Andrew King

Lecturer in Ancient History at Newcastle University Explore an exciting academic career as a Lecturer in Ancient History. Don't miss out on other academic jobs. Click to apply and explore more opportunities.

Lecturer in Ancient History
Newcastle University - School of History, Classics and Archaeology #skystorians 🗃️www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOC475/l...

Teaching Fellowship in Twentieth-Century British History at University of Oxford An academic position as a Teaching Fellowship in Twentieth-Century British History is being advertised on jobs.ac.uk. Click now to find more details and explore additional academic job opportunities.

Teaching Fellowship in Twentieth-Century British History- University of Oxford - Faculty of History #skystorians 🗃️www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOC497/t...

Although my contract ends 31 August, my years at Greenwich effectively end today as I give in my laptop, keys and ID. | Andrew King Although my contract ends 31 August, my years at Greenwich effectively end today as I give in my laptop, keys and ID. Inevitably I find myself reflecting on what the institution and I have given each ...

Reflections by a retiree on a career in #academia.
#retirement #work
www.linkedin.com/posts/andrew...

PhD Studentship: (ECOMEDS: Economic and Cultural Connections Within Mediterranean Ecosystems, c.1250-1550) at King's College London Apply for a PhD Studentship: (ECOMEDS: Economic and Cultural Connections Within Mediterranean Ecosystems, c.1250-1550). Discover a wide range of PhD opportunities at jobs.ac.uk.

PhD Studentship: (ECOMEDS: Economic and Cultural Connections Within Mediterranean Ecosystems, c.1250-1550)
King's College London - #History #skystorians 🗃️ www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNZ935/p...

After an amazing three days in Birmingham at the @vpfa.bsky.social annual conference, it's graduation of my last undergraduate cohort at the University of Greenwich - a truly talented year.

Hear hear!

It's the @vpfa's deeply rooted refusal of hierarchy in the interest of welcome and joy combined with serious intellectual ambition, isn't it?

It's proof renewed every year that fun and rigour make a great alloy!

Conference programme: 17th Annual Conference of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association. Heights, Depths, and Extremes. The Birmingham & Midland Institute, Birmingham UK. Victorian picture of a group of people confronted by a sea monster

Well, #VPFAExtremes has been wonderful - the height of my summer so far, as ever! I am deeply grateful to be part such a fantastic, extremely warm and collegiate association. Thoroughly enjoyed the last few days - diolch pawb!

Reading Scenario Experiments. This series of prompts is designed to get you thinking about how the setting for reading affects concentration, comprehension, and even the existential experience of reading. Every week, one of the following prompts will appear on the syllabus. I encourage you to try all of them that you are able. How does a different reading setting affect your mood? Your receptiveness to the prose? Your pleasure or difficulty reading? What are the particular impacts of changing your lighting or surroundings? What do you notice about yourself and about the work you are reading during this experiment? 1. read by candlelight (use a small lamp in dorms where no candles are allowed!) 2. read for one hour without checking any devices, answering texts, etc. 3. walk out into nature (climb a tree, sit on a rock, grab a spot in a hammock) and read 4. host a reading night with friends & food (sit in companionable silence, reading without chatting) 5. read aloud a chapter to someone else 6. climb into bed at night and read by flashlight under the covers for at least 30 minutes, as if you’ve already been told “lights out” as a kid 7. reread a chapter and see what new things you notice the second time through 8. change your ambient-noise level: add music if you normally read in the quiet; or read without music if you are normally a music-listener 9. read with a sketchpad at hand and sketch scenes, characters, or other elements from the story 10. practice focused listening: have someone read to you 11. make yourself a special, fancy snack on a real plate to nibble while eating: pay attention to the cooking or arranging or choosing of ingredients to make it especially appetizing first 12. make tea (even if you’re not usually a tea drinker), and read and sip 13. invent a new reading scenario for yourself, or repeat the one you liked the best from this term [writing assignment using these prompts follows; text character limit prevents inclusion of it in full]

Here you go! I'll write some new ones for this semester too. They loved them. The "read without your phone or screens in the room" was a revelation, and many of them decided to keep doing it. They had NO IDEA (& were horrified) how often they interrupt themselves to look at a phone for no reason.

Very excited but also sorry its the last day of @vpfa.bsky.social #VPFAExtremes! The panel I'm in is kicking off with Alison Dingle on Victorian depictions of the Holy Land, esp. Disraeli's Tancred and Tonna's Judah's Lion. Horribly topical.

We are delighted to announce the winner of the 2024 VPFA Second Book Prize:
Tara MacDonald, Narrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Prof. MacDonald will receive a £200 cash prize and be honoured at the Annual Conference AGM.

Illustration by Édouard Riou for Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth. An engraving depicting a host of prehistoric animals, including Megatherium, moa, and Pleiosaurus, called 'Axel's Dream'.

Writing a keynote paper for @vpfa.bsky.social's annual conference about encounters with prehistoric animals in nineteenth-century fiction, and as I write Colossal Biosciences can't stop announcing that they're resurrecting extinct creatures. I prefer Jules Verne.

THRILLED to share that my book has won the VPFA Second Book Prize! 🎉

Victorian Popular Fictions 7.1 8 Butler-Way Helena Esser, Steampunk London: Neo-Victorian Urban Space and Popular Transmedia Memory. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, 248 pp. HB £85.00. ISBN: 9781350433908 Reviewed by Emma Butler-Way Downlo…

Exciting new issue of VPFJ is now out in the world, featuring my review for Helena Esser's fantastic Steampunk London: Neo-Victorian Urban Space and Popular Transmedia Memory. I'm a big fan. Get your libraries on it.
@vpfa.bsky.social @helenaesser.bsky.social
doi.org/10.46911/TWO...

First keynote, The Submarine Gothic beginning now in the Charles Dickens room 🦈🦈🦈 #VPFAExtremes

Just chaired an excellent first panel of #VPFAExtremes with fellow #Birkbeck Victorianists @janetteleaf.bsky.social, Jeremy Newton, & Gordon Bates on Hypnotic Gothic Fictions!

We are delighted to welcome the @VPFA1 for day 1 of their 3 day conference "Heights, Depths and Extremes."

#VPFAExtremes #VPFA #bmi1854 #birmingham #victorian

@vpfa.bsky.social So happy to see you here!

Don’t forget! Our first (free!) members-only writing retreat is on 21 June, 10am–3pm (UK).
Whether you're drafting a paper, editing a book, or just need focused time—you're welcome!
Structured blocks, breaks & reflection included. Check your email to register!

The Reception of Darwinian Evolution in Britain, 1859–1909: Darwinism’s Generations Abstract. Darwinism’s Generations uses the impact of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) in the fifty years after its publication to demonstra

Given that it's now more than 6 months since Darwinism's Generations was published, I thought I'd send out an ICYMI for all those who haven't yet noticed. You can find a summary of the contents and arguments in the 'autoreview' I've posted on profmartinhewitt.com. Do check it out!

British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) 25th Anniversary Conference

General registration for BAVS2025 is now open. Come and join us in Oxford in July and help to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the formation of BAVS.

It doesn't if you go by the direct route.

We Can Make an Impact. Protect authors’ livelihoods from the unlicensed use of their work in AI training

Are you an author?
Add your signature to this call from the Society of Authors to protect your rights in the face of unauthorised pirating of your work by AI
chng.it/47GzhjP4dV

YouTube video by Susan Bickley - Topic Bantock: Sappho: IV. Stand Face to Face, Friend

On my birthday a gift: Granville Bantock's ravishing setting of Sappho fragments assembled by his wife. Here's no 4, a joyful seduction song:
"Stand face to face, friend, and unveil the grace of thine eyes.All care let buffering winds bear away..."

Indeed!

youtu.be/aH-nSLyQrkM?...

it used to be the economy was the way we provide people with food, shelter and other necessities to keep them alive. Now we are all supposed to due for the sake of the economy .What is this thing they're talking about. Is it just code for rich people, class power or what?

It is always worth knowing what the powerful mean when they use terms like "the economy."

Hence the rise of bullshit jobs, all trying to justify their existence through initiating change for its own sake and seeking to measure its benefit.
It's no individual's fault: it's a collective abdication of the responsibility of intellectuals because we need jobs.

I do disagree with the article on the lack of link between the idea of HE as a business and the bullshit jobs the piece describes. Success in marketisation is a concept fundamentally quantitative. What I perceive is the result of a commitment to quantify what is - residually - unquantifiable.

I'm also concerned that administrative procedures and staff support students treating education as a product they buy, not even as a professional service resource that students themselves have to mobilise actively.

Provocative words here. Alas, it's not only travel arrangements.

CFP: "Victorian Studies - Who Cares?" – RSVP Call for proposals to the Victorian Institutes Conference 2025, entitled, "Victorian Studies: Who Cares?" to be held Sept. 13-14, 2025.

📣 CFP alert! The Victorian Institute's 2025 conference "Victorian Studies—Who Cares?" will explore why and how we continue to care about a historically-focused discipline like #Victorianstudies. Deadline for proposals is May 1. Thanks for #SharingYourNews!

“‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”

It's no surprise that several of my students are writing dissertations on Orwell's *1984*.