I have an ongoing, intrusive thought that I will be burgled at night and lose three years of primary research and archival pictures. Annoyed I haven't called this folder PhD-Panicking! at the Disco.

One privilege of my PhD has been slipping into Ham House when the shutters are drawn and the rooms are quiet. In the half-light, for a moment, the seventeenth century doesn’t seem so far away and passing a jib door gets a little spooky.

After three years researching the influence of East Asia on seventeenth-century British culture my targeted ads are serving me modern Chinoiserie/japanning. OKA is an interior design company heavily inspired by historic interiors. NGL, I do like the side table.

NEW PROGRAMME! What an exciting one it is! We're looking forward to thinking with @eicathomefinn.bsky.social, Sari Nauman, @rogerleejesus.bsky.social & @araujohistorian.bsky.social Mondays, 17:30 @ihr.bsky.social & zoom. All very welcome! www.history.ac.uk/news-events/... #EarlyModern #SkyStorians

Teaching History is now up on JSTOR! I didn't know, but I love that it now makes me appear to be a far more accomplished scholar than I am 😭 (yet to publish from my PhD work).

PEM is a must-visit if you're ever in Boston/Salem. The trials gallery? The American gallery that centres Indigenous voices and art? One of the world's best Asian export art collections? Incroyable.

Bugs in salons?! Recent University of York graduate Mumia Douse-Bah's blog explores the colonial context of bugs and recounts a flea on a salon attendee's breast that spurred a 'poetic frenzy' 🐛🐜 @uoyenglishrl.bsky.social @laurenworking.bsky.social #StudentSalon blogs.york.ac.uk/student-salo...

I'm very pleased to announce that the call for proposed Special Issues of the Historical Journal is now live, with a deadline of 12th December. Please do spread widely among your networks — @saracaputo.bsky.social and I look forward to reading your submissions! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The deeper I’ve gotten into my PhD, the more I’ve fallen for export art. Plate Chinese Qianlong period, c.1745-60 with a phoenix above a grand English building - likely Burghley House. Fitzwilliam Collection, Cambridge

Register here! www.eventbrite.com/e/the-sweet-...

A project that I would have dreamed of taking part in as an undergrad 👇

Relaxing for a few hours each evening with some gold-work embroidery. At the current rate, I expect to complete this by winter 2026.

Grouper, drawn by John White, 1585-93 (British Museum)

"Paid Mrs. Havercampe a bill for things for the Pages and the boy Jack" I don't know who Jack is, and it eats at me. [Account Book of the Duchess of Lauderdale]

She‘s only gone and tucked herself in, an angel in fuzzy form.

In a world on fire I’ve found a single win (a solution to my old girl hogging my desk).

Wampum beads excavated this summer season at Ferryland, a very early 17thC settlement under an hour drive along coast west of St John’s. Amazing site for preservation of stone structures and evidence of wide Atlantic trade networks. #EarlyModern #Archaeology

The cemetery aesthetics, though. Top tier.

As someone who spent the final year of her undergraduate degree up to the gills in the writings of the Massachusetts Puritans, please no.

We are looking for researchers from across the UK to deliver innovative public engagement projects working in partnership with a gallery, archive, library or museum (GLAM organisation). Up to £8,000. Deadline 15 October.

Current monomania, men (playing father?) as the guardian of the teapot in seventeenth-century paintings. Both Roelef Koets c.1680, Netherlands Institute for Art History

Me to the latest draft of my thesis:

Lil Sebastian didn’t have to worry about the global march of fascism, because he was a little horse.

Read for filth by a fortune cookie in an acute[r than normal] period of imposter syndrome.

If you want to see my PhD subject at its finest, the property's vast array of cabinets - Dutch Atlantic world ivory and ebony, Japanese nanban lacquer, hybrids of Chinese kuan cai and European japanning - will be opened for a rare yearly glimpse into their interiors in October 👇

📢 An Invitation: Black History at the Vassall Estate Virtual Presentation Thurs, Sept 25, 6–7pm ET. Register here: harvard.zoom.us/meeting/regi... ft @caitlindeangelis.bsky.social, me, and a village of researchers & descendant community members who contributed to our forthcoming 200+ page report!

File this under the write-up phase is going well.

I spent a good half hour last night growing increasingly convinced that I had hallucinated this c.1680 painting of a husband serving tea, which is crucial to my latest chapter. Roelof Koets II (c.1650-1725), Family Taking Tea about 1680, private collection.

I have so many thoughts on Fennel's 'Wuthering Heights' in terms of class, race, and my teenage love of Heathcliff (as a victim of class and race who then commits terrible acts), as well as the state of culture in 2025, that I'm struggling to know what to do with them. Fitting ...

#OTD 1620 the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth. Although no MPs were present on the voyage to New England, the Atlantic crossing would be contemplated and taken by some famous parliamentary figures, as Dr Stephen Roberts explains: 👇 thehistoryofparliament.wordpress.com/2020/08/11/t...

Three years ago, in Edinburgh, I was diligently going through Sir William Bruce's letters for correspondence with the Lauderdales. Now, I am trying to gather enough friends to buy a part of their home Brunstane. £600,000 for a seven-bedroom property, commutable to Edinburgh. 😂

Lovely to be back in London for the launch of @drmirandakaufmann.bsky.social ’Heiresses’ which I took zero photos of but thoroughly enjoyed. Looking forward to getting stuck into the book after my next writing deadline.

I've updated #EarlyModern Resources earlymodernweb.org/resources/ Quite a few new links but also a big overhaul of the site to be more usable + a visual refresh. (If you can't see a change, you may need to clear your browser cache and refresh hard. 😬)

This skeet inspired by a barista this morning who caught my full name from a loyalty app and called me 'the CEO'.

I want to set up a support group for any fellow ‘Apps’ born before the age of iPhones. My full name sounds like a section of the Ireland.com website (‘Kerry Apps’) and I have to explain on the phone that it is a surname, not a business name, and I’m not in tech. 😅

Fascinating article by Nuala Zahedieh about the centrality of canoes in early colonial exploitation 🗃️https://academic.oup.com/past/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pastj/gtaf021/8231030

I'm grappling with the historiography of the gendering of 'things Chinese' and the country house in a British context. I feel like this chapter should be called 'How do you solve a problem like the Duchess of Lauderdale?'.

Just me & my favourite piece in the Fitz. A copper-alloy sixteenth-century German statuette. With her skinny frame and sinking skin, she is emblematic of early modern ideas of female aging - drying & sagging. She reminds me of Dürer's witches. Can't wait for my cantankerous hag era.

One more week to get your proposals in for what will be a very exciting day! Share your research, feedback a chapter, pitch your new archival finds at the WomCom Workshop.

I've got that back-to-school feeling... ... in that I have a massive cold right now.

IT’S HERE!!!!!! My new book, *Sweet Taste of Empire* spotted in the wild!

The final part. I can’t bear to think of the real life, ordinary ruptures of tech advances (think already of service jobs lost to screens). A precarious childhood in the wake of deindustrialisation/loss of manufacture in a UK context has made me an adult *Luddite*. Boff AI.

🔍 Did you know that we have a searchable dataset that draws on records of Londoners of African, Caribbean, Asian and Indigenous heritage in our parish registers from 1561-1840? The project started in 2000 and, thanks to our staff and volunteers, now has records of 2600 Londoners! #SwitchingTheLens

I regularly cried coming out of the National Archives looking at ‘slavery before slavery’ (what was happening before TAST in the English Atlantic during my MPhil).

Speaking from the UK, my 2023 sojourn through US museums was incredibly refreshing. Light years ahead of us here with community engagement, multiple voices & inclusive language - Indigenous and modern place names, enslaved/enslavement. Clear research and work.

Space, Mobility & Subjecthood in Early Modern History 29 Oct 5:30pm at UCL This roundtable will be of interest to scholars working on the histories of imperial formations, subaltern lives, and intellectual histories from the margins of empires in the early modern period www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of...

What if it’s not the long eighteenth century but the long seventeenth lads?

As always, a fabulous time to be completing a PhD on a seventeenth-century couple, East India goods, and touching on the India women of Restoration London👇

Bare minimum for holding a conversation, according to the Duke of Lauderdale (1616-1682): a ton of Virginia tobacco to smoke and a smattering of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Images: Boors Drinking and Smoking, Ham House collection, NT 1139903 Duke of Lauderdale, Ham House collection, NT 1139952

It's mad how many times in my PhD I've googled 'Ham House Teapot'. You'd think I'd have memorised it's collection number by now. For reference - this bad boy. From Zhangzhou, beautified with European mounts, and referred to in my inventories as an 'Indian furnace for tee'.