Happy birthday, Jane!

Can't find your ballot? Get another. Replacements ballot requests end SUNDAY MIDNIGHT: yoursay.ucu.org.uk/s3/wearetheu...

Job alert! @ischoolui.bsky.social is hiring in 4 areas this year Early literacies: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... Information behavior/HCI/UX: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... Information, Culture & Society: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... Open IS: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Thanks for the repost @trendingworld.bsky.social The conference is online, and free! The Sigrid Nunez and Karen McCarthy Woolf talks will be hosted by OU writers @emmaclairesweeney.bsky.social and @janeyeh3.bsky.social #literature #freeonline

After an excellent first day of conference we're really looking forward to our guest authors on Friday: Karen McCarthy Woolf at 18:00 and Sigrid Nunez at 20:00. Tickets here: tinyurl.com/5793w2ch @littlebrown.bsky.social @viragopress.bsky.social @carcanet.bsky.social @sarahsavitt.bsky.social

We are delighted to host Sigrid Nunez at our Letters and Literature conference on the 7th of November. One week to go! Tickets here: digital-humanities.open.ac.uk/letters2025/... @sarahsavitt.bsky.social @hachetteuk.bsky.social @littlebrownbooks.bsky.social @viragopress.bsky.social #sigridnunez

And we are thrilled to host @karenmccarthywoolf.bsky.social on 7/Nov at the Letters and Literature conference. One week to go! Tickets here: digital-humanities.open.ac.uk/letters2025/... @carcanet.bsky.social @tseliotprize.bsky.social @bloodaxebooks.bsky.social @rsliterature.bsky.social 4 m

“How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter" (Haruki Murakami). Join the Open University for an international celebration of Letters and Literature, November 5-7. Full programme at digital-humanities.open.ac.uk/letters2025/... @carcanet.bsky.social @thepostalmuseum.bsky.social

Lovely to see a postcard of my Alma Mater Bologna

We’re into week two of the ballot, time to get back to basics. Why vote? Because your voice is the only way to change what’s happening in our sector: 📉 Falling pay ⚠️ Rising insecurity 💬 Broken national agreements Every vote counts. Vote YES. Post your ballot. #WeAreTheUniversity

We are delighted to be supporting the W&A Working-Class Writers' Prize 2025 with @writersandartists.bsky.social @ruppin.bsky.social, @societyofauthors.bsky.social and @openuniversity.bsky.social Submissions open on 1st November 2025. www.writersandartists.co.uk/about-wa-wor... PLEASE SHARE

Postcards continue to arrive from speakers all over the globe as we prepare for the upcoming international conference, Letters and Literature. Full details of the programme at digital-humanities.open.ac.uk/letters2025/... @modernistudies.bsky.social @mklitfest.bsky.social @ies-sas.bsky.social

Sigrid Nunez, one of the USA’s most esteemed authors, talks to Open University novelist Emma Claire Sweeney about the letters of Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. mklitfest.org/sigridnunez #openuniversity #creativewriting #lettersandliterature #sigridnunez

The first of a series of postcards for our free online conference: Letters and Literature 1500-2025, 5-7 November 2025. Full programme: digital-humanities.open.ac.uk/letters2025/... Every day we'll share a postcard sent to us by one of our guest speakers. Watch out for tomorrow’s!

How do different ways of reading affect our experience of literature? In collaboration with the BBC, Open University lecturer @shaftowheed.bsky.social has developed a short quiz to show how different formats affect our reading experience. You can find the quiz here: www.instagram.com/ouconnect/re...

And to his further appearance on BBC Radio 4 this evening!

Looking forward to listening to my colleague Ed’s award-nominated story this afternoon!

The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music is now in paperback! So happy that this is now a very affordable book. A big shoutout to all the brilliant contributors!

Welcome to Bluesky to my colleagues at @ouliterature.bsky.social !

Excited to see the preparations for our upcoming Conference: ‘Letters and Literature 1500-2025: histories, forms, communities’ Online only from the 5th to 7th of November 2025. More details soon!

A fascinating article in @theconversation.com on Jane Austin heroines co-written by OU English and Creative Writing lecturer Dr Emma Sweeney. Check it out: theconversation.com/who-was-jane...

VCs don’t run universities. We do. After another real terms pay cut, UCU is launching a UK-wide strike ballot. Ballot opens October. Vote YES. #WeAreTheUniversity

Congratulations to all the winners and judges!

Full announcement of the 2025 ELO Awards eliterature.org/2025/07/2025... #elo25

¡MAÑANA YA! Looking forward to chairing Linda Berube's and @rhymesontheroad.bsky.social's session on Digital Comics and user-centred approaches #HCID2025

ANYONE who thinks ANY group should accept fewer human rights than everyone else is totally unfit to serve as an EHRC commissioner.

Open Access is changing research! Traditionally, institutions paid to read journals, excluding anyone who could not afford it. But now, anything published #OpenAccess can be freely read by anyone. Much of the OU's #research is Open Access: read it on ORO 👉 oro.open.ac.uk

5 yr Postdoc at Edinburgh - how and why digital participation is transforming experience of warfare. Data Viz, NLP, text & data mining, principally related to Russian war against Ukraine.

Be amazing if £1.5m could be invested in the UK comics scene, wouldn’t it? Someone’d need to build a fully-costed, well-reasoned argument to DCMS for such a thing first, I guess… WELL, NOW. Come see what your friends at CCIC have done! www.thecomicsculturalimpactcollective.org/CCIC%20DCMS%...

You can now access a beta version of the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). A bibliography of about 500,000 records, the ESTC aims to record every distinct letterpress item produced before 1801 in the English-speaking world. Explore the catalogue: datb.cerl.org/estc/

Comics & AI: Critical Prompts, a one-day conference at City St George’s, 4 Sept 2025 ernestopriego.com/2025/05/15/e... -deadline for abstracts: 10 July. #ComicsStudies

The date quickly approaches! Our speakers for #HCID2025 so far are: hcidopenday.co.uk/speakers/

How to continue to do the right thing for your trans colleagues and customers, from the brilliant folks at Gendered Intelligence. ow.ly/3g6350VZZqa

New article published today! The Cartoon Mode Provides a Stage: Understanding Comics through Performance doi.org/10.16995/cg.... by Maggie Gray [Bsky may censor the image- it's safe!] thanks to @openlibhums.bsky.social @janewayolh.bsky.social @siliconchips.bsky.social #OpenAccess #ComicsStudies

Our map of cold spots in provision of humanities and social sciences courses and student numbers across the UK has been updated with the data for the 2023/24 academic year. Explore for yourself here: buff.ly/2x7yE5K

We're hiring a postdoc (4 years) for the AI STORIES project and are looking for someone who is interested in using computational and qualitative methods to explore generative AI and literature. www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

The University of Glasgow & the British Library have announced a fully funded PhD Studentship on "Fanfiction and Online Fan Communities: Collecting Practice and Inclusion in a National Collection" www.gla.ac.uk/scholarships...

Historian of crime, death and women here. The law these women are being persecuted is the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. It is 164 years old. It was introduced when women had no pregnancy tests, no ultrasound scans.

You are invited to a one-day multidisciplinary conference on the future of comics, technology, and creativity. Abstracts (200 words) + bios (100 words) due: 10 July 2025. Don’t miss this opportunity to rethink comics and AI with a multidisciplinary community! #CFP: comicsandai.org #ComicsStudies

The immigration white paper won’t fix our public services it will break them. In HE, cuts to graduate visas & new levies will destabilise a sector already on the edge. This isn’t just bad policy. It’s an economic own goal. #ReformLight theconversation.com/universities...

Join us in September for this exciting conference on Comics and AI

After the damning immigration white paper yesterday, @uea-ucu.bsky.social staff are back on the picket lines today. Cuts, casualisation and hostility towards international students. Enough is enough. Solidarity to all those on the picket line today and this week.

Reminder :)

Letting anti-immigration agendas shape UK policy has made the UK poorer; limited the rights and opportunities of British people; and weakened the UK internationally. This cycle will continue until the point at which Govt grows up and acknowledges that immigrants are not actually the problem.

“But we don’t mean you”, some then always say. So who do you mean? The Black nurse who is actually British, but was picked out anyway as he’s Black? The refugee from Afghanistan? The Albanian doctor? Who is it? We have been at this point so many times before.

You are a "citizen of nowhere", they said. A "queue-jumper", they said. Now I am a "squalid chapter", they say. A risk as I might make this an "island of strangers", they say. I am "pulling the country apart", they say.

Hugely offensive indeed.🙋‍♀️

From Aberystwyth to Spain and every corner of the UK, thousands united to #ProtectEducationNow. Fair pay, secure jobs, and a future for education. Thank you to all UCU members, allies and supporters who marched with us. Together we are stronger, #UCURally #JoinAUnion