‘This has always been an outward-facing city’. Amazing welcome from reps of #Glasgow City Council, to the beautiful Glasgow City Chambers, for the first evening reception of #BAAS2026! @officialbaas.bsky.social conference committee: wow - and thank you, for this and a great first day of papers!
En route to @officialbaas.bsky.social conference 2026 @glasgow.ac.uk! Looking forward to presenting my @leverhulme.ac.uk funded research on how the US repatriation of 19thC literary #manuscripts to Britain intersects with 20thC political histories #BAAS2026
Loved designing a seminar around the resources of the Roy Waters Theatre Collection @royalholloway.bsky.social - historic programmes and newspaper cuttings, including from the very first production of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ in 1895! #Wilde #archives
‼️ BAAS and the Journal of American Studies are pleased to announce that they will be recruiting for the following roles at JAS in Summer 2026, for start dates of 2 January 2027.
Learn more about the roles here:
Teaching ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ might actually be the best thing in the world. Loved students’ close-reading of Lady Bracknell’s interrogation of Jack
❤️
Please signal boost 🙏 Neurodivergent PhD students: What reasonable adjustments and accommodations do you have for your studies? My
PhD is in English Literature, I have ADHD (combined type), and I’m struggling. I would like to make changes, but I don’t know what might help.
Items in the ‘Extra/Ordinary Women’ exhib @ Charles #Dickens Museum work to make their female subjects vivid beyond his shadow. I found the audio reel especially effective - also Katey’s curatorial poem about her mother’s calling card case, and Mamey as Clara Benham in ‘The Frozen Deep’.
Loving these twentieth-century Nelson’s Classics Dickenses in the window of Save the Children Woodstock
Who is ‘really’ British? @rachelkbright.bsky.social's project @keeleuniversity.bsky.social is the first meta-analysis of the peoples, places, and processes of how legal Britons were identified, made, or denied across Britain and its empire. media.leverhulme.ac.uk/feature/rbri...
I could only bear to watch that one once (though I’m open to counter-arguments…)
Most of it is 1995 redux, but the roof-sitting is kind of Brideshead (albeit no naked sunbathing)
I’m sorry Lee. He did indeed look fluffy and magnificent.
Tally Ho on an 1830s stage coach @ Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum
Our call for papers closes on 13 Feb. Theme is Authenticity: When archives are used within other systems of governance and authority, what does this mean for authentic narratives of major events? Full info openingdoors-ara2026.eventsair.site/call-for-pap...
Great talk this eve by Bridget Bennett @raioxford.bsky.social on 'The Dissenting Atlantic: Archives and Unquiet Libraries, 1776-1865'. Discussing items incl samplers & handmade dolls that can make the archive speak even in the face of huge absences (appropriately, an audience member was knitting...)
😂
'just before twelve and had a hellish morning'... morning here lasting 3 minutes?
Nice to see this research, supported by my @leverhulme.ac.uk Early Career Research Fellowship, reach the most read spot in arts this week #AChristmasCarol #Dickens
That looks gorgeous!
It's such an interesting movie, but maybe because of the portrayal of Lee, I was finding it ropier the second time around. I was also less keen on the romcom beats (which apparently the author of the original story didn't like)
I recently re-watched this, and I thought James Spader was so great, but on a second watch I felt like Maggie Gyllenhaal didn't really understand/inhabit the character? She's fine with the confident/slinky bits, but the initial attempts to convey Lee's awkwardness felt like caricature to me.
#AChristmasCarol by #Dickens was first published #OTD in 1843. I wrote about my archival finding at the Houghton Library @harvard.edu which casts new light on the meanings Dickens may have seen in the story:
theconversation.com/did-charles-...
The 2026 Sandars Lectures on 'What will survive of us', by Joan Winterkorn MBE are now available to watch online ▶️https://loom.ly/5bkd50k
One of my highlights of 2025 was a two-week trip to the Brontë Parsonage Museum to research the role of American collecting in shaping the Brontë archive - kindly funded by a @officialbaas.bsky.social Research Assistance Award. Would definitely recommend applying for these!
Today seems like a good day to post a picture of this beautifully-bound edition of 'Pride and Prejudice' I spotted in
@blackwellrare.bsky.social a few months back. I wonder who it was reserved for - I imagine they are now enjoying it! #JaneAusten #JaneAusten250
Loved being on this great panel at #NAVSA2025!
Cast list for Great Expectations, a play commissioned by Dickens himself
Gathered in London tonight with John Drew and assorted Dickensians to do a private reading of a never-performed play of Great Expectations, commissioned by Dickens himself to thwart the would-be pirates who made full use of the lax copyright laws of the time. Geek heaven!
So interesting - I'd heard about this archive, held privately, and wondered which institution would acquire it. Congratulations @uniofcam.bsky.social!