy give up before taking any real stand academic.oup.com/pa/article/7...

it's the last week of the teaching term

“A poignant appraisal of readers’ quest to find intimacy with the authors they love.” @kdclewin.bsky.social’s forthcoming The Writer’s Room (Feb. 17, 2026) earned a positive review in @publisherswkly.bsky.social. Read the full review here:

Shabana Mahmood's Indefinite Leave To Remain Culture War 3 years - if you're earning £125k+ 15 years - if you're e.g. a nurse, or a teacher Labour's two tier system which rewards high earners and insults those who work just as hard but don't earn as much - really sad to see Labour fall

Sharing this again - deadline tomorrow! We'd love to hear from you

🔔 We have extended the deadline for Targeted Research Panel funding until Friday 28th November. What's TRP funding? Each conference, we award up to £5000 funding for panels which aim to support & promote the production of research by people of colour, LGBTQ+ communities & disability communities.

we are in our slop era

Keir Starmer's spokesman insisted on Monday that "clearly these changes will not be retrospective" for those already granted asylum, as Reform have been demanding. Now we learn they will be inews.co.uk/news/politic...

I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight www.cityam.com/the-british-...

New issue of @c21literature.bsky.social: Journal of 21st-century Writings, Volume 12, Issue 2, is out now! Novel Media/Media Novel, edited by Dong Xia and Sandro Eich: c21.openlibhums.org/issue/1286/i...

It was lovely to speak to Karina Jakubowicz on the Virginia Woolf podcast @litcamb.bsky.social about my book The Writer's Room -we talked about (who else) Woolf and all things writing spaces. Check it out here

Your regular reminder that there is absolutely nothing "hard" or "tough" about targeting the poorest, most vulnerable, and least able to defend themselves groups of people on the entire planet