Our next online seminar is all about amusement parks and funfairs - we'll be looking at their origins, surviving heritage and the current challenges they face.
Book your *free* place here:
seasideheritage.org.uk/events/upcom...
Have you signed up for our June Symposium about Valuing Seaside Heritage? We're thrilled to be partnering again with @hbap1924.bsky.social and also have support from @heritagenetwork.bsky.social this year. Full details here: hbap.org.uk/valuing-seas...
My next online talk celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Festival of Britain. I'll be looking at how the #seaside was represented at the South Bank and how design there, in its turn, influenced the look of resorts in the 1950s and 60s
Book your ticket at www.ticketsource.com/kathryn-ferry
EVENT: Join us for an online talk with Eric Parry Architects on 5 May at 6pm.
'Faith, Creativity and Crafting' explores the renewal of St John’s Waterloo — how thoughtful design can revitalise a historic church while strengthening its connection to the community.
🔗
British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants. Deadline: 3 June 2026 Independent Scholars Deadline: 27 May 2026
The British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants is now open for applications, supported by DSIT, @leverhulme.ac.uk and @wellcometrust.bsky.social. Apply now: https://bit.ly/4t0MDRl
20 years on the @theguardian.com's @markffisher.bsky.social spoke with Black Watch creators about the enduring legacy of one of the most-celebrated productions in Scottish theatre history. With Vicky Featherstone, Gregory Burke, John Tiffany, Brian Ferguson, Emun Elliott and Laura Hopkins.
Valuing Seaside Heritage Symposium
Hosted in partnership with @seasidenetwork.bsky.social, @hbap1924.bsky.social, and @heritagenetwork.bsky.social.
@seasideferry.bsky.social opens the day with 'What is Seaside Heritage?'.
Register: hbap.org.uk/valuing-seas...
CONGRATULATIONS 🎉
I’m thrilled to join the Carena Institute @bbkhistorical.bsky.social team, which will develop my teaching, build on my research, and also means @drclaireharris.bsky.social and I get to work with @lesleymcf.bsky.social @jenbaird.bsky.social and Esther Breithoff! ✨💚
COVENT GARDEN is DONE. Will be PUBLISHED by YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS in SPRING 2027, if everything lines up. Blow me, that was some work. 140,000 words (may well not be allowed to leave it that long tbh). If you want 400 years of London social history, this will probably tickle your fancy.
Book display
Out now from @bloomsburyacademic.bsky.social
Professor Kate McLoughlin has written in @uk.theconversation.com about #silence, and how noticing silences in literature can make us better readers.
"We come to recognise that some things are better left unsaid – indeed, that some things can’t be said."
#booksky #reading #literature
Punk masks, Walkmans and Choppers: Museum of Youth Culture to open in London.
Opening in May, Camden museum has 100,000-item archive telling story of British youth subcultures, from mods and rockers, to ravers and emo.
www.theguardian.com/culture/2026... via @theguardian.com
Thank you again for the lovely biro (everyone admires it.)
Lives and Adventures 2 Irish Men and the Eighteenth-Century Novel DECLAN KAVANAGH If novels by and about women in the eighteenth century initiate a new literary form for the exploration of interiority, the opposite case might be made for many of the novels by and about Irish men. The long-held belief that the eighteenth century inaugurated a new language of interiority or subjectivity associated with the joint rise of empiricism and the novel has been challenged by scholars such as Jonathan Kramnick who argue that for many writers in the period, the 'ostensible privacy or interiority of mental states is often not at issue' in their writing.' More particularly, the precarity of the novel-reading (and -writing) classes in Ireland, and their awareness of living in a culture in which definitions of a 'gentleman' were dangerously unfixed, seemingly produce literary forms that are constantly veering towards the unstable and anti-mimetic territory of satire, allegory, and the picaresque. One of the best known such works by an Irish writer (if not actually set in Ireland) is Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67); unique as it might appear, it sits in a context of other works by Irish writers of the period.* Novels by Anglo-Irish men in the eighteenth century, more often than not, disrupted the very project of bourgeois masculinity that the new literary form of the English novel promulgated as the century progressed." Any survey of Irish men and the novel in eighteenth-century Ireland must thus begin by qualifying what is meant by Irish' and what is meant by 'the novel'. The designations of 'Irish' or "Anglo-Irish' have a contested history both in the historical context of eighteenth-century Ireland and in its ancillary scholarly field of Irish eighteenth-century studies. As James Ward articulates in his essay Irish and Anglo-Irish Writing' (2024):
Proofs! Forthcoming chapter in *The Cambridge History of the Irish Novel* amongst stellar company & excellently steered by Prof Chris Morash. I’ll be doing these with some Easter chocolate to power me through #IrishLiterature #Novels #speirgorm #GulliversTravels
“I hope that identifying the existence of LGBTQ+ people... will encourage us to think more deeply”
A Queer Inheritance explores the LGBTQ+ histories and identities behind @nationaltrust.org.uk properties.
Read our interview with author Michael Hall ⬇️
www.bloomsbury.com/uk/discover/...
A photoshopped image from the Bayeux Tapestry, showing Harold Godwinson swearing on holy relics an oath to the Absolute Unit (a very large sheep).
Breaking news: we've just signed a once-in-a-lifetime loan agreement to bring rural England's most iconic artwork home for the first time in 1,000 years.
Introducing our 2027 major exhibition - Bayewe Tapestry: the Fight to Wool England.
Applications for the BAVS/BARS Nineteenth-Century Matters Fellowship hosted at LJMU are now open!
You can find out more about this prestigious scheme and how to apply here: bavs.ac.uk/bavs-bars-ni...
Deadline for applications: 11th May 2026
Several thousand copies of Piper at the Gates of Dusk waiting to be signed.
Signed all these today, beautiful special editions for @waterstones.bsky.social Out a week from Tuesday!
A new eight-part podcast, The Rise and Fall of Madchester, is now on BBC Sounds. From Factory Records and the Haçienda, to the emergence of Happy Mondays and New Order, with new interviews with artists and DJs, including Mike Pickering.
Listen now: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand... #podcast
Prof Kate McLoughlin has written for The Guardian about #silence and how it has 'inspired, daunted, comforted and terrified writers throughout the long course of English literature'.
Hear about the range of careers you can launch into after pursuing postgraduate study at the Institute of Historical Research. Learn more about our PhD programme: sas.ac.uk/phd-ihr
Thanks to our speakers this afternoon who provided lots of examples of care and restoration of #seasidegardens at #southport and #scarborough as well as some lovely floral clocks. If you missed the seminar it will be available to watch online via our website soon
Deckchair hire excellent value - Chris has hired one & is charging the rest of us 45 pence an hour.
We do hope KINKY IS BEHAVING.
Do give 40 minutes of your life to watch this fascinating 1988 documentary on the permanent & elderly residents of Eastbourne’s decaying seaside hotels. Mrs Bloom is especially glorious. youtu.be/zgpK5YxqmDo?...
DEADLINE EXTENDED to the 31 March 2026!
Join our PGRs and ECRs in Montpellier this autumn to discuss the theme of 'Improvement, Degeneration, Stagnation'
#skystorians #18thC 🗃️ #PGR #ECR #CFP
London friends! (or London-adjacent) I'm going to be at Queer Britain in June in conversation with the incredible Lisa Power about my new book 'Rainbow Wales'
June 27th at 2.30pm - a matinee if you will!
www.outsavvy.com/event/33534/...
