My upcoming book is absolutely packed to the brim with em dashes—more em dashes than any well-adjusted human being could possibly need or want—and if any of you tries to claim they are the result of some soulless LLM rather than my own unhinged compulsion I will fight you.

Just a quick heads-up that Our Friends in the North is currently showing on BBC iPlayer - a stunning piece of social and political history: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

The noise I made on reading the final line was frankly Lovecraftian.

History matters.

On advance access: "Tibetan Gift-Giving, British Indifference, and the Erasure of Provenance in Colonial India" by @tibetcurator.bsky.social (@uomsalc.bsky.social) #OpenAccess doi.org/10.1093/past...

Rebecca's lecture was a fascinating study of the relationship of warfare and the circulation of wealth and goods in the early modern world. Video and audio recordings will be available soon. Thanks again to Rebecca for a brilliant Prothero Lecture and to all who attended in person and online 2/2

this is why i love being part of @royalhistsoc.org the friendship + camaraderie at times like these is a gift. i wldn't know any of these incredible women from across the UK if it wasn't for the RHS. if you aren't a member, why not? JOIN. yr support allows us to keep advocating for the discipline 🗃️

I say this very gently, but no one should think they are 'safe' if they work in UK HE today. There might be 10-15 people working at a university who are safe by dint of the fact their job involves seeing redundancies through. Everyone else must understand the fundamentals here, and then organise.

Sometimes, all you need is a chippy, a picnic bench, pilfered wine, and proper fabulous lassies. Excellent, excellent night. @emilyrobinson.bsky.social @emiliekmmurphy.bsky.social @cathfeely.bsky.social @katebradleyhistory.bsky.social @helenjuliapaul.bsky.social

And yet we get told that arts and Humanities don't matter in "the real world" or have no capacity of real income generation

Any gathering of historians that ends in someone keeping their chip shop open in order to serve our every whim is a good gathering of historians. Particular shout out for finally meeting @hagenilda.bsky.social after all these years.

Interesting messaging on the banners of UCL. They make buildings more sustainable, art more accessible, education more inspirational, diseases more detectable AI more predictable. And at the bottom of every banner: 'Here, history happens'. Everything else is made, history just happens. Huh.

A notebook on Spanish snails is this week’s #NewAccession. What’s the connection with Derbyshire? Well that would be the book's owner, snail expert Matilda Sophia Lovell, who lived at Calke Abbey for over 30 years, being sister-in-law to Sir John Harpur-Crewe, 9th Baronet. #snails

You know you're in Bloomsbury when you're stuck behind a tourist in Pret arguing about being able to pay for an empty cup.

📣 We're looking for new members to join our International Advisory Board! 📣 🌍 We're particularly interested in recruiting board members with expertise in the following areas: urban history of Africa (any region); South Asia; China; Latin America & the Caribbean; Central and Eastern Europe

I dunno, maybe if the rest of the world also adopted historians' compulsive citational practices, and footnoted everything, we'd have a better information environment

It feels like this is the inevitable culmination of "hidden histories" and "untold stories" combined with "we can't footnote your work, that would be awkward for the reader." But at its core, it's just the result of an utter lack of respect for the labor and expertise of an entire field.

Also working-class autodidacts didn't just read alone - they read in groups, set up libraries and reading rooms, and battled for Mechanics' Institutes (many long ago merged into unis) to teach music, history, and politics. They built the public adult education infrastructure that's being destroyed

The sub-head is seriously questionable: “how changing student preferences are fundamentally reshaping universities” buys into the university’s narrative that this is driven by falling recruitment leading to deficits. How can that be, when Exeter has been eating other people’s lunch for years?

Almost any aspect of Britain's twentieth-century history. Hmmmm ...

Fly the angel sleeves of your hostess dress at half mast, dim the standard lamps of all suburbia and please be seated at the telephone table to make the gossipiest call you can from a landline in memoriam💙

If he'd mentioned I'd got married there, it would have been perfect.

Whatever you think of Burnham, that was a good speech.

I see we’ve reached this stage in Shabana Mahmood’s career.

For Humanities & some social sciences, problem is especially acute, not because this research is especially costly (it's esp. cheap) but because it's often invisible AS research. (E.g. Malcolm Press on 'hobbyist research'). Making SHAPE research, as process & product & impact, visible is vital. 3/3

Being at Chalke History Festival reminds me yet again how interconnected university-based history and other forms of history-making are. The thing we do in one place explicitly supports the thing we do in another. University cuts, closures and job losses harm the entire history eco-system.

Some precious and fragile ideas about what an education can be, what a university can be, will have been lost as all university managers will remember is how to achieve cost savings and raise 'productivity'. (2/2)

It's raining! I'm so happy!

‼️The CEU is set to become a two-campus university again, HUN media reports. While Vienna will remain its main campus, degree-granting programs are expected to return to Budapest once the necessary approvals are completed. A step toward restoring the university's academic presence in Hungary! 2/1

If I could say one sentence to cats and make them understand it, it would probably be "If you are going to puke, please do it on a hard surface."

The streaming of Clarkson's Farm my husband is watching keeps defaulting to the dubbed French version. It's kind of perfect.

From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead; That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead In summer luxury,—he has never done With his delights; for when tired out with fun He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. ~John Keats www.derby.ac.uk/events/lates...

📣 Call for Applications 📣 History Workshop is seeking to appoint one Editorial Fellow in 2026, with specialism in pre-1800 CE history from any part of the globe. This is a part-time, paid role. Application deadline: 7 August 2026. Please share widely!

"The variety of historical evidence is nearly infinite. Everything that man says or writes ... can and ought to teach us about him. It is curious to note how many people, unacquainted with our work, underestimate the true extent of its possibilities." 'The Historian's Craft' (1949, trans 1954).

I think I might have just been a victim of knock-a-door-run and it's made me feel almost nostalgic. Those pesky kids.

One of the lessons of the last two years is that Labour urgently needs to stop being afraid of its own shadow. Burnham should appoint whoever he thinks would be the best Chancellor and throw his authority behind them. The Daily Mail will try to kill them anyway. So just govern.

Great news 🥳. Looking forward to wider group of women involved in #Irishrevolution being included in the 'list' once published. Hope our grandmother Maírín Beaumont is there & many more of her #CumannnamBan comrades. Read about her here: theconversation.com/how-a-photog... @whaireland.bsky.social

Northumbria's announcement (30 people to go by end of July, 10 of whom from Humanities) is maybe less egregious than Exeter's, but the pattern is the same: Humanities are disproportionately targeted for reasons that do not align with a rational look at the situation (student staff ratios) 3/?

📣 People are understandably up in the arms about this (it is horrible). But just want to wave a hand out there 👋 as we're going through the same thing in Humanities at Northumbria (1 out of 5 staff need to go by end of July). 1/?

The cat is genuinely sulking with me because I won't let her bake in the conservatory. Sorry for wanting to keep you alive.

okay and here is my ‘sounds like a shitpost but it’s genuine’ UK heatwave tip: if there is a Saxon or Norman church near you, and it’s open, go sit in it. not gothic, they have too many windows, get you some thick stone walls with some high up tiny windows. they stay cold. and you can just sit there

Email from the VC at Herts announcing the need to save £20m over the next year. Includes this line: 'Over recent years, the University has taken steps to reduce non-essential spending and improve efficiency'. That's interesting. Managers spent £14k on attending the THE awards dinner this year.

We regret that our event on Extreme Heat: Improving governance and strengthening action around the world has been cancelled due to the red extreme heat warning issued by the UK Met Office. Our apologies to everyone who was planning to attend the event.

Along with almost all of my colleagues in history, this afternoon I got an email telling me that I am at risk of redundancy. It looks like the University of Exeter sent this email to the vast majority of people in Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty. Bit hard to breath right now.

The nearest analogy - which no one is drawing - would be the Midlothian Campaign in 1880. Gladstone had retired in 1875 and his party had chosen new leaders. But in 1880 he roared back, contesting the Tory seat of Midlothian. When he won, the new leaders resigned & he returned to the premiership.

We warmly welcome applications to join the Fellowship of the Society. Next closing dates: 27 July and 5 October. Fellowship is open to those who have made a scholarly research contribution to #history in all sectors (within & beyond higher education) in the UK/worldwide bit.ly/4iOu51g #Skystorians

With all the Starmer news today, you could be forgiven for missing this story. Yet another health trust letting women down when it comes to maternity care. www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

In the end, there were just a lot more human rights abuses than I was expecting from the human rights lawyer.

UK historians! Please could you help with this survey about AI use? Open to all doing history professionally (independent, uni-based, etc); it's the work of a lovely friend (& brilliant former colleague at @uophistory.bsky.social), @alexandraortolja.bsky.social: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

DO NOT PUBLISH UNTIL NEWS IS CONFIRMED A look back at the PM's political career