My latest article has just been published in The Historical Journal. It looks at the ways in which HIV/AIDS was positioned as not just an urban problem, but one that was antithetical to rural spaces. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Loved this long read on the Leeds beer scene and the dominance of Kirkstall brewery. One of the great things about Leeds was the variety in its beer scene - it would be great to see more support for other local brewers like Horsforth, Amity, and Piglove. www.pelliclemag.com/home/2026/4/...

Ahead of next week's #MBS26 conference, our website is now live! Check out our new blog series, Histories from Here, and our plans for prizes and conferences in Modern British Studies modbritstud.org.uk

Really pleased we managed to secure funding for this workshop next month. Unfortunately a really topical issue. www.westminster.ac.uk/events/death...

Engaging the public in humanities & social sciences feels more important than ever. So we are offering £8k grants for researchers to work with galleries, libraries, archives, museums or performing arts organisations to do this. Please help spread the word! www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...

Delighted to receive my print copy of the latest Technology and Culture. My prize-winning essay on Concorde's critics appears in this volume, which tells a new story about the technological disillusionment of the late 1960s. You can also read it online: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl... ✈️

"Chasing middle England & middle-class voters & saying that’s the only thing that matters" hasn't been the focus of UK politics since the Cameron era. Burnham might be wiser to ask why the pursuit of "Hero voters" & the "Red Wall" has not actually improved their lives observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

Rishi Sunak tells Radio 4 that "AI is changing every aspect of our economy and our lives, and if I was back in office and looked at my diary and where I was going to spend my time, I would spend it on that" At no point does he or the BBC mention the £373,000 given to him every year by an AI company

Incisive stuff but there’s one proviso: it isn’t management ‘failure to comprehend’ the multiple purposes and values of higher education. Here, at least, it’s a deliberate and conscious rejection of the university as anything other than a cash-for-employability machine. As evidenced by my VC…

An alternative view would be that analyses by leading VCs that reduce ECR precarity to a short paragraph and dismiss its ‘unfair’ nature in a sentence are part of the problem not part of the solution. Surely it’s a key part of being senior and in post to be positing or even enacting solutions.

It's probably correct that there's a 'system problem', as he says, but why is it somehow the job of educational institutions to only prepare people for work, which is the implication here? If you want your employees to have particular skills, you need to train them. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This story, insofar as it deals with the National Railway Museum, is utterly absurd. If you rock up to a museum event expecting to dump a load of stuff on the staff, and are then surprised to be politely refused, then you clearly have no idea what museums are for. www.cityam.com/a-state-of-t...

The Society's President and Council have released the following statement on the proposed closure of undergraduate degrees at the University of Hertfordshire, in #History and the wider humanities bit.ly/4dmV5oO This comes at a time of further bad news from Essex and Nottingham #Skystorians

Today @drjogrady.bsky.social wrote to the University of Reading. Trans staff and students are being forced into formal grievances just to find out why policies that affect their daily lives exist. That is not legal compliance. It is institutional opacity. We’re calling on Reading to act.

Please help spread the news far and wide! We have a new, full-time, permanent Lecturer in Global History of Science job @stsucl.bsky.social Don't be fooled by the application of deadline of only 9 June 2026. This is an open search #histsci #skystorians www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

New by me in @pop-jrnl.bsky.social in which I reflect on the experience of designing & delivering what was *probably* the first module on whiteness in modern British history in a UK university history department. Enjoy! doi.org/10.1080/0031...

I have a piece in today’s Irish Examiner about a new AHRC project I’m proud to be involved in with @jcrangle.bsky.social & @tortietabby.bsky.social on a hundred years of diversity in Ireland www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...

New Associate Professor role in modern British History, just advertised here at Oxford. @lifelong-learning.ox.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk @kelloggoxford.bsky.social my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Reposting my latest article from my recent @leverhulme.ac.uk project, which has now been republished Open Access. In it I try to draw out some of the threads between imperial knowledge-making and mid-20c musical criticism in Britain. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

'The decision to close it was taken despite the faculty continuing to plan high-profile campus events, including the booking this month of US civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw.' 1/2

Academic departments deserve to be saved, supported, resourced, allowed to grow even if they're not "best in the country," "first in the REF," "top-ranked," "at a Russell Group uni," or whatever other austerity-brained nonsense senior managers have been using to flimflam you out of solidarity

For further context: almost everyone in the Faculty of Arts is at risk of redundancy. Music, Modern Languages & American & Canadian Studies courses to close completely. History will not close but staff numbers will be significantly reduced. This is what 'right-sizing' looks like, apparently.

It's an honour to be shortlisted for an Orwell Prize for my article in the @newstatesman1913.bsky.social last year about my own experiences of homelessness. Thanks to @orwellprize.bsky.social and @homelessnessimpact.bsky.social You can read the piece here: www.newstatesman.com/politics/soc...

I chatted to CBC News Live earlier today about the ongoing instability in British politics and the tottering premiership of Keir Starmer. www.cbc.ca/player/play/...

will have more of a proper post our about it once I've finished grading finals but today is publication day for my book! www.versobooks.com/products/312...

Yesterday Kier Starmer announced Labour will nationalise British Steel, and save 2700 jobs. Today, the Uni of Nottingham put 2700 staff at risk of redundancy. This is just one university. Across the UK 15,000 higher education jobs need saving. Where is the rescue package for our universities?

Please sign this in support of my many excellent and talented former colleagues at UH Humanities. To say that they don't deserve this latest piece of short-sighted management axe-swinging would be putting it mildly...

Wonderful new article by my York colleague @samwetherell.bsky.social. It uses Liverpool to demonstrate "how the newly elevated place of cultural production in late twentieth-century Britain was related to the management of surplus land and populations in the wake of industry"!

Help stop another attempt to use the present crisis in higher education to roll back the academic study of black history and culture in the UK.

Asian Dub Foundation’s Aniruddha Das aka Dhangsha with a new tape of industrial dub heaters, cooked with a raw feel for soundsystem wreckage - big tip FFO Rezzet, Muslimgaue, Bomb 20 boomkat.com/products/ins...

Really looking forward to presenting here next month alongside so many great papers. There's not long left to register if you want to join!

Absolute disgrace that Nigel Farage is invited to speak at an antisemitism rally. Letter from British Jews objecting has received a few thousand signatures in a few hours.

Not to urge complacency, but so much of what is described here has already been happening! There already are a archipelagos of privately run detention centres around British airports. Labour has already been using ex military bases for detaining migrants - e.g: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... ...

On Friday afternoon before the Bank Holiday, colleagues in the Humanities department were called to a meeting on Tuesday. They were informed that the University Portfolio Review had decided that English Language, English Literature, Philosophy, History & Creative Writing UG degrees would close

2014 REF: 2026: closing UG History

Knowledge & understanding grow in university settings when experts disagree with each other, testing each others' claims, adducing different evidence & positing alternative scenarios. That's how change happens. In this thread, I suggest that we take a different approach to that featured here. 1/x

Over the past couple of years I’ve been working w/ the artist Simon Bayliss on the unlikely intersection between Ecstasy and studio pottery. We’ll be discussing this on 9 May at Gwennap Pit near Redruth, to mark Bayliss’ exhibition “It’s Just a Feeling” www.tickettailor.com/events/creat...

A reminder that both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris literally warned everyone that SCOTUS was on the ballot. They were right yet again.

On the money piece (as per) by @jonathanliew.bsky.social on radicalised footballers and the broader cultural climate of far right vindication that enables them www.theguardian.com/football/202...

This is bang on. Reform curriculum has been met with almost audible eye-rolling from the history teacher community. Been here so many times before. There is no "right" history. History *is* different perspectives and interpretations. Supressing the interpretations you don't like is ahistorical.

Hurray for the University of Sussex. Not so hurray for OfS. 'Sussex University has overturned a £585,000 fine by England’s higher education watchdog after the high court rejected claims the university had breached free speech regulations involving its former professor Kathleen Stock.'

Happy to see that my article with @andrekosvarnava.bsky.social on the elite backlash to dismantling the 'White Australia Policy' has been published in the latest issue of @historicaljnl.bsky.social (69/2, 2026). It is open access, so download now! #historians 🗃️ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

New link for my London book launch for WE HAVE COME TO BE DESTROYED: GROWING UP IN COLD WAR BRITAIN at Waterstones Gower St on Weds 13th May at 6.30pm - because I'm now in conversation with the fantastic @nataliethomlinson.bsky.social www.waterstones.com/events/we-ha... #skystorians #histchild

My book on the history of British South Asian political activism is available for pre-order now. www.waterstones.com/book/come-wh...

Despite its very public pledges of solidarity with Lebanon, Iran went into direct negotiations with the US without a ceasefire in Lebanon. At the same time, they threaten to overthrow the Lebanese government if it dares touch Hezbollah.

Broken record here, but we cannot fix, save, improve, renew or whatever English universities if we only attend to taught students, DfE and OfS. Universities are major engines of research, innovation and civic good. Minimally DSIT must also be centrally in the frame. They're not big schools.

Worse than limited opening hours, it's the withdrawal of 2/3 of the archive for curiosity-driven research that is the real scandal for what is supposed to be a public-service organization.

NEW: Lebanon is Gaza 2.0. That’s what Israeli ministers are saying in their own words. Believe them. 1/ www.thenerve.news/p/lebanon-wa...

🚨 Conference booking open 🚨 Blood is the price of coal: Coal communities, health and welfare in Britain from the 19th century to the present 18 June 2026, University of Warwick Booking form and additional information about the programme available at warwick.ac.uk/services/lib...