Dan Elphick

I'm fundraising for Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity. I'm running the London Marathon but before then, I'll be joining 99 other runners to run laps around Croydon IKEA in December for the first ever IKEA Marathon! All donations warmly accepted: www.justgiving.com/page/daniel-...

What’s so moving about the election results in Brazil & Serbia & global student protests is you think you’re alone wanting things to be different & then suddenly you realise the young generation has got this . They are outmanoeuvring unhinged wealth & power , we have so much to learn from them .

Couldn't help getting some travellator training in for the Ikea Marathon in December, followed by a steady long run this morning. Please donate to support Shelter! www.justgiving.com/page/daniel-...

Sometimes I find myself procrastinating on research/writing projects for months. Some days (like today), I find myself inexplicably 'in the zone'. I've pressed 'send' on two different book proposals today (one an edited collection, one a smaller focused monograph).

We are soon going to have to come to grips with the fact that this shit is asbestos for the mind

We’ve been talking about this for years. None of these far-right movements are organic.

The Musica Britannica Trust Lewis Memorial Prize Competition 2027 Call for Applications Founded by the Musica Britannica Trust in 1986 in memory of Sir Anthony Lewis, MB’s first General... https://www.rma.ac.uk/2026/10/09/the-musica-britannica-trust-lewis-memorial-prize-competition-2027/

speakout.web.ucu.org.uk/stand-up-for...

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

"The internet is a store but it used to be a library" www.tumblr.com/bitterkarell...

RMA 150th Anniversary Fellowships Winner 2026 We are delighted to announce the winner of an RMA 150th Anniversary Fellowship in 2026 - Katalin Koltai, for her project "Sustainable New Lutherie: Enhanced...

The professors and instructors who turn classrooms back into spaces for reading and discussion, are going to leave the biggest legacies in this world. Everyone one else will disappear into LLM wallpaper proxies and derivatives. 

Here's what I actually think these incidents reveal (instead of a rogue AI terminator situation): Much of the infra we expect to be hardened is actually being held together by glue and popsicle sticks.

It's just weird isn't it when the British Museum is running a sold-out exhibition, when The Odyssey reports $1billion at the box office, when the V&A has just opened the most innovative and accessible museum model in Europe....and this is what our minister for research comes out with.

90 years ago, Parliament responded to the rise of Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts by passing the Public Order Act, which banned political uniforms, private militias and the threat of force for political objects. The debates make very resonant reading today. Here's the Liberal Robert Bernays. (Short 🧵)

Occasional reminded that Dr Seuss — yes, that Dr Seuss — nailed the logic of appeasing fascists back in 1941. Might be handy if your local MP hasn't yet made it beyond that level of reading comprehension.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Attending our annual conference? Come to our PGR lunch tomorrow!

Our annual conference starts tomorrow at Queen's University Belfast - see you there!

We need two Arday inquiries: 1) Into racist (and misogynistic) bullying by UK press and social media accounts (see also Diane Abbott); and 2) into the duty of care that HE has for its minority staff - a duty of care that in my repeated experience is reserved primarily for white male sex offenders.

BREAKING! Nigel Farage returns to normality by refusing to turn up in Clacton.

Gender studies might be the most vindicated academic field of all time

@boydellandbrewer.bsky.social have a 50% off sale on all ebooks, including my recent co-edited collection 'Constructing Polish Musical Identities outside Poland since 1880'. Grab a copy for less than £10! boydellandbrewer.com/book/constru...

BBC Radio 3 doing what it does best: in the Proms interval, a serious look into what's going on in the Shostakovich 11 that's coming up in the second half. Well done.

OY OY, THEY LET ANYONE IN HERE THESE DAYS @danelphick.bsky.social

I agree with all the takes about an attack on the humanities being an attack on critical thinking, &c. It’s also about joy, though. ‘Why bother studying that’ is always also a sneer at — why do you think you should get to do something you enjoy? Grow up and be miserable all the time!

First they came for the languages. In the hope that no one would have the words to say what was happening. 1/9🧵

I know I’m a broken record but to see universities abandon critical thinking and completely chuck out their own policies around sustainability, research ethics, academic integrity, etc in the pursuit of shiny new tech has been quite something

“I have done all of the things that one is supposed to do to earn a tenure-track position. And I have done approximately 85% of them by typing prompts into a large language model and then moderately editing the output.” 🤣🤣🤣 brilliant 👌🏽 open.substack.com/pub/inprepar...

'About 150 academic roles are set to go at the south-west institution, which said it was targeting areas that are “no longer sustainable” or have seen changes in student demand.' History and English are name-checked. 1/3

More job news: from 1st August, I'll be Head of Music at Royal Holloway. As is well known, it's a brilliant team. I'm lucky to have such wonderful colleagues and hard-working students. Looking forward to being 'captain of the ship' for a few years (and hope I can live up to the task!)

RMA Journals - move to digital default  RMA Members have long received a physical copy of the latest issue of Journal of the Royal Musical Association, released twice yearly. Owing to new contractual arrangements with...

RIP the brilliant David Hockney www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

so if AI is so amazing, why don’t articles and books written with it have huge “proudly made with AI” banners and stickers on it we all know why

That's a pogrom. She's describing a pogrom