Having the opportunity to gift your learning is something special. Today, I went out for lunch with my gym coach & talked to him about how to be organised about his reading & how to engage deeply/consolidate what he reads. I may not be a lecturer anymore, but I love giving people learning tools.

Just waiting to see my second Circus City show. Bristol is so lucky to have this festival!

On Anna May Wong for the Guardian www.theguardian.com/film/2025/se...

Sounds right up my street. I feel that we should think about where we publish as a political act. The most obvious element being that publishing Open Access is decolonial. (Remembering that uploading to repositories do that without a publisher fee, where possible).

Ppl, they promised you Brexit would solve everything, and it was a piece of shit. They’re telling you leaving the ECHR will solve everything. It will also be a piece of shit. Stop believing them. They talk self-serving bollocks.

I'm trying to make sense of only just learning my wonderful trapeze instructor, Mike Wright, died in April. Mike nurtured my love of aerial &, through that, inspired me to write academically about it. I so wanted to train with him again. I hope you're playing somewhere Mike, & cracking bad jokes.

Definitely my sort of thing! It feels like the sort of book, any of us really fascinated by embodiment & gender, should read.

Sometimes I'm so British it hurts. Yes, I'll complain when it's cold &, yes, I'm complaining now when 'it's too hot'. I am a Goldilocks; 21-23°C is just right.

It's a good year because it's a #Circus City year & this year's programme looks really exciting! If you don't know what 'contemporary circus' is, then you can't go wrong with checking out what's on.

This part from the chapter on libraries in Palaces for the People made me cry especially as book banning and budget cuts threaten our libraries

One of my favorite quotes from academia I first read in a book by Stephen Fry, who attributes it to a don at Cambridge speaking, if I remember right, to students: "Don't try to be clever. We're all clever here. Just try to be kind. A little kind." Seems like it has great and wide utility.

This thing about having “an open and honest conversation about immigration” - the problem is that too many white English people treat non-white people as fundamentally inhuman. It’s simply as that. When people like that say “immigration” they mean “infection”.

UK now ranking alongside Russia and Hungary - tremendous work by the Labour party.

The amount of fairly established artists over the past few months revealing they're having to step back from creative work and look for work in non-art fields instead is disheartening. A career path in skilled work where it was possible to at least make ends meet now feels less and less possible.

Intelligent folks using ChatGPT to learn about aspects of Black culture, thinking it is an accurate source, accurate enough to then inform others, grieves my soul. There are so many expert resources, books, articles, videos, websites — even human beings to learn from globally (it's beyond US).

Interested in knowing what Open Access can mean for your career and how it can be more equitable? Sigh up for this great event from the University of Sheffield.

Solidarity with all those getting grant termination notices from National Endowment for the Humanities this week. 😞 While the humanities may not have the easy "we cure cancer" talking points that some sciences do -- HUMANITIES SCHOLARSHIP IS IMPORTANT TOO! Huge loss to our country. #Academicsky

Struggling to write your thesis into a book? Here's my practical, nuts and bolts, advice on what to do once your proposal has been accepted: bdc.bris.ac.uk/2025/03/05/t... #academicsky

Big news: we are setting up a new non-profit organization to run bioRxiv and medRxiv. It's called openRxiv [no it's not a new preprint server; it's dedicated organization to oversee the servers] openrxiv.org 1/n

My piece for History Workshop looks back at what feels, I'm sure to me and so many other academics in the UK, like a decade-long crisis in universities. A crisis of politics, of a particularly venomous form of "education as market" ideology, and now a crisis of desperate, annihilating job cuts. 1/2

🔗 Websites vanish. Links break. But knowledge can live on with your help. Use the Wayback Machine’s Save Page Now tool to archive webpages that are important to you. 🕰️ 💾 📌 Try it now: web.archive.org/save

I mean, just, yes.

'The date is not in many history books. But it should be. It is 60 years on Tuesday since Britain’s first minister for the arts, Jennie Lee, published the first UK government white paper on the arts.'

"Research reveals UK institutions educated 50 world leaders in post in 2022, despite job cuts, course closures and a fall in foreign students." #highered www.theguardian.com/education/20...

This is academic freedom: "By liberal values, we do not mean views aligned with any political ideology: a commitment to freedom and social justice; tolerance and respect of difference; open-mindedness coupled with intellectual curiosity; generosity of spirit and a willingness to learn from others."

This January has felt like a bit of a funk (probably due to job insecurity, a pet death anniversary, missing sunlight & the state of the world) but I'm so grateful for a few crisp bright mornings, like today.

Open Access Toolkit for Aotearoa New Zealand Researchers

🚨 Event 🚨: Bridging Open Culture and Education: Case Studies in Cultural Heritage Education How can open culture and open educational resources bring cultural heritage to life? Explore the possibilities with us on February 13, 2025 at 2:00 p.m. UTC Register here: loom.ly/jZIO_ek

Working unpaid to get up the career ladder is a luxury few can afford... why can't organisations, governments and do gooders admit this. Volunteering your time is for those without bills, and a glaring barrier to the Working Class... pay fairly for work! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

At a time where Diamond #openaccess is gaining traction in Europe and the Netherlands, and where the Dutch Research Council (NWO) issued a call to support flips of journals, this guide, written by my wonderful library colleagues, comes at the right time: zenodo.org/records/1465...

Fellowship Opportunity! The New York Historical is accepting applications for 2025-2026 Fellowships. Scholars at all stages of their career are invited to use the collections of The New York Historical to expand their scholarship using our world-class collections www.h-net.org/jobs/job_dis...

Please share and maybe request for your library! Happy that my book “Worlds of the Ring: Nation and Empire in the British and German Circus” will be published with @manchesterup.bsky.social later this month manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526175090/

This was 18 days ago. This is a today reminder. For everyone who decides to cite us make sure you do so appropriately. #CiteBlackWomen @academicsky.org @booksky.bsky.social @blackauthors.bsky.social

This line is now living in my brain. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

I normally walk everywhere in Bristol. Tonight I tried to catch a bus. It did not go well.

Posting this today because the NY Hippodrome was the 1st US venue Cary Grant/Penders performed (👋🏻 festivalgoers), it's a year since it was published & this way, I can get an @altmetric.com hit for it now they're tracking this place 😉 doi.org/10.1177/1748... It's on the opening, circus & Americanness

Oooo! Now this is exciting! ...big takeaway, if you want @altmetric.com to track posts, don't delete your links when they auto-embed!

Victorianists: The CFP for VSAWC's 2025 conference, Exhibiting the 19th Century, is here: vsawc.org/events/. The event, hosted by my excellent MA advisor/sometime client/co-writer, will run May 23–24; proposals are due January 5. Travel grants are available for grad students & contingent faculty.

Sisters in Cinema are soliciting suggestions for what should be included in the Black Women's Film Canon. Submit your suggestions here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Waiting to Catch a Thief & finish up Bristol's acrobatic Cary (Grant) Comes Home spectacular...

...also still getting over how emotional I got at the end of Holiday - a life audience & a big screen make a huge difference! (Also, a fascinating intro by @theflyingeditor.bsky.social which means I need to pin her down for some private nerdy chats!

Definitely getting the feels about Cary Comes Home being nearly over. My Favorite Wife is the last at the Mega Screen projected so beautifully by @20thcflicks.bsky.social

Calling all members of the 5th Avenue Anti-Stuffed Shirt & Flying Trapeze Club! I’m introducing the wonderful HOLIDAY (1938) in Bristol’s Cary Comes Home Festival Sun 1st Dec at 10am - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ cast & script plus #CaryGrant & #KatharineHepburn do acrobatics… 🎟️🍿: www.carycomeshome.co.uk/events/2024-...

When you accidentally dress in camouflage for a film festival...

My intro and panel chat with Charlotte Crofts is done, so I get to sit back and be a punter for the rest of Cary (Grant) Comes Home Festival. (It was predictably fun - we could have chatted for hours!) Next up an interesting conversation about animals in film.

I’ll be in projection for this entire event and have been prepping the films the past coupla weeks… and when it’s over on Sunday I know I STILL won’t have had enough of Cary Grant! He’s my favourite. Tickets are available here, so make your day better: www.headfirstbristol.co.uk/whats-on/bri...

Bristol-based Cary Grant fans, this is your weekend! ...some of my favourites in here Inc Holiday & North by Northwest. You can also hear me introing I'm no Angel & talking movement, acrobatic training & vaudeville/variety circuits & film in a panel on motion. It would be lovely to see folks!

Those interested in my picturegoing.com site of eyewitness testimony of going to see pictures, might like to see its companion site, theatregoing.com, which reproduces eyewitness testimony of seeing theatrical productions, from the sixteenth century to the present day

I think it's important to highlight this - #research is not just academia, and academia is not just research. The space that is researched also includes industry, government agencies, NGOs, and other things (e.g., private individuals, high schools, and even militaries). #AcademicSky