It's official: 400 redundancies and a campus closure. At-risk staff will get a letter next week. Absolutely no serious consideration of any of the union's counterproposals. Please share widely.

If it were steel works we would have a government bailout plan, yet losing thousands of jobs at unis is met with a shrug. & unlike steelworks universities were profitable when they had foreign students. You are killing the golden goose… one of our best exports… HOW IS THIS HELPING GROWTH?!

Trump dozes while Marco Rubio speaks to him directly next to him. Just insane optics.

Please share! Two new postdoc positions have opened in the RADHEART project at the University of Bergen. The first is on ancient Rabbinic literature from the 2nd – 7th century CE. #AcRel #sblaar #AncientBlueSky www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

This is incredible. Reading Arcadia at the moment and just read this bit last night.

‘Marie’ Christmas, Victorianists! Eleanor Dobson and I have co-edited ‘Marie Corelli Reconsidered’, a special issue of Victoriographies. It features @janetteleaf.bsky.social Adam Lewis Smith, Keiko Kiriyama, Stephen Edwards, and our own detective work into the authorship of The Twin Soul (1887) 🔍

Oxford academics aim to ban university use of secret lawsuits. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

It's an amazing feeling, being part of something that only one or two people have read, until December 4th, when you get your chance to read what I've been banging on about for months and months and months. Link to order below:

Elon Musk and the Trump administration gleefully shutting down USAID “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.” People throw around terms like genocide quite freely online but it’s hard to find other words to describe this level of man-made death.

Why indeed? Disastrous decision from Nottingham that will hopefully be challenged and reversed

Farewell to an absolute powerhouse of an actor who had the erratic, uncanny energy of an Otto Dix painting come to life. HIs performance as a malevolent baby spirit being delivered in a painful labour by Brigitte Rabberg in Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom will forever haunt my nightmares.

Feels like a good time to remind people: pensions are deferred wages. Moving someone forcibly to a worse pension is wage theft. Always unjustifiable, but particularly appalling in the context of years and years of real-terms pay cuts. Why do they NEVER have any solution other than paying us less?

And what lessons have been learned?

Once again a quick reminder- still time to submit a proposal for the conference and an application for the bursary!!

Someone tag the Labour party: ““This was a cynical strategic manoeuvre to avoid losing voters to the far right, but it seems, based on polling, that all they have done is prime their own voters to join the far right rather than stay with the Social Democrats.”” www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

Coming soon; The Lumber Room and Other Tales: The Ghost Stories of Mary Ann Bird. I spent five years rediscovering this forgotten author. What I found was fascinating; emotional turmoil, destitution, ostracism, marital failure. And some great ghost stories. #ghosts #gothic #victorian #literature

*stares in trans* whoever indeed...

Every time I think they can’t get any lower, display less empathy to some of the most vulnerable people on this planet, or tongue polish the jackboots of English fascism any more ardently, I am proven wrong.

Shabana Mahmood went on telly to explicitly say that Reform were right about everything. That's your modern Labour Party, cementing support for the far right with bullshit.

My biography of Thomas Holloway, my Victorian quack doctor cousin, is el cheapo at the moment. It's got... 💊 Dubious cures ❄️ Haunted polar bears 🤡 A literal clown dentist 💰Philanthropy as competitive sport www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/The-Mighty-H...

Congratulations to Labour who have won the coveted Tommy Robinson endorsement. Excited for sensibles to explain to me why I have to vote for the people enacting actual fascist policy.

Hold up

"Live updates on exactly which UK universities are on strike right now over huge job cuts"

Dundee Uni won ‘Entrepreneurial University of the Year’ in 2024… then its principal resigned amid a £30m deficit that exposed serious financial mismanagement THE awards are spin, branding & optics They don't align with what's happening behind the scenes

The latest threat to UK modern languages is yet another faux pas www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/late...

Deterring foreign students ‘risks shutting out generation of talent’. Policy experts warn of long-term implications for research from tightening UK policies on international students. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025... All I can say is that this is fantastic publicity for the excellent @helleborezine.bsky.social !

Rewatching Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks The Return back to back, and the latter for the first time since I was in high school and… I think I finally get it now? Great thing is that I enjoy it just as much as when I didn’t

Want to find out how your voice can stop job cuts at the University of Dundee? Take the first step towards having influence on what happens to you next. Come along to our Stop The Jkb Cuts rally tomorrow at the Queen’s Hotel, 12:30-13:30pm. #SaveHE #SaveDundeeUni

c.org/Y7c4FsrDPd Please sign and share to halt the vandalism!

Solidarity to all of Dundee’s workers as they strike in the face of some of most caricaturishly mismanagement this sector has seen to date (although god knows the competition is heating up). May this venerable institution survive and thrive; victory to the strikers!

David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker Prize for his novel Flesh! Earlier this year I interviewed David (who is a lovely guy as well as a very fine author!) about this fantastic book for @englishstudies.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Do you think staff at the University of Dundee were misled when we were told there would be no redundancies? Or when he told us they hadn’t said there would be no redundancies?

Please share our posts with family, friends and collages and encourage them to give us a follow. We’ll be posting regularly during the strike action until the end of Friday. #SaveDundeeUni #SaveHR

UK universities cannot thrive while continually cutting academic staff No amount of wellness webinars, Lego play workshops, communal climbing events, bounce back sessions, desk yoga, jigsaw puzzle nights or Vice Chancellor's Special Awards for Resilience can change this

pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.

The ritual begins, as it always does, with a pilgrimage. People pour in from the dense warrens of India’s financial capital and from dusty villages thousands of kilometers away, all flowing towards the fortified, sea-facing Mumbai home of actor Shah Rukh Khan.

Remember that one man is the author of most of our problems. He's rich and he lives in a big house with his rich wife and he laughs it up most days. The people he demonised and punished struggle on. That's life and that's Britain.

Leicester University reviews 163 jobs, affecting geography, modern languages, history Vice Chancellor Prof Canagarajah says "We care & offer support including mindfulness webinars & chance to apply for job that doesn’t exist True peace of mind comes with severance"😉 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

After squandering millions on Castle Meadows purchase, University of Nottingham is now axing modern languages & music It also plans to cut its nursing programme Leaders of the bungleocracy continue to draw handsome salaries www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

If you missed it, here’s the interim Principal talking about substantial future job cuts at University of Dundee. He refers to the number of job losses recommended in the recovery plan. This is 390FTE with 340FTE via redundancies. We believe redundancies are not necessary. #SaveHE #SaveDundeeUni

News that further job cuts are coming is just another shocking revelation in a year when staff have been told one thing only to be told something different over the number of jobs to be cut and the need for compulsory redundancies. DUCU co-president, Melissa D’Ascenzio news.stv.tv/north/dundee...

We’re leading 5 days of industrial action at the University of Dundee. We’re calling on all our members to participate in this action. You can join us on the picket line or strike from home. You can legally join the strike if you aren’t a member of a union The people united will never be defeated.

Nothing says “university in perfect health” quite like power struggles, toxic culture & intimidating senior management Don’t worry -- external consultants advise that a few “clarified roles” & “shift away from blame culture” should fix things at University of Aberdeen www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

That's really going to bring in the young voters.

I am reading The Captive by @nedbeauman.bsky.social ( writing as Kit Burgoyne) and it is so brilliant I am actively having to ration myself so I don’t inhale it all at once. His imagination is absolutely unparalleled; I thought it would be impossible to outdo Venomous Lumpsucker, but here we are

Labour has fallen to its lowest rating in a YouGov poll, with Green support at an all-time high, it has emerged