Louise Siddons

Starbucks CEO discovers people prefer people to machines: “We’re finding through our work that investments in labour rather than equipment are more effective at improving throughput and driving transaction growth,” he told analysts. (Financial Times, 29 April 2025)

Mieke Bal, 2003: “one must study a boundary without policing it … studying a boundary and policing it are *incompatible* activities. When you police a boundary … it is no more open to questioning than the law is to the police. When you study a boundary it is put at risk, denaturalized.”

Today's the big day! There are 22 planned protests all over the UK and even one abroad!

Find out if there's one near you here:

whatthetrans.com/compilation-...

View of Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon alongside other books on a display table.

Unabashedly delighted to see Good Pictures in person at the @forarthistory.org.uk book fair in York — thanks @uminnpress.bsky.social for being present!

Today: the @societyofauthors.bsky.social protests #MetaBookThieves in London. Amidst widespread, centuries-old (admittedly quibbly) consensus around copyright, why is wholesale corporate theft even a debate? societyofauthors.org/2025/04/01/s...

Hello world! We’re a new nonprofit that brings together academic, libraries & university-based publishers. We’ll be launching a large collection of hundreds of HSS diamond #openaccess journals in Jan. 2026.

‘Vague, confusing, and did nothing to improve my work’: how AI can undermine peer review Peer review ensures the findings of research are trustworthy. But what happens when it’s performed by an AI model?

Is it AI undermining peer review, or is it offering evidence that we have definitively hit the wall in terms of pressuring academics to do more with less? (Hint: it’s both.)

theconversation.com/vague-confus...

“The free space of creation exists only when it is actively, aggressively, courageously, persistently occupied” — Marilyn Frye, “Do you have to be a lesbian to be a feminist?” off our backs (Aug/Sept 1990): 22.

Opinion | There’s a Name for What Trump Is Doing to Trans People: Denationalizing The message is that we are a threat to the nation. The subtext is that we are not of this nation.

M. Gessen nails it: “The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/o...

The brilliant and delightful Andrew Swaine came to my IVFDF workshop, Dancing Queer History, and had some thoughts which led to a conversation, the results of which he has written up here: andrewswaine.uk/interpretati...

My ‘Dancing Queer History’ workshop at IVFDF this Sunday comes with a free two-page handout for the first ten dancers, which is what happens when concern for the environment and the excitement of sharing collide in the copy room.

Job Opportunity at the University of Southampton: Lecturer B/ Associate Professor in Creative Technologies Winchester School of Art is proud to be one of the UK’s leading art Schools and part of the world-renowned University of Southampton, a founder member of the Russell Group of research-intensive univer...

Winchester School of Art is looking for an artist with substantive creative digital/technical knowledge, either hardware- or software-based -- someone who uses tech as their medium, not just their platform. Does this sounds like you or someone you know? jobs.soton.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

Don't delay, listen today! The lesbian gaze waits for no man.
open.spotify.com/episode/3HXJ... (Queer Lit episode with @lsiddons.bsky.social about this gorgeous, gorgeous book.)

Belated *ages ago

"Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon" with Louise Siddons Queer Lit · Episode

@lenamattheis.bsky.social & I just had this 💜 convo, but in US politics it was ahe’s ago (before, eg, Trump attacked USAID, which work[s/ed] with/for queer & Indigenous people in the US & abroad). Book is free bc of @neh-odh.bsky.social & @uminnpress.bsky.social.

open.spotify.com/episode/3HXJ...

Virginia Woolf, 1926: ‘however interesting facts may be, they are an inferior form of fiction… we become impatient of their weakness…, of their compromises and evasions, of the slovenly sentences which they make…, and are eager to revive ourselves with the greater intensity and truth of fiction.’

Karen Gould Prize Citations - The Medieval Academy of America 3/6/2025 » 3/9/2025(Re)Animating the Middle Ages: Adapting the Medieval in Animated Media

Delighted by this accolade for my dear colleague's brilliant and innovative work! Congratulations Prof Jennifer Borland! @okstate.edu www.medievalacademy.org/page/GouldPr...

Art review: Queering connections: Glitchy Kinship, The Winchester Gallery, Winchester School of Art - In-Common - Southampton By Mabel Wellman. The fifth Queering Connections art exhibit launched this week at The Winchester Gallery at Winchester School of Art (30/1/25). This exhibition by sociologist Dr Lizzie Reed of sociol...

Great review of our current exhibition at The Winchester Gallery, curated by @lizziereed.bsky.social: www.in-common.co.uk/2025/02/01/a...

On holiday (again!), and this time it’s Isabel Miller’s canonical lesbian novel, A Place For Us/Patience and Sarah, 1969/1979: “I can’t say how much it meant that there would never be a hurry again.”

Fantastic talk by @themedievaldrk.bsky.social in our Material Interests series at Winchester School of Art @unisouthampton.bsky.social this evening — huge win to see students engaging with Prof Kennedy’s thought-provoking connections between Medieval English manuscripts and comics theory!

Looking forward to speaking about Good Pictures in the History dept at #BristolUni tomorrow — join us! www.bristol.ac.uk/arts-law-soc...

vm.tiktok.com/ZGdBBFSwg/ book now for #ContraDancing at Halsway Manor with @lsiddons.bsky.social Heather McAslan Will Allen Will Power and Linda Game. halswaymanor.org.uk/event/contra...

Emma Donoghue, Learned by Heart: “But if it’s true… about the mad being capable of a sustained performance of sanity, then I wonder how many people going about their business… in the world may only be keeping their wildest impulses in check by means of such an ‘immense and harmful effort of will’.”

Last HGW post: “It may be I see decay all about me because I am… decay. To others it may be a scene… radiant with hope. I… [find] no promise… in any of the great things of our time. How they will look in history I do not know …; that is how they have mirrored themselves on one contemporary mind.”

Wells: “For this… millions toiled and perished in suffering, in order that a few of us should build palaces we never finished… and make our lives one vast dismal spectacle of witless waste! …It came to me like a revelation… at once incredible and indisputable of the abysmal folly of our being.”

Wells, 1909 and still nailing it. “In these plethoric times when … the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbour’s eye, when there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves or stark beauty, we find ourselves by accident.”

More from Tono-Bungay: “I do not know how far it is possible to convey to any one who has not experienced it, the peculiar interest, the peculiar satisfaction that lies in a sustained research when one is not hampered by want of money. It is a different thing from any other sort of human effort.”

Hols, so I randomly pulled Tono-Bungay (HG Wells, 1909) from my mum’s shelf. “A country which leaves its medical and literary criticism, or indeed any such vitally important criticism, entirely to private enterprise and open to the advances of any purchaser must be in a frankly hopeless condition.”

UCL and EFDSS announce partnership offering a fully-funded PhD studentship We're pleased to announce that University College London (UCL) will be offering a fully-funded PhD studentship (with stipend), in partnership with the English Folk Dance and Song Society. This opportu...

We're pleased to announce that @uclofficial.bsky.social will be offering a fully-funded PhD studentship (with stipend), in partnership with the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

For further description, specific candidate requirements and how to apply, go to: bit.ly/3ZKMggt

Harvey, possibly the least attractive and most photogenic dog on earth, dressed in a professorial sweater and resting his tiny paw on a copy of “Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon”. He is looking at the camera with characteristically bulging eyes.

Marketing colleagues asked for an author photo, so we took several and I asked my sister for her help choosing one. This was her reply.