Andrew Mangham

The world is heading towards WW3 and this pillock is wanging on about free speech.

That's okay, we're also for teaching, research, innovation, urban regeneration, outreach, community activism, writing, media, social mobility, counselling, mental health care and international investment, I'm sure this will be fine too. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-p...

UNI DISCOURSE: Profs in elite colleges lead young people into cultural Marxism
UNI REALITY: Profs in normal colleges are frazzled by endless paperwork

Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century cover

Weighing in at 827 pages and 2 1/4 inches, our Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the 19th Century is HERE! Huge thanks to @oupphilosophy.bsky.social and our 50+ authors. Restoring women to the philosophical canon is a matter of justice, but it is also better scholarship!

Fab day at the ‘Violence, Health and Health Humanities’ event at the University of Reading today. Congrats to #sophiefranklin.bsky.social, who organised the event as part of her work supported by the DOROTHY MSCA COFUND Fellowship programme.

Ursula von der Leyen, "The diary of Anne Frank."

"A painful reminder to Europe to be vigilant and unyielding towards all those who see hatred and want to divide our society"

"Europe knows this path all too well. And never, never again must we embark on this path"

Took my ‘Literature and Healing’ students to the Royal Berkshire Hospital Medical Museum today. This place is a hidden gem in the heart of Reading!

Attacking the rights of a marginalised group isn’t a win for feminism.

Demanding that women be defined by our biology isn't a win for feminism.

The people driving this are not acting in the interests of women. They're taking us all backwards and ushering in the far right.

Hey, did you know there's an alternative to ChatGPT that makes sense economically and doesn't destroy the environment?
It's called English majors and they will happily fix all of your documents for the low price of health insurance and a living wage.

Some bluebells.

CFP: Special VPR Issue (Winter 2026) – RSVP Call for proposals for a special issue of VPR honoring the late Brian Maidment! Proposals due May 15, 2025 and will be published Winter 2026.

CFP: Essays in Honor of Brian Maidment (Proposals due May 15; Essays due Nov. 1). Guest editors Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge invite proposals for a special issue of VPR. For full details, visit rs4vp.org/cfp-vpr-spec... @rs4vp.bsky.social

British Steel's turnover (2023) £1.26 billion - Votes at risk! Red Wall! Urgent legislation!

UK universities' combined turnover (2023/4) £57.2bn - Central to innovation and the industrial strategy. Educating a dumbed down nation. Silence.

Yes, let's save steel, but for heavens sake help unis too!

Just came across this conundrum in @herring1967.bsky.social’s Emergency Questions. I suspect most people would eradicate the novels of Wilkie Collins. But not me. And I love mini eggs.

A @readingmuseum.bsky.social
#exhibition co-curated by @andrewmangham.bsky.social and Emma Aston that reimagined monsters of ancient tales with new art and analysis proved to be a hit with younger museum-goers – an often hard-to-reach audience! 👹

🔗 rdg.ac/45H9gzF

It’s the fact that Starmer got on well with him that worries me.

Wow. Bowled over by this review. Thanks to @mlclark.bsky.social and @strangehorizons.bsky.social

Truly sorry to hear about the passing of Professor Brian Maidment. He taught me as an undergrad and inspired me with a love of Victorian literature. He was generous, kind, and a pleasure to be around. Thanks for everything Brian.

Poster for the University of Reading's Centre for Health Humanities's online seminar series. The poster reads: Please join us for our seminars, held on Wednesdays 13:00 to 14:00 (UK time), via MS Teams. The joining link for each event will be circulated nearer the time, as well as the venue for hybrid talks. For more information or to request a calendar invitation, please email chh@reading.ac.uk. Feel free to circulate to any of your contacts who may be interested! 26 February 2025 (hybrid – online and in Carrington 101): Dr Rhea Sookdeosingh (King’s College London), ‘“Important, bold and brave”: Doing public engagement with sensitive historical research’ 26 March 2025: Dr Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril (University of Sheffield), ‘Crip Doulas and Cripistemologies of Chronicity – Lessons for long COVID’ 9 April 2025: Dr Janet Weston (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine), ‘Immoral, unjust, and simply ruining the nation: public health law and public fury in post-war Britain’ 23 April 2025: Dr Ailise Bulfin and Giulia Scapin (University College Dublin), ‘Investigating fictional representations of child sexual abuse and using the Shared Reading method to work with people with difficult lived experiences’ 14 May 2025: Dr Clare Hickman (Newcastle University), ‘Sensing the Multispecies Hospital: Exploring more than human encounters in and around the early twentieth-century TB sanatorium’

The University of Reading's Centre for Health Humanities is hosting an *online* seminar series this spring – with talks on public engagement, disability studies, public health law, shared reading & representations of CSA, multispecies encounters, and more! Join us by emailing chh@reading.ac.uk.

Victor Frankenstein’s Technoscientific Dream of Reason How is it that this premodern mystical alchemist appears so contemporary today?

Mary Shelley's novel suggests not only that magic and alchemy preceded science but also that science can infuse and revive their prescientific ambitions.

This week's universities in the Bad or Very Bad News column:
*Coventry
*Dundee
*Keele
*Nottingham
*St Andrews
This will start up again in Jan, as the Cavalcade of Waste fires up again! 🙄☹️

Thanks Amazon.

Read this moving and urgently necessary account

That’s very kind of you to say, thanks Dinah! Hope all is well with you.

#otd 1897 Ellen Nussey, great friend of Charlotte Bronte, died aged 80. It's thanks to Ellen's preservation of hundreds of Charlotte’s letters, and to her assisting Elizabeth Gaskell in her biography of Charlotte Bronte, that we know so much about the Bronte family.