Mercedes Sheldon

🚨 NEW at Broadview this Fall is The Country Wife, edited by Peggy Thompson 🍃

As the only current edition with contextual materials, this book is perfect for your incoming 18th century literature students!

Request an exam copy 👉 buff.ly/VSKzcDq

#NewAtBroadview

an older woman with blue hair and red glasses says absolutely perfect Alt: Me appreciatively grading a student's essay

Gave students an assignment to rewrite a snippet of Hard Times as, instead, a "condition of America" novel circa 2025. The winner: a scene from a school board meeting in "Woketown."

St. Thomas president: Teaching AI skills is important. Forming character is more important. "As more and more cognitive skills become automated, human beings will add value to organizations in the realms of relationships, sound judgment and ethical reasoning," St. Thomas president Robert K. ...

"This generation of students has been raised in an era when trust is low, isolation is high & change is happening at breakneck speed. / Students need more than technical skills."

Whether framed as secular or sacred, educators & parents need to recognize that "character can be taught." {gift link}

Mentally ill patients dancing at a ball at Somerset County Asylum. Process print after a lithograph by K. Drake, ca. 1850/1855. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/xswz3swa

CFP: Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities A VPFA Study Day Loughborough University, 27 March 2026 The Health Humanities and Victorian popular fiction intersect in revealing ways, offering insights into how 19th-century literature shaped and reflected contemporary understandings of health, illness, and the body. Popular narratives not only mirrored anxieties surrounding public health and medical progress but also contributed to shaping public perceptions of health and healing. Health Humanities approaches re-examine these texts to uncover how cultural narratives and literary representations influenced attitudes toward physical and mental well-being, gendered experiences of illness, and the ethics of care in an age of rapid scientific change. Health Humanities is a particularly useful approach to sensation fiction because it illuminates the ways in which these emotionally charged, often morally ambiguous narratives explore and interrogate concepts of the body, illness, and mental health. Sensation fiction, with its focus on secrets, trauma, nervous disorders, and abnormal psychological states, frequently dramatizes the anxieties of Victorian society surrounding health, gender, and identity. By applying the lens of Health Humanities, scholars can uncover how these texts reflect and shape contemporary medical discourse. Interdisciplinary approaches also highlight how sensation fiction critiques institutional medicine, domestic care practices, and the pathologization of women’s experiences. Ultimately, Health Humanities allows us to see sensation fiction not just as entertainment, but as a culturally significant form that negotiates the meanings of illness, morality, and human vulnerability in a rapidly changing world. 20-minute papers are invited on any aspect of the health humanities and sensation fiction. Topics may include, but are not limited to the following: • Madness, Hysteria, and the Sensation Heroine • The Role of Doctors and Medical Authority in Se…

🚨Call for Papers!
❓Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities: A VPFA Study Day
🗺️Loughborough University
📅27 March 2026
💷 FREE
For full CfP: victorianpopularfiction.org/studyday/for...
Contact the organiser Anne-Marie Beller (@braddonite.bsky.social) at a.m.beller@lboro.ac.uk for more information

lovely perspective view of the newly built Covent Garden market from 1831

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

The indispensable Carlyle Letters Online, guided by Brent Kinser, has found a new home at Western Carolina University: carlyleletters.wcu.edu This magnificent resource features free access to all of the letters of the 50-volume Duke-Edinburgh edition completed in 2023. #Victorian #19th-c.

Holy shit this is INCREDIBLE go sign up now.

Join the team at Theatre Journal! We are seeking two new colleagues, an Online Editor and a Performance Review Editor. Please share widely and consider applying! Don't hesitate to reach out with questions.

You don’t have to be a climate scientist to know the Arctic is losing permafrost; in Svalbard, the dislocation is obvious even to an untrained eye...

The Arctic Seed Vault Shows the Flawed Logic of Climate Adaptation | Scientific American www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

Opposing the 'inevitability' of AI in academia is both possible and necessary, argue researchers Since the widespread release of ChatGPT in December of 2022, AI has taken over much of the world by storm—including academia. Most of this happened with very little pushback from politicians, policymakers and university boards, despite a myriad of issues related to AI technologies.

✨AI's swift rise has reshaped academia—almost unnoticed! 🤔 A silent revolution unfolds… what will it mean for learning & the future? 🚀 #AIimpact

Source: https://phys.org/news/2025-09-opposing-inevitability-ai-academia.html

Students want to create! With their own brains!

UIC English is hiring a TT Assistant Professor in prose fiction.

As we are one of the very few PhD programs in Creative Writing, PhD is strongly preferred.

Happy to answer questions; please share around.

uic.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

How can any Reading Rainbow book be out of print‽

The journal Victorians (formerly The Victorian Newsletter) is out, with new format and new editor Kristen Pond, featuring a forum on amateurism and professionalization in science with intro by @aktange.bsky.social. Some terrific work here, and all is Open Access. muse.jhu.edu/issue/55573 #C19th

A thing I learned when I had small children, but seem continually to forget in relation to myself is that tired can actually point to hungry, and grumpy can mean tired.

Main frontage of the baths building in Grange Road, just south of the Thames.

Plan of part of the basement which housed the Turkish baths. These comprised three hot rooms, plunge bath, shower room, shampooing room fitted for two shampooers, and provided with the usual shampoo slabs and bowls. There was also a complementary steam room.

The carpeted cooling-room at the baths, with loungers, tables and chairs, and thirteen cubicles, each containing a couch and small table, etc.

A still from a 1930s Bermondsey Council film 'Where there's life there's soap' promoting their Turkish baths. Can be viewed online, courtesy Wellcome Collection at https://wellcomecollection.org/works/zrgauwtq

#onthisday, 24 September 1927, #Bermondsey opened its £150,000 Grange Road Baths. Some papers lammed the council for providing 'luxurious' #TurkishBaths on the rates as they were well fitted out for a local authority facility. Gay friendly. Closed 1973—"structural defects". Demolished 1975. 🗃️ #C19th

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪

Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students.

I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

She basically invented astrophysics.
She proved the laws of chemistry, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics, not just gravity, applied universally.
She determined the composition of the sun and primacy of hydrogen in the universe.
She advised the PhDs of Frank Drake and Frank Kameny.

CHOTINER: So you’ve become very famous for hating fish

AHAB: One fish in particular

CHOTINER: Yes, I see that, and, in this case the fish is actually a whale

AHAB: I’m not sure I see what you’re getting at

The thing I love about teaching close reading via the strike scene in North and South is 1) how easy students find it to identify language they think is important; 2) how that can build out to a bigger claim about humanisation or dehumanisation; and 3) how you can then get them to see the other side

YouTube video by Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Applying for a Curran Fellowship: A Grants-crafting Workshop

After some delay on the part of yours truly 🙄 the recording of our Sept. #RSVPDigiEvent on grantscrafting is now live on YouTube. And just in time - Curran Fellowships are due in just a few short weeks on Oct. 15! Many thanks to our panelists + to Clare Horrocks for chairing! youtu.be/L5XRtqh1qoE

Front matter from The Bookseller, January 1858, accompanied by text that says: Rachel Calder, The Bookseller, the First Modern Trade Journal, Victorian Periodicals Review, volume 58, number 1, Spring 2025.

Rachel Calder examines how The Bookseller #tradejournal laid the foundation for the communication and information system that remains at the heart of today’s global #publishing industry. Read about founder Joseph Whitaker’s innovative strategies in VPR 58.1: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl... @rs4vp.org

Carlos Vives: Tiny Desk Concert Carlos Vives carries the mantle of Colombia's vallenato tradition. Now 30 years after his landmark recording, he revisits songs from La Tierra del Olvido with a 12-piece band.

Carlos Vives carries the mantle of Colombia's vallenato tradition. Now 30 years after his landmark recording, he revisits songs from La Tierra del Olvido with a 12-piece band.

Devices seized near U.N. meeting could have shut down cellphone networks The Secret Service said it found over 300 SIM servers, 100,000 SIM cards and other illicit materials in multiple sites surrounding New York City ahead of the U.N. General Assembly.

The Secret Service said it found over 300 SIM servers, 100,000 SIM cards and other illicit materials in multiple sites surrounding New York City ahead of the U.N. General Assembly.

Good peeps 🎉: My kid's principal. Big heart. Wise thinker. Great writer. High expectations. An impressive role model for all the students, but esp. for the Black ones. His kicks are always in the school colors. His energy is always positive w/o being sugary or fake. Signs newsletters "love y'all."

For every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received €1.39 in return The net cost of the BIA pilot went from €105m to under €72m due to tax generated and savings on social welfare payments

It also finds that recipients’ arts-related income increased by over €500 per month on average, while their income from non-arts work decreased by around €280. Dependence on social protection declined, with recipients receiving €100 less per month on average, and 38 percentage points less likely to receive Jobseeker’s payments.

Ireland just released a report showing the huge success of the unconditional basic income it provided to artists. Each $1 spent led to society gaining $1.39. Artists' earned incomes went up more than their side job incomes fell. And they were happier and used less welfare

www.gov.ie/en/departmen...

Mom of a middle schooler; we just watched it for the third time in four weeks. “Free” really caught my attention lyrically; my kid adores “your idol,” which is a brilliant play on words. One of the grands watched with us and she was dually impressed by all the feels layered into the dynamic plot.

One of the things I really liked about S2 of “Andor” was how few Imperial Stormtroopers there were.

Lucas put them in masks for two reasons, IMHO: 1) it made them terrifying, their inhuman faces frozen in frowns, with no pity, feeling, etc. Echo of his enforcer robots in THX-1138.

I was just thinking about a few years ago when my brother almost died; no family knew that he was unconscious in a hospital.

Set up your emergency contact correctly in your phone, please. Hopefully, it'll never be needed, but if it is, it is all the difference in the world to your loved ones.