Cathy‘s work guided by Brenda Child (Red Lake Ojibwe) & Jackie Fear-Segal is brilliant. If you do teach American history in UK classrooms consider joining TIHPS’ very collaborative community of practice.

#AGoldenWorld is out in exactly one month! Please consider pre-ordering for a friend or library. The book is the culmination of my decade-long obsession with researching traces of the Americas in Renaissance London: www.faber.co.uk/product/9780... #earlymodern #Tudors

My thesis is in. My time on the trail of ‘India’ goods - the products of China, Japan, India, and the Americas - at Restoration Ham House and the broader court is coming to an end. I don’t think my phone camera roll will be so full of gorgeous things again.

As I finish the final phases of a PhD based on a set of late Stuart interiors, I can’t help but feel that a childhood love of Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen’s designs on Changing Rooms may have had more of an effect on my life choices than I have previously believed.

If you like your historic interiors with a globally-focused twist, on April 27 I will be giving a lecture for the Society of Court Studies on the interiors of the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale at Ham House. It's in person in London, or online!

Heffers in Cambridge saw me coming putting this in the shop window.

Me in the run up to thesis hand in:

Listening to the 'In Our Time' on the Columbian Exchange. I feel like I'm so used to anti-wokeness attacks on Atlantic world history that I'm pleasantly shocked by the consistent references to the exchange as a 'Great [Indigenous] Dying' and the 'European invasion'.

Quick question for academics at U.K. universities. What provision does your institution have to allow lecturers at Grade 7 to take part in doctoral supervision? Can they be lead supervisors? Are they always supported by senior colleagues, for example?

Oxford and my adopted second home of Cambridge (South London forever) looked gorgeous in some much appreciated blue sky in these past few days.

Watch now on YouTube: Taoiseach of Ireland @micheal-martin.bsky.social announces Professor Alvin Jackson as first Childers Professor of Irish History @cam.ac.uk Speeches also from Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice and @lucydelap.bsky.social @trincolllibcam.bsky.social 🔗 youtu.be/rNynCzuh0CA?...

Rewatching Hook in my mid-thirties and realising that I am Hook. Dramatic, slightly flamboyant existential crises often in a Baroque environment.

This song hits me right in the tear ducts. I bet my MPhil supervisor's Caribbean in World History taught course (if it's still going) was lit this week.

A Jamaican food van arrived at my village/estate in Cambridge today. It turned out that almost everyone in line, including my partner and me, was an excited former South Londoner. My partner and I exclaimed, 'SMELLS LIKE HOME!' and hugged each other like losers as soon as we caught the smoke. Guy ..

Absolutely @ed by the Greenpeace Instagram this morning.

It really infuriates me to think of all the incredible, ethical, forward-thinking transatlantic projects that *could* have come out of the 1776 anniversary this year in another timeline.

Amsterdam, where the global/colonial connections are *everywhere* Tobacco jar, Antique Shop Kraak porcelain laid out with Dutch-made silverware, At Home in the C17th Exhibition Lacquer charger, Rijksmuseum Miniature apothecary, Rijksmuseum

Periodisation is the bane of my life. I was trained in global history so feel all the nuances surrounding whether there was an ‘early modern period’. My PhD thesis falls into the 1670s-90s so not quite Late Stuart, or mid. Am I Restoration? When does that end?! 😂

Christmas 2025 shall henceforth be remembered as thesis-mas. All thesis for this meeses. Feb full draft, April final hand in.

Y2K Marie Antoinette is real, and she can hurt you. The final boss of jeans and a nice top.

No hidden document, but a thrill to see in person bills for making of a suite of furniture to be sent as a diplomatic gift from Charles II to Moulay Ismail Ibn Sharif (r.1672-1727). Gerrit Jensen was a likely supplier of japanned furnishings to Ham House from 1672+ and features heavily in my thesis.

London-area friends: I’m looking forward to launching the UK edition of my book THE CROWN’S SILENCE at Waterstones @ Gower St on Jan 30th with Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy @bellribeiroaddy.bsky.social Please help spread the word! www.waterstones.com/events/the-c... www.waterstones.com/events/the-c...

Christmassy snaps from my visit to Ham House yesterday. I was on site (no burden!) to share my PhD work/tour my OU colleagues. A lovely, festive (kind of) break from the final stages of thesis writing.

I just wrote '11 December 1672' as a heading to my notes instead of '2025'.

Congratulations to Katie Donington, Abdul Mohamud, Robin Whitburn, Nicholas Draper and their contributors! Their #OpenAccess book Teaching Slavery published today. Read and download free at: bit.ly/48vnDdJ #Education #Colonialism #Slavery #Racism

The stationer's advert in front of the Duchess of Lauderdale's Domestic Book.

First draft of my final chapter? Sent to my supervisors. When I close my eyes, I see the words calico, Persian carpet, and lacquer/lacquer/Indian cabinet in secretary hand.

Do you know what sucks almost as much as baby loss? Spending nine months chasing various departments for confirmation of the extension of funding/deadline to which I am entitled.

I think if I could find a way to remain in this 1819 attic room forever, I could write the next Frankenstein.

Seventeenth-century Dukes 🤝 a conscientious student's GCSE/A-Level History answer book TURN OVER.

I saw today a woman offering ‘witch tours’ of Edinburgh. It’s nice to see a job that my undergraduate degree directly set me up for as I stare down the barrel of post-PhD unemployment 🤣.

The National Archives could never 😬

Very happy to be finishing my final (!!) chapter of my PhD this week, which includes the V&A's glorious Lady Clapham as illustrative material. Images: Lady Clapham, V&A The Duchess of Lauderdale, NGS

Exciting news! Next August I'll deliver a keynote lecture at the conference 'Carousels and Other Colonial Spectacles: Performing Race and Racialization at European Courts, ca. 1500-1700' at Copenhagen University, alongside Noémie Ndiaye. Call for papers is open now lnkd.in/e2ad7u7H (deadline 15/12)!

I don't want to say that my PhD is impacting me in odd ways, but I have bought myself a fruit bowl that I've gathered is genuine Delft this week.

Pip's six years in South London have not prepared her for the back garden fireworks arms race that is October to November in a well-to-do village on the Cambridgeshire/Essex border.

The world premiere of Native Bound Unbound: Archive of Indigenous Slavery will be streamed live on YouTube this weekend. Watch live: Day 1 (NHCC - Albuquerque) www.youtube.com/live/xiA5Mp_... Day 2 (MIAC - Santa Fe) www.youtube.com/live/5r-vWjG... Follow @natboundunbound for updates and links.

Happy Halloween! Here's a thread of some of my monstery essays, and a link to register for my next book talk, hosted by the Linda Hall Library: Thurs Dec 4th, 7-8pm CST (8-9pm EST) 1/ 💙📚 🧪 🗃 #ancient #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thC #HAMH events.lindahall.org/humansamonst...

Some people played Pokémon Go, I play collect the dodgy 1920s memorials to the Pilgrims/early American settlers. Image: Begijnhof, Amsterdam.

If children who are not related to you do not call you “Aunt” or “Uncle” then you have no charisma and no light in your eyes.

The government of Jamaica has set up a portal for contributing to official relief efforts. I will update this thread if anything analogous opens up for Haiti, Cuba, or the DR supportjamaica.gov.jm

The feminine urge to install a box bed. Images: Museum Ons‘ Lieve Heer Op Solder/Our Lord in the Attic

My partner also enjoyed the ADE stuff going on, became best mates with our local barista, and was adopted by a table next to us in a restaurant in De Pijp because he is 100x cooler than me.

Had the pleasure this past week of my partner indulging my seventeenth-century monomania on a birthday break. Photos: my first time seeing Petronella O’s doll’s house (which I’ve studied from afar as a deeply global object) in the flesh. Look at the ceramics, the spittoons, the japanned cabinet.

Witnessed a fellow visitor attempting to touch a seventeenth-century ebony cabinet at the Rijksmuseum yesterday. The room steward was swiiiiift with the politest telling off. Me?

Our hotel room in Amsterdam has bathrooms papered in documents from the former City Archives. We won Rembrandt’s marriage certificate. I am trying to be on a break from seventeenth century handwriting. 😅

Out of office on, Dutch art from tomorrow on.

How was Robert Knox, son of an EIC Captain and captive in Sri Lanka for nineteen years, immediately identified as an outsider aboard ship when it was inspected on his arrival in England in September 1680? His beard was long and old-fashioned. #earlymodern #skystorians

Ned Blackhawk - How Native Nations Shaped the Revolution The Founders were inspired—and threatened—by the independence and self-governance of nations like the Iroquois Confederacy. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

This includes close-up images of the embroidered textiles that once adorned Queen Catherine of Braganza's state bed.