Helen Smith

House prices will be our last bulwark against fascism.

Thank you! That is really interesting to know.

Please do not tell me it is time for my annual password update. I can't update my password, there are no more passwords, the universe is empty of passwords, it is all void.

Still fighting my losing battle against capitalising articles after a colon.

do my clever and knowledgeable followers have examples of historians writing (eg journal article or book chapter) about their own *failures* in interesting ways? eg research goes wrong, wrong questions etc 🗃️

I am in the middle of writing something a bit like this, although I am not a historian and it remains to be seen whether the end result will be interesting!

Please can someone come up with a flowchart for 'Is the Union Flag racist?', with Gerri Halliwell's dress featuring on one side and anything funded by Tommy Robinson and his right-wing mates marked out clearly on the other?

This question is opening up a whole new world of nun-rear adjacent foodstuffs!

Books are assumed to be middle-class & decorative. People who read are assumed to have space to house them & leisure to read them. Wanting to have books to consult at work is seen as self-indulgent rather than practical, despite copious evidence that we read and remember physical books differently.

The more I think about it, the more furious I am at the class politics barely hidden in the refusal to consider books as serious scholarly tools. Universities don't tell physicists they need to keep their lasers at home.

Amazing! And now I'm hungry.

Interesting...

Quite a niche question today. Does anyone know if the phrase 'a nun's buttock' or similar is in any way proverbial in France?

And wondering if I could carry off the greeting proposed by John Eliot in 1593: 'Come, cullion let me crush thy callibisters with accoling thy buttockes. Shake handes.'

I am writing more about buttocks today than I had anticipated.

In London, hate will never win.

How we talk about history is the issue where the media and political discourse is perhaps most out of touch with how out of touch Nigel Farage is with the British public, outside his core vocal minority

Double digits is a lot.

With apologies for making you feel ancient, Anna Elizabeth Smith is 10!!!!!!!! today!

Can't wait to see it!

Oh how gorgeous! It's beautiful.

Eurostar waitress spotted my daughter gnawing on a block of parmesan, in preference to her train meal.

'Oh, you're living your best life right now', she cried. 'No need to hide the cheese, I'm French.'

A plethora of new ODNB entries on early modern women stationers! Entries from Heidi Craig, Andrea Silva, Kirk Melnikoff, @mgyarn.bsky.social, Andreas P. Bassett, @tarallyons.bsky.social and @georginaemw.bsky.social, me, and of course from @valeriewayne.bsky.social who cooked up the whole cluster.

A whole article about changes in the sector that doesn't once consider the possibility that universities should be funded to educate students.

Such a beautiful site too!

HELLO NEW JAPANESE PAPERMAKING RESOURCE!!!!

h/t @wordsmith.bsky.social

Sign the Petition Stop Mass Redundancies at Lancaster University – Hold Senior Management Accountable

A petition against the mass redundancies proposed at my university: www.change.org/p/stop-mass-...

Ethnographies of Paper in Early Modern England Click on the article title to read more.

I wrote about John Taylor and ethnographies of paper. It's out online today, prior to publication in *Critical Quarterly*.

Thanks to @georginaemw.bsky.social and co for kicking off this train of thought with a wonderful conference, and giving it a home.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

YouTube video by University of York Margaret Atwood receives an honorary degree from the University of York

It was wonderful to be present when @wordsmith.bsky.social introduced Margaret Atwood, who received an Honorary Degree, and who spoke so movingly about the power of books, words and reading in a world in crisis. youtu.be/BWpdOg4DZHc?...

Call for Papers: Poetry and Science, From the Renaissance to Enlightenment University of York, June 26, 2026 - June 27, 2026 Deadline for submission/application: September 30, 2025 Keynote: Katie Murphy Confirmed Speakers include: Liza Blake, Tita Chico, Jonathan Sawday, Helen Smith, Lizzie Swann We invite proposals for the final conference of the AHRC-DFG project, ‘Scientific Poetry and Poetics in Britain and Germany, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, 1580-1750’. From the late 16th and on into the first half of the 18th century, a large body of poetic writing addressed scientific subject matter. The conference explores this mass of scientific poetry – and a corresponding poetics of science – that reveals a vibrant facet of Renaissance, Restoration, and Enlightenment culture: the production not only of ideas, but of new, technical vocabularies and fast-paced neologizing, all forged in the particular demands of poetic form. Poetry, the era believed, did not function as mere ornament, but to reveal deep structures in the created world. This potential was theorized by the period’s emerging literary criticism, a practice that developed in demonstrable parallel with modern ‘science’.

#CfP: Poetry & Science, From the Renaissance to Enlightenment
York, June 26-27 2026. Abstracts Sept 30 2025

Keynote: @manymanyplies.bsky.social. Confirmed speakers: @medrenliza.bsky.social, @titachico.bsky.social, Jonathan Sawday, @wordsmith.bsky.social Lizzie Swann #Skystorians
shorturl.at/rYg7H