New year in the North Pennines

Join and help to lead the Constitution Unit! @uclspp.bsky.social is looking for a Lecturer in British and Comparative Politics who will also join our senior team and contribute to our research and impact activities. Applicants must have, or be near to finishing, a PhD. Apply 👇

@quinnslobodian.com: “While the MAGA grouping uses its power to stage a Gramscism from the right…the response of its targets is simply to ask for something softer; to try to meet them halfway in a foggy and nebulous language of community, storytelling, and place.” lpeproject.org/blog/post-ne...

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

A representation of entrenched inequality not just between generations but families. The politics which follows is a vast ideological effort to justify that inequality as natural & necessary, to ridicule critics & distract opposition while ignoring the fraying of society that is its consequence.

good time for the @eflux.bsky.social issue on masculinities to drop (it’s always a good time) www.e-flux.com/journal/159

Some astonishing anecdotes within...

Very happy with this cover for ‘Irish Culture and Partition, 1920-1955’, which features a detail from Evie Hone’s stained glass window 'Four Green Fields'. This window was originally shown at the New York's World Fair in 1939, but is now found in Government Buildings on Merrion Street

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

Real estate people and speculation is destroying universities across Europe and the U.S.

“You can't offer poverty wages to staff who kept the British Library running through the cyber-attack, then offer bonuses to directors who benefit from their hard work.” @graceblakeley.substack.com asks: who are Britain's cultural institutions really for? graceblakeley.substack.com/p/you-should...

Our friends @bairishstudies.bsky.social are now accepting single-author monographs published in 2025 on any #IrishStudies topic for the 2026 BAIS Book Prize. The BAIS PG Bursary Prize and BAIS PG Essay Prize are also accepting submissions. Full details: irishstudies.co.uk/prizes-and-f...

I guess it would be funny if their first “dynamically priced” production was Look Back in Anger

So much media commentary on contemporary masculinity seems incapable of thinking beyond nostalgia for the patriarchal family wage, as if it’s the only antidote for neoliberal atomisation and its misogynistic symptoms. Feel like this conversation has basically been static for the last 20 years…

Had an excellent time at @uniofgalwaylib.bsky.social archives this week.

Graduate of the American Studies programme that the University of Nottingham wishes to close wins 2025 Wolfson History Prize for Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade. History, it's a long game. Divest in haste, repent for the longue durée.

‘All maximum breaks—indeed all breaks over seventy-five or eighty—have this quality of aesthetic excess, of formal purity, snooker for snooker’s sake.’

A predictable result of kicking the can down the road. The fees system is the worst of all possible worlds: a regressive pseudo-tax that doesn’t cover costs unless supplemented with an unsustainable supply of international students.

‘By 1790, one in eight Liverpool households were dependent on the slave trade.’ John Kerrigan on Liverpool, the Atlantic slave trade and m. nourbeSe philip’s long poem 𝘡𝘰𝘯𝘨! www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Born on this day, 1897, Nye Bevan, Minister of Health and Housing when Labour built 805,000 council homes between 1945-51. He believed high-quality council housing should reflect 'the living tapestry of a mixed community'.

Perhaps the dumbest take in the last few days has been British people, including people on the left, loudly proclaiming we are too vicariously interested in New York local politics.

Soldier F found not guilty in Bloody Sunday murder trial. So no convictions for the murder of 13 people during an anti-internment March in Derry in 1972. So much for the rule of law in the UK? ‘And in the dirt lay justice like an acorn in winter.’ The Road to Derry, Séamus Heaney, 1972.

This is something my lovely students worked on last academic year. If you're interested in student perspectives on what decolonisation means for English Literature, please listen to this thoughtful discussion. #AcademicSky @livunihss.bsky.social @livunienglish.bsky.social

This is so interesting from @qubelfastofficial.bsky.social regarding the impact of the Irish Famine. @irishstudiesqub.bsky.social

Our neighbours @livunipress.bsky.social have published their Autumn/Winter list. Doesn't take long to find books of interest to #IrishStudies scholars 😊 but just in case, here is the Autumn/Winter Irish Studies list: www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/topic/public... #academicsky #booksky

🎊 🎉The department is thrilled to be part of the award 'Crafting Care for People, Place and Planet'! Look out for new PhD opportunities with us related to this funding.

You should all pre-order Hannah's excellent book!

In the lead-up to Brian Friel’s centenary year, Arts Over Borders directors talk about the epic five-year project of site-specific presentations of his plays 👇

The Labour government is turbocharging the British derisking state with the world's most expensive nuclear power plant, Sizewell C. Expensive for us, profitable for investors. Public subsidies for 12% returns, when average infrastructure yields about 7, all hail investible infrastructure!

‘When neoliberal policymakers attack abortion and promote conservative visions of sexuality and the family, it is not only to maintain women’s subordinate status, but because the family is central to the reorganisation of economic life they have overseen’ www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Delighted to announce the shortlist for our 📚Annual John McGahern Book Prize📚 for best debut by an Irish author. Congratulations to Ferdia Lennon, Alan Murrin, Sinéad Gleeson and Anna Fitzgerald. @4thestatebooks.bsky.social @bloomsburybooksuk.bsky.social @literatureireland.bsky.social #IrishStudies

At this point I think I may be one of an incredibly small number of people to have read the second Sullivan report in detail. It is uniformly poor scholarship, containing flagrant fabrications and misrepresentations, calling into question Alice Sullivan's ability to conduct basic academic research

Mustafa Sheta ran The Freedom Theatre in a refugee camp in Jenin - then he was arrested by Israeli forces in 2023. Just a month after his release, their show Return to Palestine opens in London... @hollyomahony.bsky.social interviews Sheta about the realities of making theatre under occupation

If you or your students are interested in contemporary theatre and performance in Northern Ireland, you can now get 20% off the (hefty...) price using the discount code: PALAUT. There's lots stuff in it that will be of interest to feminist theatre scholars too. link.springer.com/book/9783031752292

We also heard the research of Rachel Fehily, Róisín O’Gorman, Michael R. Murphy & Sarah Hoover on Dramaturgies and Visibility #ISTR2025 endsofempire.com

Second day of #ISTR2025 is off to a fantastic start as Brian Singleton discusses ANU Productions’ Hammam (2023), bringing it together with the context of the 2023 Dublin Riot www.abbeytheatre.ie/whats-on/ham...

Kurt Taroff raises thought-provoking points in ‘Circuses of stasis: performing the defence of the imperial state in the US and Northern Ireland’, juxtaposing the perfomativity and iconography of The Twelfth parades with Trump rallies (at one of which he apparently "signed a baby") #ISTR2025

@lukelamont.bsky.social on Abomination by Conor Mitchell and Belfast Ensemble at @irishtheatreres.bsky.social 2025 #EndsofEmpire hosted by @myiadt.bsky.social

Catching our breath after a flurry of brilliant panels this afternoon. The Government Policy & the Arts panel featured papers from Patricia O’Beirne, Ben McCabe & Charlotte McIvor. #ISTR2025 endsofempire.com

Sometimes is does seem extraordinary how far things have shifted to the right. Apart from being wrong, it’s also hard to see which prospective Labour voter this argument is for.

Join us at 4pm BST on 28 June for Pleasure: University of Liverpool Kenneth Allott Lecture / Poetry Society Summer Lecture with Ledbury Poetry Critics co-founder Vidyan Ravinthiran at the Ledbury Poetry Festival! In 1802, William Wordsworth was already worried – like us – about

And yet, near silence from the government.

🎭 Katie Knowles and Esme Miskimmin have been working on a collaborative project: a new play performed at #ShakespeareNorthPlayhouse, featuring young actors from the Imaginarium Youth Theatre Group. Info on the show and accompanying exhibition: shakespearenorthplayhouse.co.uk/event/act-yo...

Is the theatre sector shrinking?, asks @smithalistair.bsky.social, as BBC research reveals significant contraction in subsidised theatre 👇

For the Poems for Peace Project, a collection of poems were written by various writers, each thinking about different facets of peace and conflict. In our latest episode, staff members from @livunienglish.bsky.social interview the writers on their work open.spotify.com/episode/07Vd...

Great news! I am recruiting a(nother) PhD student! 'Ulster Americans' is a collaborative PhD with National Museums NI, specifically the Ulster American Folk Park, and is open to home and international students so please spread the word! More details in the link. www.qub.ac.uk/courses/post...

Assistant Professor of English (Drama and/or Theatre) Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) Full time, permanent www.timeshighereducation.com/unijobs/list...