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Sally Barnden

@sally-barnden.bsky.social
472 followers 995 following 86 posts

Early modern drama enthusiast. Lecturer in Literature and Visual Culture at Swansea University. Aspiring climber and successful cat person.

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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Does anyone know of a good Pericles available to stream online? I've tended to use the Stratford Festival one on DigitalTheatre+ but I don't love it--it seems the Globe and RSC have been remiss about recording their Pericleses
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Jacquelyn Gill @jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I am delighted to be on several “unhinged about AI” lists because of my firm believe that human beings should not participate in our own deskilling and replacement for the further enrichment of tech billionaires. Yes, please block me. Cleanse my timeline of your creepy pick-me energy.
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emer mchugh’s the devils @emer.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
PSA: i’m open for copyediting/indexing work! get in contact if you’re interested in working together. ps i don’t use AI too, i’m just some autistic guy with a stickler for detail 🫶🏻
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Dr Ian McCormick @wokestudies.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
"AI is the asbestos we're shovelling into the walls of our technological society. Our descendants will spend generations digging it out again, and the longer the bubble goes on without popping, the longer it will take to repair the damage." www.thenerve.news/p/cory-docto...
thenerve.news
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our t...
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Rebekah Higgitt @rhiggitt.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
A depressingly long list of universities who are implementing cuts and redundancies, as well as the petitions and actions against them (via @onslies.bsky.social) qmucu.org/qmul-transfo.... This is a national emergency that should be responded to with national policy.
qmucu.org
UK HE shrinking
a live page of all the redundancies and restructures happening across UK Higher Education. Page is updated regularly.
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George Eaton @georgeeaton.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Reform have now lost six by-elections in a row in England, Scotland and Wales. Their national poll rating is 26% – below Labour in 1983 – and Farage’s approval rating is -37. They’re very far from the voice of the people and need to stop being treated as such.
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 07/06/2026
This year's Shakespeare Survey review (productions outside London) is at FOUR Macbeths, a Twelfth Night, a Henry V and an Othello. Heading up to see Branagh's Tempest (The Kenpest?) this week
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 07/06/2026
Adventures with Booking dot com because my reservation for four nights in Verona next month has been arbitrarily moved to a hotel in Rome that I'm fairly sure does not exist....
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Travelling on the Milford Haven to Manchester line, it seems like an oversight that there are no Welsh language announcements at the English stations on rail lines that cross (or follow!) the border. Now leaving Shrewsbury (Amwythig!)
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Emily Rowe @emilyrowe1.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Exciting Thursday… my book manuscript is complete and SENT 🥂⚒️
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
c.org/9xFq2PcqbT
c.org
Sign the Petition
Save the Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire
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Hallie Rubenhold @hallierubenhold.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
Here we go again. Every so often tech makes an incursion into history, completely ignores that history is a rigorous discipline with a methodology, and then claims that a mystery or issue that historians have grappled with can be solved with an algorithm. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
Scientists believe they have found previously unknown sketch of Anne Boleyn
A computer science team believes they have discovered a previously unknown sketch of King Henry VIII's second wife - but not everyone is convinced.
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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
The "death" of English departments and other liberal arts fields is not about their obsolescence but about the fact that they're being actively *killed* by institutions that don't value them on principle, not because of any evidence. Glad ppl are catching up. www.nybooks.com/online/2023/...
nybooks.com
Letter from an English Department on the Brink | Sarah Blackwood
I write to you with news about the state of the English major at one nonelite, midsize, regional comprehensive private university in New York City. At
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Dr. Jens Foell @jensfoell.de · 15/04/2026
OpenAI: We’re burning money like the Joker. A miracle needs to happen for us to turn a profit Microsoft: Please please use our AI systems, we’re teetering on the edge here Anthropic: I wonder what’ll kill us first: lawsuits, regulations or model collapse Media and universities: AI is here to stay
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Lucy Munro @lucycmunro.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
Found a Shakespeare thing; wrote about it in @thetls.bsky.social: www.the-tls.com/regular-feat....
the-tls.com
A man of property
Just outside the City of London, in the secluded streets once occupied by the monastic precinct of the Black Friars, is an unassuming warehouse building
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Nadine Akkerman @misswalsingham.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
👇 😍
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👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻 @oldenoughtosay.com · 08/04/2026
all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 21/03/2026
Time for a moratorium on pre-recorded whispery witch voices in Macbeth productions. As spooky effects go it’s fine, but I think I’ve now seen 4 productions do this in the last couple of years so we need to put it to bed for a while. Let your witch actors say their lines!
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Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
🚨 It looks like the UK government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft of their work. This is despite creatives' huge protests, and despite previous proposals being roundly rejected by the public. Please spread the word. 🧵 1/4
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Dr Miranda Fay Thomas (they/she) @drmirandafay.bsky.social · 01/03/2026
I have decided, purely for my own amusement, to start a thread of critical quotes about Falstaff, but illustrating them with an image of Mr Blobby. '...a character deeper than life, a wit unmatched by anyone merely real whom we will ever know' (A. C. Bradley)
media.tenor.com
a clown in a pink and yellow polka dot costume is standing on a stage
ALT: a clown in a pink and yellow polka dot costume is standing on a stage
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EarlyModernista @ellierycroft.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
A real joy to put my work into dialogue with Roberta Magnani's at Swansea University's MEMO event today. Many thanks to @sally-barnden.bsky.social for the invitation to do so!
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Bridger Bartlett @allo-nothing.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
Delighted to share the finalized flyers for my practice-as-research event next month! 🤩 Concluding performance is open to all and will be opened by a critical/contextual talk from me. Happy to set up a Zoom link if anyone is interested in tuning in from beyond Swansea!
Flyer advertising my neuroqueer early modern Morris dancing event happening at 4pm on 7 March in the Taliesin Studio on the Swansea University Singleton Park campus. Spellings and formatting mimic early modern print. And composite image of Will Kemp morris dancing and the effeminate man on the front of Haec Vir is featured.Welsh translation of the English-language flyer.
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
I gave a lecture on As You Like It yesterday and somehow Panopto was set to expect it to be in Welsh, so it has auto-generated Welsh captions based on its best estimate of what I was saying, and has generated some real nonsense (but sheep ARE bad at everyone’s learning, to be fair)
Sentence from lecture: “so we don’t really see Rosalind working at these alternative identities, as Wilder says she seems to have this kind of power of change fullness, that the different identities can just be presented wholesale and will be accepted by the people she’s speaking to”
Panopto auto-generated Welsh caption: “Symuda re r Iesu am rodd o lyn cerfwedd cyn iddi ddod hen y defaid yn wael ar ddysg pawb Yr oedd teim ffon nes y diffynydd Anti Presented holds ail yn bobi eg stated sbecyn tew”
Google translate: “the word of Jesus moves for a gift from Lyn cervewdd before it becomes old the sheep are bad at everyone’s learning There was a stick until the defendant Anti Presented holds ail baking eg stated a fat pack”
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Glen O'Hara @gsoh31.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
Beyond a tiny hardcore of rich universities, if you are an employee in UK Higher Ed you will be somewhere on the treadmill/ slippery slope below. You'll recognise exactly which step you are on at this moment. Take a look. 👇
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
trying to give appropriate focus to a very interesting research meeting while Howl's tail wiggles back and forth through my Zoom window and everyone politely ignores it
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Sunny Moraine @dynamicsymmetry.bsky.social · 28/12/2025
This is just going to always be my go-to response to this kind of thing anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...
I do understand: you want permission. There's a machine in the corner wrapped in human skin that makes things out of shit and blood to look like whatever you want (as long as you don't look too closely). You gave one to your teacher and they didn't notice. Your boss told you to use it after they laid off half the team and it was fine. You fed one to your kids and they liked it. You want to know you can use it sometimes without me thinking less of you. You don't need me to believe it's useful, you just want me to be polite about it.

But I am a hater, and I will not be polite. The machine is disgusting and we should break it. The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
a seasonal research query: does anyone know of any sources on the cultural history of snowmen? what's the earliest reference we have to temporary snow-sculptures? (humanoid especially, but also more generally!)
Raymond Briggs's illustration of 'The Snowman' - a tall snowman with three black buttons, a green hat and scarf and an enigmatic smile, in pastel shades.
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Anna Aslanyan @anna-aslanyan.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
British Library staff asked for a decent pay. Instead they got ‘a few money-saving present ideas’, such as ‘consider not giving presents this holiday season’. They are on strike this week. I wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...
lrb.co.uk
Anna Aslanyan | On the Picket Line
On Monday morning, more than a hundred people formed a picket line outside one of the entrances to the British Library...
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lucynoakes1.bsky.social @lucynoakes1.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
Ongoing decimation of British universities part 252: Apx. 1000 academic staff at University of Essex just received formal ‘risk of redundancy’ letters via email. Please share @ucuessex.bsky.social @ucu.org.uk
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Elizabeth Kolkovich @ezkolkovich.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
Attention #EarlyModern and #Shakespeare friends: join me on this Giving Tuesday in donating to an Open Access fund for Meghan C. Andrews’s book. Cancer took Meghan from us in 2023, but her legacy can live on. Share widely!
gofundme.com
Donate to Help Publish Meghan's Shakespeare Monograph, organized by Sarah Neville
Shakespeare scholar Meghan C Andrews passed away in 2023, after a valiant… Sarah Neville needs your support for Help Publish Meghan's Shakespeare Monograph
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
my student has decided completely unprompted that she wants to write about Lust’s Dominion (or, the lascivious queen, etc). Suspect I know the answer here but—is there a decent edition?
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Greg Jenner (Historian) @gregjenner.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
Well worth a read. It’s so sad what AI is doing to students’ ability to think for themselves👇
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Pascale Aebischer (she/her) @pascaleexeter.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
Mary Baldwin University is embarking on drastic cuts of its liberal arts programme and of humanities subjects more generally. A bad case of mishandled management, and colleagues and students will suffer as a result (including #AmericanShakespeareCenter!) Sign the petition here: c.org/VmXd75Pf7h
c.org
Sign the Petition
Protect MBU's Liberal Arts Legacy
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Eoin Price @eoinprice.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
ON STRIKE AGAIN BECAUSE THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH REFUSES TO RULE OUT COMPULSORY REDUNDANCIES!
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Writeups.org @writeups.org · 12/11/2025
With alt text.
You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out thatwhat a country values can change overtime. Sometimes, though, there's a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you've actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word - but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass - and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island - even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.
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Rob Hawkes @robbhawkes.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
As more of my valued colleagues face the threat of redundancy, here’s a quick reminder that it takes years and years of public investment to train an academic. Cutting someone with this wealth of experience loose isn’t “saving” anything. It is a massive waste of our collective resources.
moneyontheleft.org
UK Universities in Crisis? Time to Transform Higher Ed Finance
by Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson Universities in the UK are in crisis. Job cuts in the sector are reaching ‘cataclysmic’ levels, with an estimated 10,000 already lost and many more at risk. Just da…
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Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP @bellribeiroaddy.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
Israel has illegally intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters, abducting British citizens and seizing ships sailing under British flags. The government must condemn this attack on humanitarians, speak up for their safety and demand their immediate release.
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Laura Phillips @lauraphillips.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
“The former leader of Reform UK in Wales has pleaded guilty to bribery charges relating to making statements in favour of Russia while being an elected member of the European Parliament.” 1/
bbc.co.uk
Ex-Reform UK Wales leader Nathan Gill pleads guilty to bribery charges
Nathan Gill admits eight charges of bribery while being a Member of the European Parliament.
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Cishoot Billionscare @bennettelder.net · 05/09/2025
Your electricity bill is going up because data centers are raising demand, not because your utility started scaling out some renewables. Pass it on.
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
going to write a paragraph in my Two Gents review about how Lossi is unconventional casting for Crab because she's so elegant and has a mournful long greyhound face and generally seems like she might be the wisest character on stage
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
further disincentive for international students is of course *just* what the sector needs at the moment
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
Asking for a student: what is the figure on the right holding in the title-page woodcut to the Haec Vir pamphlet? my first thought was a badminton racket and shuttlecock, but a bit of cursory research into the history of badminton suggests this is unlikely! A handful of feathers and... a spoon?
title-page woodcut from the 1620 pamphlet 'Haec Vir' - two figures in gendered early modern costume
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
Does anyone have institutional access to AM Digital's 'Eighteenth Century Drama' repository? I'm hoping to read Samson Penley's 1818 adaptation of 'The Jew of Malta'
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Prof. Liz Oakley-Brown @earlymodlancs.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
- 400 jobs to go at Lancaster University - 1 in 4 people will be made redundant But where's the financial evidence for this extreme action? Please read 👇 Sign the petition 👇 chng.it/7F52bThYqn
chng.it
Sign the Petition
Stop Mass Redundancies at Lancaster University – Hold Senior Management Accountable
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
Does anyone have institutional access to AM Digital's 'Eighteenth Century Drama' repository? I'm hoping to read Samson Penley's 1818 adaptation of 'The Jew of Malta'
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
Rediscovered an offcut from the ‘Royal Actor’ book about Coriolanus, the French Revolution and George IV misunderstanding satires about himself, and I’m tempted to polish it up as a short-ish article. I am technically meant to be doing several other things instead, though
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
the University of Warwick rebrand is deeply embarrassing, but the sad thing is I can also imagine our Head of School showing it off in a meeting as something that we should emulate
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 20/07/2025
suddenly wondering if Sabrina Ghayour is making an Andrew Marvell reference
page of a recipe book with subtitle “vegetable love” and image of sweet pepper, courgettes and pepper grinder
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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 14/07/2025
We're advertising two artist's residencies at Thin Ice Press: the York Centre for Print. Please share! www.thinicepress.org/research/pri...
thinicepress.org
print matters artist’s residencies — Thin Ice Press: the York Centre for Print, offering memberships, workshops, equipment hire, events & exhibition space.
Thin Ice Press: the York Centre for Print welcomes applications for two artist’s residencies, to take place across five days between August and September 2025 as part of our research project: Print ...
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Sally Barnden @sally-barnden.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
Series of personal and professional knock-backs lately, gonna go walk the Salt path* *wales coast path, I’m not facing the M4 in this mood
cliffs near Langland, Swansea
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