Alex Calder

Important news: the deadline for the joint BAMS/MSA conference in Loughborough has been extended to December 29, 2025! You can review the CFP, and find links to the submission platform, here. www.moderniststudies.org/conference/M...

The heartbreaking, obscene thing is that while the target audience *might* notice and remember headlines about the extension of ILR requirements for 48 hours at most, tens of thousands of individuals and British families will live with a whole decade or more of stress, uncertainty, punitive expense.

Thrilled to announce our new issue, Novel Media/Media Novel, edited by Dong Xia and Sandro Eich:
c21.openlibhums.org/issue/1286/i...

Training and support within the Future Doctoral Provision Programme AHRC has commissioned an engagement exercise to develop thinking around the future of doctoral provision in the arts and humanities.

My guess is that this is the relevant further info for the updated version of things across the UK (although I've only skimmed in haste admittedly!): www.ukri.org/what-we-do/d...

Training and support within the Future Doctoral Provision Programme AHRC has commissioned an engagement exercise to develop thinking around the future of doctoral provision in the arts and humanities.

Here's the news story about the changes from ukri: www.ukri.org/news/update-...

I don't know for sure these days, it used to vary by different consortiums by geographical area of the UK (e.g. SGSAH for Scotland, OOC for Oxbridge and Open U). However, I think that model might be partially or wholly gone and it's now this? (for Cam at least): www.csah.cam.ac.uk/education/ca...

Very much the case for humanities ECRs today - eloquently summarised by these contributors, no. 2 especially

Image of 'The Empress' by Pamela Coleman Smith - figure with long hair, crown of stars, holding sceptre-like object. Two trees (pines?) made up of dots on right-hand side. Text: Weird Modernisms, BAMS/MSA 26, 1-4 July 2026, Loughborough University, UK

pls RT, modernists - CFP now out for 'Weird Modernisms', the collaborative conference between @modernistudies.bsky.social and @moderniststudies.bsky.social !

July 2026, Loughborough University.

www.moderniststudies.org/conference/M...

I’m glad 😊 I found it helpful a couple of years back for research as part of a placement with the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize (formerly the Republic of Consciousness)

This could be a useful starting point (no contact details but there are links to webpages): contemporarysmallpress.com/press

Huge thanks to Helen Smith wordsmith.bsky.social for an excellent English: Shared Futures conference. It was inspiring, exciting, and fun, and especially moving to hear so many friends and colleagues speaking about why and how English matters to them

From the top of my (frazzled) head: fiction - def Isabel Waidner (both We are Made of Diamond Stuff and Sterling Karat Gold) and also Natasha Brown's Assembly. Also: Olivia Laing's Crudo (often compared to Seasonal) or Max Porter's Lanny. In poetry: Jay Bernard's Surge, Roger Robinson, Bhanu Kapil

Ed Kiely · Short Cuts: University Finances Universities’ reliance on international students is only the most recent attempt to solve a broader problem, one that...

‘If higher education was as committed to “woke indoctrination” as the Tory peer Nat Wei claims, I imagine I would spend a lot less time on administrative emails.’

Ed Kiely on UK university finances: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

A admin/university generic portal type thing under heading "Manage Jobs". Below, an ostentatiously long and malevolent pastel yellow bar reads (in small text in the centre) "Got No Jobs"

Higher education: Got No Jobs

Really excellent conference programme - I sadly cannot make it, but (if you're in Cambridge in mid June) you can!

This government is totally reckless and dangerously ignorant when it comes to universities.

If a regional uni folds, it will probably be the biggest employer in the area. Further, all industries that supply the uni will lose biz. Industries partnered with the uni will also leave. Unemployment hell.

Ecocritical people/hive mind - I'm putting together a workshop introducing humanities thinking for environmental issues; after close reading a poem by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, I want to incorporate an example of press coverage/public discourse to then critically read - any good/go to examples?

Yes hopefully! There's enough silliness out in the world about literary "difficulty" and bizarre conflations of reception anxieties with texts; not to mention a weird insistence on the separateness of form and content (despite them being entwined and mutually constitutive)

Sounds excellent, and exactly the sort of thing I want to include on a future project on the contemporary maximalist novel

Stop treating our lives as abstract questions and gotchas

again and again and yet again the privileged’s fantasies of oppression take precedence over the marginalised’s real, daily, violent oppression

Absolutely - but there's got to be a teaching moment in there though, about the importance of intersectional feminism and class as a facet of gender equality

We have a brilliant new issue for you! Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring 2025) is now available: c21.openlibhums.org/issue/1419/i.... There are new articles on peripheral readings of poetry, the Scottish Network Novel, the new sub-genre of up-lit & reviews. Plus more articles coming soon! #OpenAccess #AcaSky

Prob not this book, but Namwali Serpell has a cool series of lectures called "Stranger Faces" (Transit Books, 2020) about the ethics and affect of strange faces (e.g. disabled, racially ambiguous, dead, animal, blank, digital)

A yellow post-it with a surprised cartoon face (big cartoon eyes, eyebrows raised, etc) atop a black plastic laptop webcam

So not only did I give a lecture to an empty room, but the only attendee was, in fact, this post-it atop my webcam

Editorship of <em>C21 Literature</em> C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings is the journal of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS). The journal is dedicated to examining the genres, forms of publica...

📣 🚨 C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings / @c21literature.bsky.social seeks a new editor! Join a leading journal in 21st-century #LiteraryStudies. Term starts May 2025.

📅 Deadline: 22 April 2025.
More info: c21.openlibhums.org/news/793/
#C21Literature @bacls.bsky.social

Found myself in a literal rabbit hole watching clips of Watership Down while doing teaching prep and marking

I feel like you'd enjoy Muriel Spark's first novel The Comforters: especially the moment when the protagonist accuses the narrator of not even being able to properly describe a hospital ward, which is met - a page or 2 later - with a sassy and detailed description of the ward

Academia still expects the outputs appropriate to a 1980s-era tenure line researcher (time protected for thought, wage sufficient to support social reproduction at home) but its reward structure is more like picking up hours at Chipotle or delivering packages for Amazon, if you can even get that

Yeah of course! Final year (3rd year/hons) Contemporary Writing (Part II Paper 12) at Cambridge