Final two weeks to get your proposals in for our conference on care histories - please do think about submitting! We're also happy to consider papers that don't strictly fit into the defined time period! 🙂 #skystorians
📣 Call for papers: Caring Communities: Rethinking Histories of Care, Class, and Kinship, 1800-present
Newcastle University, Thursday 3 - Friday 4 September 2026.
Deadine for submissions: Friday 24 April 2026.
caringcommunities.co.uk/conference/
Shortlisted for the SAHR Templer Medal
'An impressive study of how the cultural legacy of the Great War shaped the attitudes of wartime soldiers in the Second World War.'
manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526157232/
We're hiring! We’re looking for a Research Assistant (0.4FTE, 12 month FTC) to join us and work with @gmmedicalmuseum.bsky.social.
Role can be held flexibly (though not remote); centres around outreach + engagement, archival + oral history work in Worcestershire
jobs.worcester.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...
Oh my god it is actually out - like actually now. Over a week early! They snuck it out without telling me! lol.
Well, here it is people, and you can download the whole thing for free - thanks to @wellcometrust.bsky.social
Fill your boots: www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mon...
Front cover of a book _The Politics of Personal Experience_. The cover is mainly red with wavy white lines. The main title text is black on a white background.
The book is finally finished. It comes out 25th April 2026. It’s about historians’ “personal experiences”, how these might relate (critically and analytically) to their histories.
It is called _The Politics of Personal Experience: Writing a History of Munchausen Syndromes_
Announcing a brand new series launching this #Halloween 👻
Manchester Studies in the Supernatural explores how the #supernatural shapes human experience across time and place.
Bridging disciplines and challenging boundaries, it welcomes bold new research on the #occult and the #unseen
Behind the sensationalised headline, there’s some excellent and fascinating research here.
www.theguardian.com/education/20...
And I will tell you flat out, there is a HELL OF A LOT BETTER-QUALITY ACTUAL TEACHING involved in getting a good degree out of a student who came in with BCD than there is getting one from an A*A*A student.
A banner advert for Matt Houlbrook’s new book Songs of Seven Dials: An intimate history of 1920s and 1930s London
There's just a day to go until @manchesterup.bsky.social publish my latest book Songs of Seven Dials: An intimate history of 1920s and 1930s London.
I thought I should explain a bit about where the book came from.
1/15
What HE managers fail to understand is that in the context of the Humanities, ‘employability’ isn’t teaching coding or carpentry, but skills around writing, presenting, reasoning, evaluation, analysis, research etc. In an 80% service economy, these are the skills that fundamentally matter.
If you don’t want to do your job, you can leave! People are desperate to teach at universities, let them do it!
Cover of my book We Have Come To Be Destroyed: Growing Up In Cold War Britain. The cover is an eerie blue-green and the words melt into an image of a group of children confronting the camera at a festival in Coventry in 1980.
Cover reveal for my forthcoming book, WE HAVE COME TO BE DESTROYED: GROWING UP IN COLD WAR BRITAIN which tells the history of Cold War Britain (c.1956-89) through the eyes of children & young people! Out with @yalebooks.bsky.social 28 April 2026 #booksky #skystorians yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300...
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.
Child holding a book titled Joining Up In The Second World War
It’s real and I’ve got one!
Daughter’s honest and accurate review: “It doesn’t have so many pictures.” She’s not wrong. If you need pictures this isn’t for you, but if you like free access to new First and Second World War history then download it here: www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781...
Obviously a lie, since the definition of PhD-level expertise, standard across universities worldwide, is that you can produce original knowledge.
Front cover of book; civilian men queuing to become soldiers
Delighted to see that my book Joining Up is published today, a mere 11 years after I started writing it. You can read it for free here: doi.org/10.7765/9781...
@manchesterup.bsky.social
Hey... our July titles in Modern History are all #OpenAccess on manchesterhive.com 🔓
Available from 29 July, these books are new in our @sshmedicine.bsky.social & Cultural History of Modern War series.
Feat. @sarahcrook.bsky.social, Joel Morley & more.
Ground-breaking research, completely free.
THIS.
The government response to this petition is infuriating.
“Maternity and other types of Parental Pay are intended to provide a measure of financial security to support parents whilst they are away from the workplace; they are not a replacement of earnings” except they literally are??? Please sign:
What we're doing in the uni sector is shutting off routes for kids with Bs and Cs to do key (and prestigious) subjects, and closing down the ability of young people to go to the local uni just when it becomes ruinous expensive to go way. Will have incalculable consequences for social mobility.
Is there a better time to read and review books than summer? I don't think so - and I'm looking for reviewers for lots of titles for the Journal of Contemporary History. We now do review articles of up to 4,000 words, covering three books. These and many more are up for grabs:
When Universities are mismanaged or run into financial issues, it's always the staff and NEVER the management who lose their jobs.
On the contrary, they get above-inflation pay rises that are the equivalent to one or two of the full time jobs they cut.
How and why do we let this happen?
It's notable that the only student speech frequently shut down on university campuses is a) pro-Palestine b) pro-trans-rights. The OfS seems *deeply* unconcerned about that speech being limited. In fact, they want academics who oppose those positions to have the right to 'shock and offend' students.
Last year we ran a survey on UK HE redundancies.
Based on 349 responses, the UNIVERSITIES DEGRADED REPORT uncovers awful conditions, targeting of marginalised groups, & far more cuts than estimated.
People's stories matter. We can hold leaders to account. Please share widely tinyurl.com/48nzf7ew
We are currently advertising for a 1-year fixed term 0.8 FTE post in Modern History at Lancaster. It goes without saying that it would have been nice had it been a F/T post but, in the current climate, it is something ...
hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...
Exterior view of Armstrong Building, Newcastle University, red brick, neo-Gothic-ish architecture with many windows.
Newcastle University staff invited to a ‘Doodling for Wellbeing’ session (‘Let your pen dance across the page' in 'a perfect escape from the everyday hustle and bustle'. Invites sent on same day 153 academics were informed of their location in 'redundancy pools', with 38 redundancies planned. 1/2
Good, thanks. Hope all’s well with you. It’s a great project (& fab team) - still can’t believe my luck.
Such brilliant news, Leah. Congratulations!
this is in fact true for almost all early years interventions, which is yet another reason why the lack of childcare support in the UK is criminal