Alex Burchmore

Welcome to Bluesky @phrc-dmu.bsky.social! Hard recommend for 📷📸🗃️ folks - with a great autumn line-up of free, online research seminars this autumn. The link has information on how to book, as well as how to get in touch to offer a talk in future editions.

So excited to finally have hold of the book!

Happy 15th anniversary to the love of MY life, too, @blairwilliams26.bsky.social 🥰

The promotion is definitely a bonus - perfect timing! 😊

Really excited to meet and work with our incoming Sir William Dobell Chair and Fellows in Art History at the ANU for 2026! 🎉

An incredible group of scholars with some fascinating and timely research planned for their stay

#academicsky #arthistory #art

My thoughts exactly! Definitely won't be removing any of the lyricism or polish, whatever that would entail... 😅

An excerpt from feedback offered by #Reviewer2 on the latest article draft: "The writing is very polished, but if anything, perhaps too polished in parts, where the lyrical risks eclipsing the historical or scholarly"

So, historical/scholarly writing can't be lyrical and polished? 🙃

#academicsky

Very cool books with very cool covers bombardment because we all need a little beauty and brilliance, surely

The "Vienna" model or sample book, c. 1410-20. An aid for workshops and travelling artists so that they had a stock of motifs & shapes. Silverpoint drawing on paper, maple wood, leather. Dimensions: 9.5 cm × 9 cm. A small thing. (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien)

Peacehammer 40K: Paintinge litel miniatures of gardeneres, sculptors, academics. Trimminge hedges. Makinge friendes.

The 13-storey Liuhe Pagoda (Six Harmonies Pagoda) at dusk, c.1925, Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, by Charles H Kragh. located at the foot of Yuelun Hill, facing the Qiantang River, originally constructed in 970, but rebuilt a few times since. Interestingly a pagoda that also served as a lighthouse.

Our Lancet viewpoint, 'Bioethics for the Planet', seems ever more timely. Caring for humans and all life forms demands we care also for the planet. Viewable with registration
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
#climate #planetaryhealth #globalhealth #STS #ethics

A portfolio case with an ornate design made of porcupine quills, including the traditional Mi’kmaw star design.

A portfolio or envelope case made of birchbark and dyed porcupine quills by a talented Mi’kmaw artist around c.1910 and featuring the traditional 8-pointed star— I love this object. Relatedly, it‘s Mi’kmaq Treaty Day!

Today is publication day for PAPER AND THE MAKING OF EARLY MODERN LITERATURE! Available in paper or digital form www.pennpress.org/978151282744... @pennpress.bsky.social

🤣🤣🤣

I always wonder how they feel about us carefully collecting their poops 😅

A headband with ornate patterns made of porcupine quillwork

An amazing headband made of dyed porcupine quills by an Indigenous person in the Great Lakes region around 1760. It is in such remarkable condition because it was kept in a Scottish castle for 250 years.

Sometimes, homely objects from the past are far more evocative than possessions of the powerful rich ~ here, from Egypt 1,400 years ago, this design on a child’s linen tunic, woven with pink, blue & green ducks, flower petals & central animal face collections.mfa.org/objects/70038

Papua New Guinea: 50 years of Independence | National Library of Australia (NLA) Explore parliamentary debates relating to the Independence of Papua New Guinea.

The NLA has digitized heaps of PNG parliamentary debates, including from the colonial legislative council (1951-63) and house of assembly (64-75). Keyword searchable too. www.library.gov.au/news-media/p...

Meanjin archive to be ‘made available for free’ | Books+Publishing Purchase a subscription to view job ads and other premium content on Books+Publishing.

Always like to see an accessible archive, but maintaining it isn't free. How long until a "purely financial decision" to shutter the digital archive too?

Alex Burchmore – Out of the Melting Pot, into the Garden? Aboriginal-Chinese-Australian Artistic Encounters

Really looking forward to contributing next Thursday to the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre's Global Encounters Network Seminar Series - online and open to all!

📌 Out of the Melting Pot, into the Garden? Aboriginal-Chinese-Australian Artistic Encounters

🕰️ Thursday 18 September, 6-7pm AEST

Kerameikos: The potters' quarter

You can read about our super fun exhibition 'Kerameikos' at Sydney Uni - Chau Chak Wing Museum in the latest Journal of Australian Ceramics. Exhibition extended until 2 Feb 2026! 🏺🏛️📜
search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3...

Best surprise after a long trip back: my article got picked for journal cover!🥳
“Three centuries of Chinese printing in the Netherlands”, in Yearbook for Dutch Book History, 32/2025

“Literary journals have never been a commercial enterprise, they have been a cultural enterprise ... To talk about the ‘problem’ of Meanjin as being a commercial one is to disavow the purpose of a university.” @sophtree.bsky.social

A sinuous floral border in the Kelmscott Chaucer, printed in William Morris’s workshop in 1896. One of 13 copies printed on vellum. Given to @theulspeccoll.bsky.social in 1916 by John Charrington (1856-1939), Honorary Keeper of Prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum. CUL Sel.1.16.

One of my favorite digital collections is that of the Museum of Royal Worcester. You can explore their ceramics collection and their archive, which holds treasures like these pages from a 1930s pattern book with heavenly designs for Art Deco style floral china: www.museumofroyalworcester.org

It’s ludicrous and insulting to suggest that the richest university in Australia can’t afford the two part-time wages to run Meanjin.
Also: did they even try to save it? Donation drive? Philanthropic efforts? Offering it to another institution?
No.
The university council shut it down intentionally.

All right, putting it out into the world… if anyone back in Australia has hot tips on a job for a museum studies professor who loves teaching and public programs and has leadership and strategic thinking skills, I’d love to hear them. Holding on here, but longing to be back in Oz.

"Meanjin isn't just a magazine, but an important cultural institution [that] provoked national conversation for the best part of a century ... ensuring Australia could speak to itself – critically, insistently, sometimes uncomfortably"

Another cultural institution on the managerial chopping block 🤬

Venice’s Lion of St Mark’s Square was at least part made in China, study suggests Isotope analysis finds copper ore came from Yangtze River basin while statue could be a repurposed Tang Dynasty tomb guardian

"The Lion of St Mark is Chinese, and he walked the Silk Road." Cool bit of research here on an iconic Venetian symbol: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

To all who wryte storyes & poemes, to everyone who doth wryte scriptes & screenplayes, to those who make art of all kyndes, and to those who designe and performe yn daunse, and theatre -- thanke yow. Whethir you make for a few friendes or an audience of millions, thanke yow. You helpe us all.