Our next #RSVPDigiEvent is coming up on Friday, 21 November! We'll hear from the editors of 3 top Victorian studies journals (including VPR's own kmalonephd.bsky.social) on "How to Get Published in an Academic Journal." Come one, come all! buff.ly/ydJkKAK

This is one of three cartoons I have in the current Private Eye.

It’s lovely to see our BAVS CFP out. If you research/teach any aspect of the Victorian period (broadly defined) do consider joining us! You can submit a paper, roundtable, creative workshops/ pedagogical paper. We really are open to a wide range of talks! victorianist.wordpress.com/2025/10/20/c...

Our @ehunineteen.bsky.social seminar series starts next week with @drreznicek.bsky.social talking to me about care in Romantic novels - register in skeet below! Free, online, all welcome!

19th century writers love describing all the different compartments of a woman's face. "Vaulting eyebrows. Rose petal lips. Eyes like a gelid pond." I'm not a police sketch artist. Just say "brown hair".

“Copyright growing pains” is one hell of a euphemism for the biggest IP theft in history

Funeral Invitation, 1688. Funeral invitations first appeared in the 17th century, and acted as an admission ticket to both the church and the funeral feast. Pallbearers were often assigned a number on the ticket to signify their position in carrying the coffin.

Well don't I feel stupid

With science falling under increasing attack, this medical historian is here to remind people of the power of #vaccines. THREAD🧵 Hard-hitting polio advert from 1958. In the first half of the 20th century, polio was the leading cause of death in children and young adults. 1/7

So @digivictorian.bsky.social encouraged me to do this

the quaint world of Victorian porn advertisements

We don’t all share the same internet. The personalised algorithm has siloed us into parallel worlds

I’m on TV tonight! Check out the first episode of Britain’s Railway Empire at 8pm on Channel 4. It’s a new, two part series about the history of the railways, starting with the Victorian Era. It’s not just a story about tech and engineering, but covers the social and cultural impact too.

It was such a joy this morning to see Lela Harris’s extraordinary portrait of Miss Lambe, Jane Austen’s only character explicitly of African heritage, from the last novel she worked on. She died at age 41 without being able to finish Miss Lambe’s story. 1/

Hello UK friends - please, please could you sign this petition against the job cuts at my place of work - 1 in 4 us will be out of a job by August next year if we don't stop the cuts. And once you've signed it, please share. We need your help! www.change.org/p/stop-mass-...

does anyone know of any research on the history of the 'family newspaper' - by which I mean a 'newspaper' produced usually by children, about daily goings-on in the household? think Gad's Hill Gazette, Hyde Park Gate News, etc...

Talk about The Wire, Sopranos, Game of Thrones all you want, but the greatest US television program ever made is Sesame Street. It's not even close. 50+ years of treating kids across class, ethnicity, religion not as mini-consumers...but as citizens with a stake in this world.

Of use to those working on 1852-1879, it includes a chronological index of open-access copies of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, a widely read (affordable) secular early women’s monthly miscellany. jmsw.github.io/edm-index/ Now updated with a searchable spreadsheet of contents by category!

Speaking of the Illustrated London News, a paper whose pages I never tire of turning, here's an account of its (mainly 19th-c.) history I put together some years back for the publisher Gale, which has made the essay free to access. It was fun to write. www.gale.com/intl/essays/... #C19th

IT'S ALIVE!!!!! I had the best time working with Annemarie to edit our fabulous contributions - huge thanks to our authors for sharing their research, and for being polite when I suggested revisions. Huge thanks also to VPR ed Kathy Malone for her patience and making the editorial process so smooth.

Job alert! We're advertising for a full-time, permanent Lecturer or Senior Lecturer in 20thC American History at Edge Hill. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNX206/l...

This is terrifying, and happening right now. My university is about to reduce the curriculum from 6 20-credit modules per year to 4 30-credit ones, one assessment per module. Explicitly designed to reduce subject richness in favour of skills (and save on teacher numbers). Students will hate it.

I'm on the TV! 'Jack the Ripper: Written in Blood' is a new docudrama about the journalists who reported on the killings and helped to mythologise the figure of the Ripper. I'm one of the talking-head historians. Part one premiers tonight at 9pm on Sky History & NOW TV. #WritteninBlood

Got weekend plans? Cancel them to read my chapter, 'Working-Class Writing in Victorian Britain' in the absolutely stellar Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature!

Matthew Stephens @c19thnewshound.bsky.social argues that short-lived newspapers, often overlooked as the expected casualties of a developing industry, were actually a significant proportion of the 19th century’s press. Read it in VPR 57.1-2: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl... @rs4vp.bsky.social

🚀📈 Making Victorian visual culture searchable: Introducing an open-access and AI-powered dataset of 72,000 illustrations from the Illustrated London News (1842-1890). (w. Bethany Warner, @pfyfe.bsky.social and @bcgl.bsky.social) openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/articles/10....

So pleased my article on geo-coding addresses of 121 million + people in British censuses 1851-1911 is now out with Historical Methods! #openaccess - map any census info (ages, occupations, birthplaces etc) by address - link census to other spatial datasets Get the code and data 👇

This is both an incredibly niche thing but I think it should be more of a thing. Caffè Nero subscribes to the British Newspaper Archive so it’s all free on their wifi. There. I said it.

Disco was discovered in 18th century Wales by Erthwynn Dann-Fyre

Hi everyone, can you help one of my students with her MA dissertation? Amy is exploring the motivations, influences & ambitions of those who practice history (from professionals to amateurs, paid to hobbyist). Fill in her survey to add your experience (& please share): forms.office.com/e/mFNv6tAqxn

Oxford University Press will be awarding as many as 10 ECRs the opportunity to publish their first book in fully open access as well as in hardback. Today the website was revised to make clear that independent/unaffiliated scholars are eligible. Deadline March 3. academic.oup.com/pages/early-...

‼️NEW EPISODE ALERT!🚨 You’re Dead To Me tackles the Arts & Crafts Movement, featuring the wonderful Cariad Lloyd & needlework expert Dr Isabella Rosner. It’s a very fun, big vibes one! Listen first on BBC Sounds! www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Just found out that as of today that History as a whole is being notified that we’re at risk of redundancy. This’ll be the second time I’ve had to reapply for my own job in under 5 years! Our sector is at breaking point.

Advertising quack medicines in early 20th century Edinburgh – you can get an idea of their wares by the signs saying ‘Men! Men!’, ‘Hygienic Appliances’ and ‘Private side door entrance’

For any scholar working on the 19th-c. press, a Curran Fellowship can be a big help. Everybody is eligible, and the application is blessedly straightforward. This year's deadline is next week: Wednesday, January 15. Recommendation letters due Jan 22. rs4vp.org/awards/curra... #19th-c

A true #Housegawp - I gasped out loud.

Newspaper-seller at Ludgate Circus in the 1880s, traffic clattering past her

Just an incredible opportunity from 1935

my students in the last decade have become teachers, barristers, lawyers, civil servants, midwives, ICU nurses, journalists, accountants, academics, advertising execs, museum curators, TV producers… because we give them broad skills. If I had to train them to do *a job* they’d all be historians.

Found this sweet New Year's resolution from virtuoso violinist Marie Hall on @digivictorian.bsky.social's tw*tter feed: "Never despair, no matter how black the future may appear to be." From Answers magazine, 1909

Something lovely for the weekend! Marvellous clay pots with octopus decoration made by artisans from Bronze Age Crete about 3,500 years ago! 🐙❤️ Heraklion Archaeological Museum. 📷 by me #Archaeology

So, it turns out that the New Year is a terrible time to launch a new series, because all the journalists and publicity people are off work... BUT WE'RE DOING IT ANYWAY! BBC You're Dead To Me, series 9, starts January 3rd. Shorter radio edits every saturday morning at 10am on BBC Radio 4

Every time you share a "The Conversation" post I want to remind you that they have a multi-million dollar annual budget and pay writers zero dollars, including adjuncts and grad students. We cannot rely on exploited labor to achieve a better public humanities. www.patreon.com/posts/better...

Friends don’t let friends write for the Conversation! (Not least because they will take your unpaid contribution and franchise it out to the Daily Mail.)

Today's #MastheadMonday features the Railway Bell (1844-1846), one of a number of short-lived newspapers launched at the height of the 'Railway Mania' of the mid-1840s. This was digitised by the British Library and is free to view on the BNA: www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/railw...

He's hiring a ship He's packing his cloak He's moving to England To follow some bloke Dracula is coming to town

On Monday we began a Starter Pack of societies and organisations (UK and international) for historians. Thanks to your recommendations and help, we've added another 40 societies and networks to the listing this week bsky.app/starter-pack... #Skystorians

This is what's so baffling about so many suggestions for AI in the humanities classroom: they mistake the product for the point. Writing outlines and essays is important not because you need to make outlines and essays but because that's how you learn to think with/through complex ideas.

Hey folks I’m currently pouring through @pfyfe.bsky.social's excellent book *yet again* preparing for our chat on Thursday—if you're interested in DH, Victorian studies, nineteenth-century media, periodicals, distant reading, AI, or anything in between you should join us!