iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Some recent musings on the gorgeous and very intimate natural history doc Super Nature, and the tensions that arise between romanticising super 8 and overlooking the animal materiality of film stock www.beccaeharrison.com/aftergloam-s...

beccaeharrison.com

Super Nature

A long-form review of the 2026 film Super Nature that covers the film's ethically conscious production, and the history of animal exploitation in the making of film stocks.

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

So I’ve just written a whole 90k-word book about why Lucasfilm definitely 100% should not do this. It has nothing to do with story arcs or Star Wars fan service and everything to do with ‘maybe we’d like a not-dying planet of our own instead of more samey-samey resource-intensive fantasy ones.’

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I may not have a job and everything is terrible BUT my book (which I nearly gave up on, see above) just went into production. Following a decade of work 'Uncovering the Star Wars World: The Land, Labour and Nature of a Media Empire' will be out in May 2027. Excitement! Relief! And... copy editing.

A screenshot of a contents page laid out over two columns. The headings read:

Introduction
Worldbuilding
The matter in hand
How Star Wars works
Reading the Star Wars world

Chapter One. Crew and Craft
Imperial exceptionalisms
Arts and crafts
Taxing issues
Extended family
Family affairs
The house always wins
Close Up: Original Trilogy Tea
Making the tea
Drinking the tea
Iced tea
Spilling the tea
Reading the leaves

Chapter Two. Material and Parts
Oily substances
Organic matters
Down the mine shaft
Scavenging parts
Trash, de-compacted
Close Up: Looking for Artoo
Designed for life
Metal heads
Over and over
Paranoid androids
Dirty computers
Short circuit

Chapter Three. Imperial Designs
Closing ranks
Cultural appropriation
Royal remixing
Defensive initiatives
Imperial legacies
Close Up: The Throne Room Gown as Orientalist Couture
Patchwork Padmé
Unpicking orientalism
Patterns of appropriation
Fitting for a queen
Imperial influencer

Chapter Four. Alien Lands
Real-world matters
Location, location, location
A whole new world
Just deserts
Re-worlding Star Wars
Close Up: Expanding and Enclosing Lands
The nature of things
Alienated landscapes
Facilitating shoots
Enclosing lands
Big trouble in Little Marlow
It’s just… people

Chapter Five. Creature Discomforts
Service animals
Creatures of habit
Animal matters
Meet the flockers
What is it like to be an orbak?
Wild irregularities
Close Up: No Birds Sing in Star Wars
And they said it was pretty here
Red in tooth, claw, and tape
Into the wild
Digging deeper
Animal instincts

Conclusion. New Beginnings at the World’s End
Bigger or better?
Common goals
Worldmaking

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

If I were running a university where staff spent weeks and weeks of time putting grant proposals together only for UKRI to feed them into LLMs without informed consent—effectively theft of the time and work—I’d be taking serious action to defend those staff. But I’m not running a university, so

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Category is Books in Glasgow is in need of shutters to protect the shop - and presumably anyone who might be inside - from the people who keep smashing the windows. It’s a gem of a queer bookshop so if you can support them, please do!

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

My partner and me on the last full day of the holiday we put off for ages so I could write a book about Star Wars

The Anakin and Padme meme (an image of each character side by side and then repeated below to form a checker board). In the first box over Anakin the text reads ‘staying in Cono will be convenient for the night train’. In the second, the text reads ‘you’re not going to make us visit a Star Wars location, right?’. The characters’ appearances in the third and fourth boxes convey that Anakin is going to do exactly what Padme hopes he won’t.

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

A short piece I wrote about the Andrew Scott meteorology film Pressure, and the traps that an otherwise great movie falls into when it gets misty-eyed about fantasies of expertise www.beccaeharrison.com/aftergloam-p...

beccaeharrison.com

Pressure

A long-form review of 2026 film Pressure on the nature of expertise and power.

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Just found myself in the weird position of turning down an academic job offer. I’ve decided not to apply for them before (recently enquiring about a research role I was told the ‘research budget’ came out of your salary) but never encountered t&cs so awful and exploitative that I’ve declined one

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Hate to be right but I called the BBC dropping Drag Race before the ‘I kissed a…’ news was announced. There was only so long they were going to bother maintaining a veneer of ‘tolerance’ Drag Race co-creator warns of TV representation 'crisis' after BBC drops show www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

bbc.co.uk

Drag Race co-creator Fenton Bailey speaks out after BBC axe

The BBC is cutting the show because of financial pressures, sparking discussion about LGBTQ+ representation on TV.

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

We’re on the inaugral @europeansleeper.eu from Brussels to Milan and it’s like travelling in a 90s adaptation of an Agatha Christie story or Hitchcock film and I’m very here for it (see also: greener and much much cooler than flying)

A red train pulls into a station platform

A bird’s eye view of a sleeping compartment with a bunk bed positioned over a blue bench on each side, and a table under a window in the middle

A compartment interior window with curtains hanging over it, a bunk bed visible on the left and wood panelling of the compartment in the background

A selfie of a white woman with long dark hair (me) in a long horizontal mirror under a bunk bed covered in blue train fabric. Behind me there is a train window and another bunk bed

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This review is making The Uprising’s treatment of the Peasants’ Revolt sound like Maidstone’s tribute to Wat Tyler — naming a grotty stretch of the one-way system between the big Sainsbury’s and a pay-and-display car park ‘Wat Tyler Way’

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

GenAI is ‘very good for animals,’ says Danny Boyle, as yet another data centre destroys the meagre land we’ve left for animals to live on and the light, noise and thermal pollution it creates puts all the animals in the surrounding area at risk

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M a r c u s 🏳️‍🌈🇧🇧 @marcusjdl.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

You’d think Cambridge would have more vigorous recruitment policies than hiring such dodgy white men! DEI has gone too far!

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

One of the joys of finishing my book is that I can write about things that aren't Star Wars again. Here, I talk about the inescapable sadness of the very funny Coyote vs Acme - by way of corporate media, Roger Rabbit, and coyote-shaped craters in the ground. www.beccaeharrison.com/aftergloam-c...

beccaeharrison.com

Strange Beast: The Tragedy of the Toons and Toontown in Coyote vs Acme

In the wake of a long succession of origin stories based on studio intellectual properties that flip-reverse the hero-villain dynamic to eke out every last bit of audience cash at the box office...

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

This rocks, I am 100% getting involved

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Visit to In Other Worlds at the Barbican (on for another week). It’s packed with multimedia stories but left me flat - some of the more emotive pieces about colonialism and climate change are smothered by the project’s overall tech determinism. Enjoyed its celebration of filmic world-building though

A metallic blue-green fragment of what looks like a computer part is embedded in a piece of rock that reveals amethyst on its outer edge

A pink-lit astronaut-diver figure hangs in front of a large screen on which three more of the figures dance among multicoloured clouds. A caption reads ‘We dance for the rivers whose waters have been poisoned and twisted’

Lichen appears to grow on a brightly, intensely pink-lit tree trunk

Three screen shows different scenes from documentaries about technologies that are claimed to help combat climate change. The sceeens hang in a dimly lit car park

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Can anyone point me to research or findings on the impacts of data centres on surrounding plants, animals, and/or fungi? Library catalogue search is showing stuff on water, heat, etc. but not specifically wildlife. Maybe I’m using the wrong search terms? Suggestions appreciated!

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Yesterday we visited the Hold to This Earth exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The pieces are expansive, detailed, moving, provocative, so many things. The indoor space felt a bit small for the scale of the show but that aside it’s so worth a trip. On til April 2027 ysp.org.uk/whats-on/exh...

ysp.org.uk

Hold to This Earth: Works by Contemporary Indigenous North American Artists from Tia Collection | Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Headlining our 2026 programme is a major presentation of work by contemporary Indigenous American artists from Tia Collection. Bringing together 65 works b

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Currently writing about Coyote vs Acme, incl the tragedy of the commons by way of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, owning our narratives but not *owning* narratives via Greek myth, and what it means for a cartoon coyote to make an actual crater in the earth. The film is a strange beast, but a good one

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The first album I ever owned aged 5 was a Dolly compilation. People used to think my childhood obsession with her was funny/weird. But now it seems more like evidence of her immense talent for crafting stories that spoke to so many people with so many perceived differences (age included!)

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UCU Westminster @ucuwestminster.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

"Jason Arday did not die alone. He died in a world that made his ascent a symbol, his scrutiny a sport, and his collapse a lesson about the institutions that used him." paulddf.substack.com/p/who-killed...

paulddf.substack.com

Who Killed Jason Arday?

Earlier this afternoon, my oldest boyhood friend, a distinguished international lawyer who received his doctorate at Cambridge, called me to share the tragic news that Jason Arday, the Black British a...

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

To reassure the people who think universities hiring senior staff closely scrutinise white candidates’ track records - I… just lol at the very idea. When senior management decide they want someone, no matter intellectually vacuous, bullying, or inexperienced, that’s who they get

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

The BBC inviting an academic famous for resigning from their job (over disagreements about their work) to comment on the Arday case seems like a legit programming call. But when said transphobic academic’s work contributes to erasing trans people from existence?! Ffs where to even start with that

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Tits McGee @scientits.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

I am going to be reminding you again tomorrow, but this consultation closes next Tuesday 4th August If you haven't already completed it, please set aside some time to do so this weekend - it's really important

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Bridget Phillipson, reflecting on her years spent standing idly by while UK higher education crumbled into the abyss and tens of thousands of university workers implored her to do something, literally anything, to save their jobs: BUT WHAT ABOUT ME THO www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

theguardian.com

‘It hurts to lose a job you love’: Starmer loyalist Bridget Phillipson fights on despite cabinet demotion

Exclusive: The former education secretary on her new role as Labour chair and continuing as the minister for women and equalities

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Kirsty Grainger @kirstygrainger.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Earlier this year UKRI launched a funding call to invest £40M in ONE AI lab. www.ukri.org/opportunity/... For some unknown reason they decided to fund TWO AI labs at the cost of £60M. An extra £20M. Just found. That's the equivalent of 7 more years of Jodrell Bank. www.ukri.org/news/ukri-la...

ukri.org

UKRI launches two AI research labs to stay ahead in global race

Two new labs will back British researchers to develop next generation artificial intelligence (AI) systems, helping secure the UK’s position as a global leader.

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

‘Growth in every postcode’ = every postcode gets a data centre Dealing with the cost of living crisis = you can’t afford heating, but you can huddle beside the heat-emitting data centres Sorting water quality = there’s no shit in the rivers because there are no rivers because data centres

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Guess when you’ve spent a large part of your filmmaking career making derivative work reliant on cultural appropriation, and leveraged your enormous power to force technological change on exhibitors with no thought for workers, using genAI must be like breathing www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ju...

theguardian.com

George Lucas likens AI sceptics to luddites clinging to horses and carts

Star Wars director calls AI technology ‘the future’ of film-making and says ‘there’s nothing you can do about it’

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

On the off-chance anyone is travelling between Cornwall and Leeds on Sun 12 July I have a train ticket that’s not being used anymore owing to a change of plans. It’s non-refundable, so at this point would be glad for someone else to get the use of it

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Tech firms should release environmental data on AI and universities should measure use. But there's tonnes of research on the ecological impacts of gen AI and data centres already - PRODUCED BY ACADEMICS IN UNIVERSITIES. The evidence is not hidden, it's just that sector 'leaders' don't care

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Listening to a BBC news report about racist riots in Belfast. Describing men as ‘dressed in black and wearing masks’ is a really roundabout way of saying ‘white’

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dr joshua phillips @woolfianjosh.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Kier Starmer: “felt cute, might delete the university sector later 👁️ 👄 👁️ “

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

How anyone, let alone the CEO of Universities UK, can discuss young people’s disillusionment without addressing her peers culling 1000s upon 1000s of university staff is beyond me. They may not have oversight of loans but they are responsible for devaluing degrees www.theguardian.com/education/20...

theguardian.com

Shrinking graduate premium sours views on value of a university education, UK poll shows

Worries over AI and loan debt mean 34% of people think degrees are usually not worth the time and money

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

With poor turnout expected for The Mandalorian and Grogu, I spoket to Hanna Flint alongside @clarisseloughrey.bsky.social for Hanna's deep dive on where Star Wars has gone wrong. (It may feel like homework because I'm mid-book, but the overproduction is very real) www.bbc.co.uk/culture/arti...

bbc.co.uk

'It's felt like homework': Why Star Wars went so wrong

The Mandalorian & Grogu is released this week and is set for the lowest opening weekend of any Star Wars film ever. With the TV shows also struggling, here's why interest is waning.

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Having watched MAFS in the past, when a family teen started on the most recent series I tuned in so we could talk about what healthy, toxic, and abusive relationships look like because the show couldn’t be trusted to. I’m only surprised this hasn’t come out till now www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

bbc.co.uk

Married at First Sight UK brides say they were raped by onscreen husbands

Channel 4 was aware of one of the rape claims before broadcast, but the woman involved still featured in the show.

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Probably my favourite thing about writing a book is taking hours of National Archives research on, say, the 1970s scrap metal industry in Britain, and turning it into one (1) sentence before realising there’s a related but distinct topic you need to discuss that you have no source material for

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Wait til he finds out that loads of university managers have already stripped degrees of critical and creative material and turned them into debt-inducing technical proficiency pipelines to industry

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Rachel Moss @menysnoweballes.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

12 May is Mass Observation Day in the UK! If you want to be part of this cool ongoing social history project, read more here - massobs.org.uk/12th-may/

massobs.org.uk

12th May - Mass Observation Archive

Our 12th May diary day is your chance to be part of recording everyday life. Sending us your dairy helps us record everyday life in the UK.

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Just saw a Linkedin post in which someone's calculated the cost *to universities* of UK academics doing peer review work, as if any academic in the year 2026 is peer reviewing research during paid hours, or even at this point being paid at all

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Saw these newt tadpoles feeding on a pond flower on my evening walk. Looking at the photo makes me feel we passed into a strange and murky netherworld. Like haunted Victorian spirit photography, but newts

Two newt tadpoles feeding on a pink-stemmed flower in a murky grey-green pond. Whiteish reflections on the water’s surface give it an ethereal quality.

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 06/05/2026

“The suit, filed by actor Q’orianka Kilcher, alleges that Cameron ‘extracted her facial features’ and ‘directed his design team’ to base the key Avatar character Neytiri on her appearance after seeing her in an LA Times advert for Terrence Malick’s 2005 film The New World.”

theguardian.com

Indigenous actor sues James Cameron for ‘stealing’ her facial features for Avatar character

Suit says director used Q’orianka Kilcher’s features without permission after seeing her in advert for The New World

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Travelling down to Brighton for a research day at Sussex tomorrow on film and the environment, where I'll be talking about the practical and digital erasure of wild animals, plants, and fungi on Star Wars location shoots, and how animals are corporately re-branded as creatures to be exploited as IP

A grey-white horse wearing a costume made of long synthetic grey fur and a saddle is attended to by human crew on the set of The Last Jedi.

A black and white puffin, one of the animal species affected by location shoots for the Star Wars sequel films, stands on a cliff edge overlooking the sea.

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Browsing Met Gala photos and sooo many are like eliminated-in-week-5 Drag Race looks. If you're getting wrapped in celluloid at least go for an interesting silhouette?! Or say something about the (fossil, animal) material? Or the medium's political potential? That one really sums up the banality

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Dead excited to share that my forthcoming book 'A Star Wars World' will be out next May with @bloomsburyacademic.bsky.social. It's an accessible/trade deep-dive into the labour, materials, designs, locations, and animals and plant lives that the franchise has depended on over the past 50 years

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Sam Thomas @literarymetal.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

This May 4th, I’m very happy to launch the CFP for a major scholarly conference on Star Wars, which will take place at Durham University in 2027. Please share widely across your networks and indeed to anyone who might be interested! starwarsat50.webspace.durham.ac.uk

starwarsat50.webspace.durham.ac.uk

Call for Papers - Star Wars at 50: Forces, Forms, Legacies

A one-day scholarly conference at Durham University scheduled for May 7th 2027.

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

The Last Jedi is actually a pretty close remake of The Empire Strikes Back and nowhere near as radical or breakaway a Star Wars film as people like to think it is

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

For #Maythe4th 2026... All the Star Wars films, Ranked! The Global Heating and Jet-Fuel Shortage Edition i.e., I calculated the films' aviation emissions based on one crew member flying to all locations. Solo comes out least worst (breathe easy, you still don't have to like the prequels)

A table showing aviation emissions in kg CO2e for the 11 Star Wars feature films, listed 1-11 as follows:
1 Solo, 4084
2 The Empire Strikes Back, 4400
3 Return of the Jedi, 4821
4 The Phantom Menace, 5004
5 The Rise of Skywalker, 5558
6 A New Hope, 5570
7 The Force Awakens, 8159
8 The Last Jedi, 8163
9 Rogue One, 10211
10 Attack of the Clones, 14823
11 Revenge of the Sith, 17501

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will pooley @willpooley.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

hard numbers here from @brodiewaddell.bsky.social are pretty sobering 1 PhD awarded for every 5.5 current staff in history departments in the UK. for all PhD students to take up a full time post this means a historian’s career should av. < 6 years postphd🗃️ manyheadedmonster.com/2026/04/23/h...

manyheadedmonster.com

Historians, PhDs and Jobs in 2026

Brodie Waddell When I last wrote about the employment situation for historians back in 2023, the situation was not looking very bright. It has, however, somehow gotten much worse since then. This s…

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Becca Harrison @beccaeharrison.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

At the stage of book writing that feels something like Wake up: book. Work: book. Rest: But also book? The bit where you're dreaming in endnotes

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