sophie

⭐️ Our 2026 internship opportunities are live! ⭐️

Check out 30+ paid internships & artist residencies for Arts & Humanities PhD researchers in Scotland.

Gain real-world experience, build skills & grow your networks with diverse partners.

🕔 Apply by 31 Oct 2025
👉 www.sgsah.ac.uk/e_t/i_ar/

If you’re working on any area of fantasy and the fantastic, come and join us at Glasgow in June 2026 and do consider presenting or running a workshop! All the info you need and the full CFP is here:

fantasy.glasgow.ac.uk/index.php/20...

@uofgfantasy.bsky.social @uofgartshums.bsky.social

Join Dr Richard Ansell (Birkbeck) for a free online seminar. 5:30-7:30pm London time on Wed. Oct 8 via zoom. “Travel Journals and Other Traces of Servants on the Grand Tour”. From valets to maids, dis... TikTok video by Long 18th Century Seminar IHR

Join us next Wednesday (8-10) in person at the IHR or online from 5:30pm to Dr Richard Ansell’s paper ‘Travel Journals and Other Traces of Servants on the Grand Tour’. Register with the following link: www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

Richard outlines the paper here:
www.tiktok.com/@long18thcen...

‘A surreal journey’: Palestinian students evacuated from Gaza arrive in UK First 34 students, who have full scholarships, welcomed after months of campaigning by academics and others

In case anyone hasn't already seen: 34 of the Gaza students with scholarships at UK institutions arrived this week, including a student who is due to start a PhD with me at Edinburgh. I'm so grateful to everyone who helped with this - thousands of people. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

embarrassing

Still don't understand why they made the Hobbit movies when what the world really needs is a trilogy of films about Gandalf's 17-year archive trip to Minas Tirith.

Very excited and grateful to have been given the chance to present at the ‘Journeys of Curiosity’ symposium, where I’ll be chatting a bit about curiosity, the sublime, and imperial anxieties in Romantic travel accounts of the Himalayas. Really looking forward to hearing all the other papers as well!

massive congratulations Cleo!🎉

We're very excited to announce that our wonderful exhibition 'Celebrating the Scottish Poet, Robert Fergusson (1750-1774)' with the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, has been turned into an online exhibition!

Check it out at the link below: robert-fergusson.glasgow.ac.uk/online-exhib...

Swinney warns UK Government risking lives by failing dozens of Gazan students The First Minster said the decision to only evacuate nine people was incomprehensible

John Swinney criticises UK government's refusal to help Gaza students with offers at Scottish universities. Students have places at Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews and Dundee. 'Scotland is ready to welcome these students': www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottis...

Play it Forward! DOUBLE the donation, DOUBLE the play, DOUBLE the impact! Help Project Play raise money to support ForRefugees

Hi friends! I just wanted to share this fundraiser for Project Play, a charity supporting and advocating for refugee children living on the UK-France border.

All donations for the next two months will be doubled, please consider sparing a few pounds if you can ❤️

www.justgiving.com/page/project...

I should be at Cambridge, but I’m trapped in Gaza Home Office red tape strands dozens of Palestinian scholarship winners in war zone

Shaimaa has a scholarship to do a PhD on Palestinian literature with me at @uoe-llc.bsky.social, but she's stuck in Gaza because the foreign office won't help. Please share. www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2...

As part of my PhD research on space (i.e the built environment/social space) and feminism during the British Women’s Liberation Movement, I’m looking for oral history participants to interview about their experiences. You don’t need to have thought about space and your activism- I’m just interested in your experiences! If you were involved in Reclaim the Night, squatting/housing activism, or feminist architecture from c.1968-1990 (ish), you can contact me on this platform or email me: sinead.carter@pgr.reading.ac.uk. Please share with anyone you think may have contacts!

I'm looking for participants for my oral history on space and feminism! Please share with anybody you feel may have contacts and email me if you have any questions or would like to get involved: sinead.carter@pgr.reading.ac.uk

Foundations: please step up and take over the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). This is an absolutely essential scanned archive of all of the old journals and books from the 1500s to about 1920. Has been indispensable for my research.
about.biodiversitylibrary.org/call-for-sup...

Children crossing Channel from France exposed to teargas, report says NGO says rise in interventions has only increased danger as new data shows at least 15 children died in transit last year Children and babies coming to the UK on small boats from northern France have been teargassed and subjected to tactics such as the discharge of rubber bullets and the slashing of dinghies with knives, according to a new report. The publication on Tuesday of We Want to Be Safe, by the French non-governmental organisation Project Play, came as the latest figures on daily crossings released by the UK government reached an all-time high of 19,982 for the first six months of the year, a 40% increase compared with the same period last year. Continue reading...

Children crossing Channel from France exposed to teargas, report says

Project Play’s new report highlights the “devastating impact of record child fatalities and increasing violence against children on the UK-France border”.

Please give the report a read and see their website for more information on their work and ways to help.

www.project-play.org/we-want-to-b...

we welcome anyone affected by the 28 Days Later rage virus to come and enjoy a relaxing visitor experience at The Museum of English Rural Life. however we politely request all infected to avoid running in the galleries, use indoor voices, and refrain from being so completely uncontrollable

David Cameron — and every UK minister complicit in arming and enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza — must be investigated for war crimes.

Will funding cuts devalue arts and humanities PhDs in the UK? From next year, the AHRC will fund vastly fewer student-initiated PhDs, focusing more of its reduced funding on specific challenges. Critics say this will undo a decade of improvements in PhD supervis...

“Oxford and Cambridge will come through this OK because they have other sources of funding...But we may well see a serious contraction of humanities postgraduate research training…That would be devastating for the vibrant national system that we’ve built in recent decades.” @mcraeandrew.bsky.social

Antarctic expeditions were clearly part of the colonial project, not least in the framing as conquering the last unclaimed land, and in the way that they were used to demonstrate specific qualities of colonial masculinity. Historians don’t say that to denigrate Scott. They say it because it’s true.

Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars | Defector Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic ac...

This guy, @albertburneko.bsky.social, is a genius. Please read his brilliant article on Elon Musk's deranged and morally repugnant Mars colonisation schtick. defector.com/neither-elon...

📢 CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS 📢 [Please Share Widely!]

Picturing Pennant is a new crowdsourcing project to "tag" the illustrations in Thomas Pennant's eighteenth-century Tours of Wales and Scotland.

Can you help us identify the places, people, and much more in these wonderful illustrated volumes?

my favourite podcast releasing a series on my latest research interest is a great way to start 2025!

Imperial botany features heavily in many of the exploration & travel narratives I’m analysing as part of my PhD, so very much looking forward to listening to this series.