Getting Stuck (In)

My social media of choice lit up last week with threads about student disengagement. There is a widely-shared pessimism about what on earth is going on inside (and outside) university classrooms. Why are students struggling more and more to engage in the basic ways we expect? Social media aren’t great for nuance and discussion and […]

The Urgency of the Ephemeral

It goes in fits and starts, but I’m still here, publishing posts infrequently, to no particular schedule. That’s one of the nice things about academic blogging, after all. My manager is never going to ask why I haven’t been productive on the blog this year. In a version of academic life where everything must be […]

European Women Go Mad in Throwaway Sentences

I recently returned to a book that has shaped much of my thinking: Ann Laura Stoler’s Along the Archival Grain. It’s a powerful avatar of the turn to ‘archives as process’. At its centre is a set of claims about why and how researchers should read along the grain as well as against it, all […]

Her Story

Valerie Margaret Small was born in 1941. In her teens, her domineering father was sick and bedridden, and she was expected to look for work. She trained as a tailor and then, aged 19, took driving lessons. This was how she met Patrick Burns, who owned the driving school and was 17 years her elder. […]

Legal Theatre of Cruelty

I recently read my colleague John Foot’s book The Red Brigades for a research discussion event at Bristol. The Red Brigades of the title were the largest of the revolutionary communist groups active in Italy in the 1970s, responsible for an escalating campaign of kidnappings and murders across the country. For the event, we read […]

Friends In Deed

In a new article in History Workshop Journal Laura Forster asks: how is history like friendship with the dead? It is easy, she points out, to scorn the idea of making friends with the past, and to see this impulse as ‘romantic, immature, and decidedly ahistorical’. Easy, but misguided. Drawing on examples of utopian revolutionaries […]

Unverbal Diarier

‘Céléstin Guittard de Floriban did not leave much of a mark on history,’ writes Michaela Kalcher. What this unremarkable bourgeois did leave, however, was a day-by-day account of the French Revolution. Anyone hoping to find in his diary an unfiltered story of the political turmoil from an ‘ordinary’ witness will be disappointed. Guittard was typical […]

Geg

For many years, I have asked our second-year student cohort to tell me their favourite words, and explain why. It’s one of the highlights of my job. They bring me words that are difficult to read out, or internet slang, or rarefied curiosities, and inevitably a good sprinkling of obscenities. Each of their choices is […]

Glazed and confused

In a piece for the Guardian Jeremy Ettinghausen introduced me to a term I hadn’t come across before: glazing. Ettinghausen’s article draws on eighteen months of chat logs between three students who share a subscription to ChatGPT, and asks what they use the tool for. The answer is: everything. So the puzzle is why? As […]

Soldiers’ Rewards

In 1815, a farmer from the Nord wanted to marry but faced an unusual problem. In 1799, aged nineteen, he had wed a seventy-six-year-old in a sham marriage to escape conscription. This wife, with whom he had never lived, had since died, so there was no reason why he could not remarry. But the problem […]

Will Pooley

history/folklore/writing