Helen Smith

Job Opportunity!

🚨 Two @rarebookschool.bsky.social courses coming to York in July! @wordsmith.bsky.social 'The Culture & Craft of Wood Type' & @jenniebatchelor.bsky.social 'The Rise of Periodical Print Culture' rarebookschool.org/courses/typo... rarebookschool.org/courses/hist... 🗃️ #bookhistory #earlymodern #18thC

In 2-3 pages, please provide evidence for how you meet every one of a 17-page list of criteria and how you excel in several.

An amazing opportunity for a PhD and a 4-year postdoc on this important project with the brilliant and lovely @smschober.bsky.social - hair, race, trade and multispecies history! #EarlyModern 🗃️

House prices will be our last bulwark against fascism.

Please do not tell me it is time for my annual password update. I can't update my password, there are no more passwords, the universe is empty of passwords, it is all void.

Still fighting my losing battle against capitalising articles after a colon.

Please can someone come up with a flowchart for 'Is the Union Flag racist?', with Gerri Halliwell's dress featuring on one side and anything funded by Tommy Robinson and his right-wing mates marked out clearly on the other?

Quite a niche question today. Does anyone know if the phrase 'a nun's buttock' or similar is in any way proverbial in France?

In London, hate will never win.

How we talk about history is the issue where the media and political discourse is perhaps most out of touch with how out of touch Nigel Farage is with the British public, outside his core vocal minority

With apologies for making you feel ancient, Anna Elizabeth Smith is 10!!!!!!!! today!

Eurostar waitress spotted my daughter gnawing on a block of parmesan, in preference to her train meal. 'Oh, you're living your best life right now', she cried. 'No need to hide the cheese, I'm French.'

A plethora of new ODNB entries on early modern women stationers! Entries from Heidi Craig, Andrea Silva, Kirk Melnikoff, @mgyarn.bsky.social, Andreas P. Bassett, @tarallyons.bsky.social and @georginaemw.bsky.social, me, and of course from @valeriewayne.bsky.social who cooked up the whole cluster.

HELLO NEW JAPANESE PAPERMAKING RESOURCE!!!! h/t @wordsmith.bsky.social

A petition against the mass redundancies proposed at my university: www.change.org/p/stop-mass-...

I wrote about John Taylor and ethnographies of paper. It's out online today, prior to publication in *Critical Quarterly*. Thanks to @georginaemw.bsky.social and co for kicking off this train of thought with a wonderful conference, and giving it a home. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

It was wonderful to be present when @wordsmith.bsky.social introduced Margaret Atwood, who received an Honorary Degree, and who spoke so movingly about the power of books, words and reading in a world in crisis. youtu.be/BWpdOg4DZHc?...

#CfP: Poetry & Science, From the Renaissance to Enlightenment York, June 26-27 2026. Abstracts Sept 30 2025 Keynote: @manymanyplies.bsky.social. Confirmed speakers: @medrenliza.bsky.social, @titachico.bsky.social, Jonathan Sawday, @wordsmith.bsky.social Lizzie Swann #Skystorians shorturl.at/rYg7H

Thanks to Thin Ice Press and @georginaemw.bsky.social @wordsmith.bsky.social for an enlightening three days of material thinking! If I have learned anything it is that there is there is no end to matter and 'digressions are sunshine'!

Please someone buy the last two tickets for my Edgar Allen Poe-stcards workshop at York Art Gallery! www.yorkmuseumstrust.org.uk/whats-on/eve...

Spitting blood at being thanked for my 'patience and resilience' in the face of VS schemes. I have resilience in spades, and patience in a small number of extremely niche contexts, but I have felt neither of those emotions when it comes to the damage these measures are doing across the sector.

I had not seen this before, and it made me smile...

We're advertising two artist's residencies at Thin Ice Press: the York Centre for Print. Please share! www.thinicepress.org/research/pri...

Saw the play Nye last night, starring Michael Sheen, about the founding of NHS. Both Sheen and play magnificent. The takeaway message.

Still not persuaded that the answer to women's work being undervalued is for women to behave more like (certain) male colleagues. How about instead we recognise, value and reward the work that gets done? Workloads are an institutional responsibility, not a personal one.

Congratulations to my brilliant colleague, Daniel Matore, whose @oupacademic.bsky.social monograph, 'The Graphics of Verse: Experimental Typography in Twentieth-Century Poetry' has been awarded the University English Book Prize. universityenglish.ac.uk/announced-un...

On the downside, my lungs are gurgling gently once again and I have been prescribed further antibiotics. On the upside, the doctor used the words 'Obviously you're young and fit', which more than makes up for it.

This week we've been at the English: #SharedFutures conference in York, run by @englishassociation.bsky.social & University English Thanks to all the speakers for an inspiring week & @wordsmith.bsky.social for organising! Great to catch up with Manchester Poetry Library & the zine-making station!

I don't know how many of my followers here are York-based, but we have a lovely workshop as part of Shared Futures tomorrow, so if you are local and have some spare children, send them along! And please spread the word. little-vikings.co.uk/events/untea...

THEY WERE ALREADY LISTED IN THE CATALOGUE. theonion.com/scholars-dis...

i just find this so bizarre. searching through texts and doing the reading for myself is how i actually think through ideas! trying to put together a sentence is how i figure out what i actually want to say!

A great Phd opportunity for a Black British student, starting this September. Spread the word! www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

A sad little antibiotics poem titled 'I have turned down all the free booze on the Eurostar '.

'we know far less about how graduates themselves experience their early careers. Until now, subject-level data on graduate job quality—how meaningful their work is, how well it aligns with their goals, and whether it uses their university-acquired skills—has been missing from the policy debate.' 1/3

Men are extremely keen to explain to me that Britain *needs* a domestic steel production plant and doesn't necessarily *need* universities. Okay. Steel contributed about £1.7bn to the UK economy in 2024. Universities contributed more than £200bn.

Lecturer in Liberal Arts York St John University - School of Humanities #skystorians 🗃️www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNF251/l...

Ok, it’s time to settle this 1st c. SHORT 2nd c. LONG 3rd c. SHORT 4th c. SHORT 5th c. LONG 6th c. SHORT 7th c. LONG 8th c. SHORT 9th c. SHORT 10th c. LONG 11th c. SHORT 12th c. LONG 13th c. LONG 14th c. SHORT 15th c. SHORT 16th c. LONG 17th c. LONG 18th c. SHORT 19th c. LONG 20th c. SHORT

To be fair to the Chicago Sun-Times, there are entire swathes of my CV where the authors are real but the works themselves are wholly fictional...

The other day I saw an ad for an app which uses AI to generate bespoke emojis. The mismatch of resource and outcomes is staggering!

Open to teachers, academics, writers, policymakers, and anyone else with an interest in how English is taught and what it means for us.