Peter Adkins

We are recruiting!

An exciting new opportunity has opened up here at Gladstone’s Library.

We are looking to recruit an Archivist who will work in the Library’s busy Reading Rooms. Working in a team of five, this role is a mix of public-facing and office-based work.

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Ah, that makes it even more interesting and entertaining!

We had a virtual screening and discussion of the film with Nariman at Crude Representations. It is *so* good! Apparently DT could see the oil tankers from his childhood bedroom window arriving at Llandarcy. So it's only fitting he'd be sent to Abadan!

Does anyone want a free month's premium subscription to @edinburghminute.bsky.social? Got some promo codes when I signed up!

I love the idea that there might be a Triestine easter egg (so to speak) smuggled within the cat's miaow.

Thanks for the clarification - deleting my original post at risk of spreading misinformation.

I had never even considered this, but it tracks!

I always have to try to make the sound aloud when I read it!

Rereading Woolf's 1917 diary and finding myself tickled once again by the anecdote in which she and Desmond McCarthy stay up late trying to vocalise the cat's "Mrkgnao" in Joyce's Ulysses (she can't have disliked it *quite* as much as she professed).

🚨 Job alert! 🚨 The Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex is looking to hire both a fixed-term Lecturer in Literature and a fixed-term Lecturer in Theatre Studies. For full details about each post, see the link below. vacancies.essex.ac.uk/tlive_webrec...

Exciting day to see what the postman has for me.

Lots of bad solutions proposed for UK universities in the press:
Limit research to Oxford and Cambridge, curb VC pay, teach more “efficiently” etc

But
1. Fees have flatlined meaning they don’t cover the costs of
2. the massive loans that VCs took out for buildings when unis were privatized.

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we would be in a much better state in this country if we stopped focusing on anointing a chosen few working class students into Oxbridge, and instead properly funded all the different sorts of universities that attract students from a wide range of backgrounds already

Armed police threatened to arrest Kent protester for holding Palestinian flag Officers accused Laura Murton who also had a sign saying ‘Free Gaza’ of supporting a proscribed organisation

☠️

Photo of a raven on a window railing with half of a baguette in its beak.

Quoth the raven, "baguette".

Reporter: “Why do you think so many countries and governments around the world are just ignoring what’s happening in Gaza?”
Greta Thunberg: “Because of racism.”

Congrats! Can't wait to read it!

This #modwrite I am trying to be super organised by starting my paper on fossil fuel in The Voyage Out for the Woolf conference in Sussex next month. Will I actually get it written early for once?

We have a new review on the BSLS website: Aaron Scott Pugh reviews Sebastian P. Klinger's Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899-1929 (www.bsls.ac.uk/2025/06/klin...)

We're at the Samuel Beckett Society 10th Annual Conference: Beckett’s Relationships 📚 @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social

Visit us at the School for Languages, Literature and Cultures to chat to Emily Sharp and Elizabeth Fraser from our Literary Studies team! 👋

edin.ac/4jGuu6L #SamuelBeckett

Translated works win UK’s oldest book awards A portrait of obsessive desire and a lushly illustrated elegy for the lost identity of the Arab world have won the UK’s longest-running literary awards.

For the first time, both James Tait Black Prizes have gone to works in translation: Lamia Ziadé's My Great Arab Melancholy and Lucas Rijneveld's My Heavenly Favourite. www.ed.ac.uk/news/transla...

We're announcing the winners of the 2025 James Tait Black Prizes today!

Celebrating the 2025 James Tait Black Prizes Join us for the announcement of this year's winners of the James Tait Black Prizes. Featuring Ian Penman, one of 2024's winners.

The James Tait Black Prizes are the oldest literary prizes in the UK - so come along on 30 May at 4pm to find out 2025's Fiction and Biography winners!

Featuring the judges and postgraduate panel, as well as Ian Penman, one of last year's winners, it's not to be missed.

Free 🎟️: edin.ac/3H1ZKPi

As someone who was welcomed into Kent's anthropology department reading groups and research seminars while doing my PhD in English this is heart-breaking stuff to read.

I don't think I'd have the stomach for stately Buck... although I could probably cope with Haines, which I know is just terrible (and very English) of me.

A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope

Thank you for sharing your powerful story. I hope things are easier now.

Somehow Joyce pulls off heart-warming sentiment and razor sharp satire of the form and its conventions, often in the same sentence. I completely understand why people would want to discuss who they would like as "friends" in the novel 😂

Yes! It is a friendly book, despite its difficulty. I remember reading it slowly over a summer about 13 years ago and finding myself absolutely lost in the characters in a way that is perhaps surprising for an ostensibly experimental, supposed anti-novel.

Lots of Lenehan hate in the comments. Some keen to have a pint with The Citizen. Or at least garryowen.