Kiron Ward

Philosophical Logic has joined the OLH! Read their open letter on mass editorial resignation and the push to make academic research “as accessible as possible to both the academic community and society at large”.

A Cultural History of Vertigo The first interdisciplinary history of vertigo, this book covers medical accounts from antiquity to the present, testimonies of lived experience, and literary a…

Books are like children in one important way - both take a village to raise.

Thank you to my village, all over the world, who have helped me along the way. None of this could have happened without you.

www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cultural-...

As I wrote in 2020... "The web makes up a large chunk of the data feeding GPT3 and kin. Posting the output of large language models online builds a feedback loop that cannot improve quality.

All ingredients for an information heat death are on hand."

In yet more devastating news, the VC has confirmed her plans to cut 80% of academic staff from Essex Pathways, our foundation year department. This would effectively close down all our existing foundation year programmes through the back door.

But it's not a done deal yet. Please share urgently.

Essex university to cut 400 jobs as overseas student numbers plummet Roles to be lost are part of wave of redundancy programmes across UK’s higher education sector

Every sympathy for University of Essex (and pressures facing them) but this is very bad news for Southend.

giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... Essex university to cut 400 jobs as overseas student numbers plummet

We’re hiring! 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

penny for an equalities impact assessment

the only way to make this stupid and pointless system even more unfair would be to remove the reviewers—and now they can!

Framing GenAI as a battle between teachers and students is a red herring. Students and educators are on the same side. The real opposition are the data extraction firms and brokerages and their allies among the managerial class.

so it begins

horrendous. solidarity w my former colleagues at essex

Book cover: Melissa Schuh, Literary Autobiography: Contemporary No Elises and their Self-Representations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Flyer: Melissa Schuh Literary Autobiography Contemporary Novelists and their Self-Representations -Explores the narrative strategies developed by novelists as they cross generic boundaries of ction and non-fiction -Presents case studies of works by canonical contemporary authors -Develops denitions and concepts to analyse forms of autobiographical writing that flaunt their fictionality Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing Get 20% off with this code: PALAUT

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING Series Editors: Clare Brant • Max Saunders "Melissa Schuh's Literary Autobiography offers a theoretically elegant and literarily sensitive rethinking of the fraught relationship between the novel and autobiography. Central to the book is the concept of performative contradiction, which Schuh develops as the defining aesthetic strategy of literary autobiography—a strategy that embraces fictionality not to undermine life writing, but to open it toward deeper questions of truth, identity, and narrative ethics. Schuh's analyses of Roth, Coetzee, and Grass persuasively show how these works form an aesthetic lineage that contemporary autofiction continues to draw from. This book will be indispensable for scholars across life writing studies, narratology, and literary ethics." —Stefan Kjerkegaard, Aarhus University, Denmark Why do novelists write about themselves? What modes do novelists use to manipulate representations of their personality? Why is it often late in their career that novelists write about their own lives? This book develops the concept of literary autobiography as a genre responding to a profound uncertainty about the knowability of the self, often negotiated through a particular concern with the writing life. Comprising a particular sub-genre and style of contemporary life writing, the autobiographies examined in this book foreground their formal 'literariness' through the explicit use of fictionality, disrupting established (auto) biographical tropes by employing narrative innovations associated with postmodern fiction and prefigured by modernist experimentation. Taken together, they exemplify an aesthetics of performative contradiction, in which novelistic strategies cast doubt on the veracity of the life represented. Exploring works by canonical and popular novelists - J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, Günter Grass, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgard - this book addresses the increasing novelisation of contemporary life w…

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, because my book is out now, fresh off the press!
Happy book birthday to “Literary Autobiography: Contemporary Novelists and their Self-Representations” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) 📕🎉! doi.org/10.1007/978-... @hss.springernature.com

This is what I called hegemonic defeatism, looking at the French case

We're about to see a lot of people who pretended to be against the far right when it was easy give up before taking any real stand

academic.oup.com/pa/article/7...

it's the last week of the teaching term

The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love by Katie Da Cunha Lewin Literature lecturer Lewin debuts with an insightful exploration of the spaces where famous writers crafted their most influentia...

“A poignant appraisal of readers’ quest to find intimacy with the authors they love.” @kdclewin.bsky.social’s forthcoming The Writer’s Room (Feb. 17, 2026) earned a positive review in @publisherswkly.bsky.social. Read the full review here:

Shabana Mahmood's Indefinite Leave To Remain Culture War

3 years - if you're earning £125k+

15 years - if you're e.g. a nurse, or a teacher

Labour's two tier system which rewards high earners and insults those who work just as hard but don't earn as much - really sad to see Labour fall

Sharing this again - deadline tomorrow! We'd love to hear from you

🔔 We have extended the deadline for Targeted Research Panel funding until Friday 28th November.

What's TRP funding? Each conference, we award up to £5000 funding for panels which aim to support & promote the production of research by people of colour, LGBTQ+ communities & disability communities.

we are in our slop era

Keir Starmer's spokesman insisted on Monday that "clearly these changes will not be retrospective" for those already granted asylum, as Reform have been demanding.

Now we learn they will be
inews.co.uk/news/politic...

The British library is in crisis: why does nobody care? The widespread indifference to the British Library's crippling cyberattack demonstrates a perilous failure to value the knowledge infrastructure vital for national prosperity

I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight
www.cityam.com/the-british-...

sorry lmao

can't believe a prime minister who did unconscious bias training would do this

Cover image for C21 vol. 12, no. 2 (Autumn 2025). A smartphone on a book.

New issue of @c21literature.bsky.social: Journal of 21st-century Writings, Volume 12, Issue 2, is out now! Novel Media/Media Novel, edited by Dong Xia and Sandro Eich: c21.openlibhums.org/issue/1286/i...

Virginia Woolf Podcast — Literature Cambridge

It was lovely to speak to Karina Jakubowicz on the Virginia Woolf podcast @litcamb.bsky.social about my book The Writer's Room -we talked about (who else) Woolf and all things writing spaces. Check it out here

#VoteLabour

Your regular reminder that there is absolutely nothing "hard" or "tough" about targeting the poorest, most vulnerable, and least able to defend themselves groups of people on the entire planet

graphic designers are essential and under-appreciated!! huge thanks to @sjzavala.bsky.social for helping us with our most recent cover.

completely obscene, and Jim Burden is younger than Ántonia sooooo…🤷🏽‍♂️