send me all your most unsayable opinions about the environmental humanities

We have published a new Policy Paper by @jmoss88.bsky.social & @emilyrobinson.bsky.social. They argue that Mass Observation @massobsarchive.bsky.social should be revived with state funding to help us understand the reasons behind contemporary voter apathy. historyandpolicy.org/policy-paper...

My latest @theguardian.com: "Fifa banned Russia from international football. Now it must do the same for Israel." As Israel inflicts untold misery on Palestinians, it is time for soccer’s governing bodies to stand by the principles they claim to uphold www.theguardian.com/football/202...

Me and Katja celebrated joint energy books over fika in Uppsala. She knew peat was important before the big peat-wave took place. A must read!

📣 It's publication day! 🔥Burning Swamps🔥 is out with @universitypress.cambridge.org ! My book tells the forgotten history of peat in the context of Russia’s industrialization & electrification and points to the lingering presence of past extraction 1/5 #envhist #energysky

Electric Wind is here! Thank you for the surprise post @manchesterup.bsky.social ! Available for pre-order and in all good bookshops from 14 October 🙂

Please spread this far and wide! I’m on the convening team of this exciting new IHR seminar series and we are looking forward to hearing about all the cutting-edge research being done by ECRs across the country!

We’re delighted to publish a new Policy Paper today by Jonathan Moss & @emilyrobinson.bsky.social. They suggest that Mass Observation @massobsarchive.bsky.social - founded in the 1930s - can help us understand the reasons behind contemporary voter apathy. historyandpolicy.org/policy-paper...

This is a great piece (and if you are staff or a student at a British university, you might find you can log in to the FT through shibboleth etc…)

British media pumps out daily propaganda pieces for Farage, fails to offer *any scrutiny* and basically legitimises rampant racism, then puts on its ‘innocent face’ and clutches its pearls at the rise of the far right… What a grim betrayal of our democracy. www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/how...

I’ll put my university ranking in my email signature when it gives all staff an above inflation pay rise! Until that day, I’ll not waste the carbon, ta.

do you work in a university/faculty/school in the UK that abolished “departments”? willing to share experiences (by DM if preferred)? RTs also appreciated

Concerned by this #UKHE -wide drive. It clearly is a way of removing representation from governance structures (a Department has a voice, committees, & governance structure, a 'subject area' does not), however much consultants/HR deny it is. Would be good to know how people protect representation.

The title! The image! No notes.

VACANCY: we invite applications for a new job at the Society: Events and Academic Engagement Officer (0.6 FTE) bit.ly/3V8q5PC The post-holder will join our professional Office to help us support history and historians. £36,433 pro rata. Closing date: Sunday 5 October #Skystorians

I also think the assumption was “You need to be ridiculously lucky to get an open ended job, but only once”. And then the wave of redundancies began, and I realised you also only need to be unlucky once.

“Cataclysmically bad” This new series of ECR blog posts on the French History Network makes for grim reading, perhaps grimmer even than some in UK #FrenchHistory might have realised. 1st post, anon ECRs in French History on what it’s like right now out there: frenchhistorysociety.co.uk/6691/ 🗃️

I spent last night writing about car parks as part of the PR for an exhibition on brutalist buildings in Bristol that's happening in October. We do have some interesting ones. This one, on Rupert Street, is from 1960 and was designed by Swiss architect Rudolph Jelinek-Karl.

Very niche question that I think is unlikely to get a positive response but does anybody have access to William Henry Tripp's 1938 book '"There Goes Flukes" The Story of New Bedford's Last Whaler' and who could scan or send images of the pages around 33-35 (I think)?

They make the laws to chain us well

Shon Faye getting us to face the bleak reality of trans rights and trans life in Britain today.

I'm looking to organize a panel for next year's French Colonial Historical Society conference (July 25-27 in Maynooth, Ireland) on the aftermaths of colonial infrastructure/development projects. If you're working on similar topics in French colonial history, let's chat! #history #envhist

"The university will stop sharing the data required to be included in the ranking as of 2026. As a result, Sorbonne University will no longer feature in future rankings produced by THE, which include the World University Rankings, the Rankings by Subject or the Impact Rankings." Excellent!

I'm teaching on this (but don't let that put you off, etc)

This whole 🧵. A crowdsourced mini course in environmental history. What sticks in my mind is the 'Switch Off the Lights' campaign and the appearance of reminder notices in every public, commercial and industrial workplace.

1 week left to submit an abstract for our symposium on Pollution in the Archive!

The thing about an ebike is i bought one and now i am biking like 30 miles a week instead of zero miles a week on the regular bike i love but don't think about using every day.

‘These are not deals that lead to the British people owning industry, which Miliband claimed in 2023 was one of Labour’s objectives. They are subsidies and incentives, large sums of public money accruing no equity.’ @ewangibbs.bsky.social on an oil refinery closure: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

"Hobbyist" is a truly breathtaking choice of phrase. It encapsulates a profound sense of contempt for the labour of academics in the UK, who already have to navigate an underfunded system dominated by precarity and overwork. "Knows the price of everything but the value of nothing" springs to mind

Exciting to hear that QMUL will then again be a very humanities university, as our humanities departments are the ones scoring high in REF, well above our science departments... [Sarcastic. This kind of language is coverage for cuts and misunderstands the cumulative role of small-scale research.]

We want robust, enormous research that is SUCH good research, you already know how important and right and insightful it is before you even start it. We want research so predeterminedly world-changing that there is hardly any point actually doing the research at all.

Scrapping People, Culture, and Environment from the REF makes *total sense* in a sector intent on literally firing swathes of academics and professional services staff thus ruining research culture and trashing the higher education environment!

ASEH Applications for Prizes, Fellowships, and Grants are now open! Deadline to submit is November 20, 2025. Please visit the ASEH website to learn more and apply: https:/aseh.org/Awards-&-Funding

Why is it always a children's book? When do we get a celebrity who decides to edit a Festschrift or prepare an annotated edition of a primary source text?

We're starting day 4 of the strike with Jack the cat's full support. He also says that this is a manufactured crisis because there is no deficit at the University of Edinburgh. Clever cat.

Someone is trying to set up an "Amazon of raw materials" if you need to order any manganese ore or anthracite Coal. Minumum purchase is 5000 tonnes though and you pay extra for shipping: hibarri.com/listing/mang...

This (once) astonishing story signals the extent to which the far right fascist culture of organised violence has been fostered, emboldened and extended by MAGA politics. Disgusting and frightening. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It's 2040 and the sector has cannibalised. There are now 4 universities remaining in the UK: Oxford, Cambridge, the Russell University, and the Great British University.

Quite a big deal this - there will be a few VCs and governing bodies across UK reading the fine print… @wonkhe.bsky.social wonkhe.com/blogs/the-fi...

It is twenty years today since my first book Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-57 was published by @uchicagopress.bsky.social and I am feeling contemplative. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

The Green Party has hit 70k members! We've got more MPs, more councillors, and now more members than EVER before The country is crying out for a positive alternative – and you can help us build it There's never been a better time to join our movement: join.greenparty.org.uk

Rightfully, the stupidity and offensiveness of using the legacy of the death of 144 people in the Aberfan disaster in South Wales to block a solar farm in Oxfordshire has been widely condemned. It’s also deeply ironic to refer to the legacy of coal in blocking replacing fossil fuels with renewables.

It really would be easy, too, because most of them do eff all of any of this.

A new Banksy artwork at the Royal Courts of Justice has been quickly covered up by authorities. The piece showed a judge attacking a protester with a gavel – and appeared just two days after almost 900 Palestine activists were arrested in London

I'm at KTH in Stockholm this week. On Thursday I'll be giving a book talk for @anthropocenekth.bsky.social on what energy history, and wind energy specifically, have to offer understandings of the Anthropocene and where we might go from here. More info here: www.kth.se/anthropocene...

Here’s the page you need if you want to join the class action: www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com And the Authors Guild statement on who may be eligible for a part of the settlement: authorsguild.org/news/what-au...

On the same day in the Telegraph:

What have been the best/most effective/meaningful environmental changes in 20thC Britain, in your view? I'm writing a new unit & have lots of disasters, decline, and conflicts; but I don't think it's been all bad. Some egs. of positive changes - intro of National Parks; rise of green politics...