iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

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.

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Sarah Wride @srwride.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

If you’re a #Humanities #ECR & in/willing to travel to York on 17 December, join me & the @historylabplus.bsky.social team for our 2025 ‘Christmas Connections’ event, a FREE & informal opportunity to support each other, build professional connections, & sample the city’s heritage & eatables. 👇&🧵

sas.ac.uk

Christmas Connections @ York

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

I might have missed it, but I'm surprised no-one has picked old-fashioned printing. It's great to see pixels people getting hands on with ink and type!

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Hannah Murphy @hsmurphy.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

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 🗃️

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Jim Waterson @jim.londoncentric.media · 01/10/2025

House prices will be our last bulwark against fascism.

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

Thank you! That is really interesting to know.

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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.

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

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

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will pooley @willpooley.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

do my clever and knowledgeable followers have examples of historians writing (eg journal article or book chapter) about their own *failures* in interesting ways? eg research goes wrong, wrong questions etc 🗃️

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

I am in the middle of writing something a bit like this, although I am not a historian and it remains to be seen whether the end result will be interesting!

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

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?

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

This question is opening up a whole new world of nun-rear adjacent foodstuffs!

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

Books are assumed to be middle-class & decorative. People who read are assumed to have space to house them & leisure to read them. Wanting to have books to consult at work is seen as self-indulgent rather than practical, despite copious evidence that we read and remember physical books differently.

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

The more I think about it, the more furious I am at the class politics barely hidden in the refusal to consider books as serious scholarly tools. Universities don't tell physicists they need to keep their lasers at home.

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

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

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

And wondering if I could carry off the greeting proposed by John Eliot in 1593: 'Come, cullion let me crush thy callibisters with accoling thy buttockes. Shake handes.'

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

I am writing more about buttocks today than I had anticipated.

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Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan @london.gov.uk · 17/09/2025

In London, hate will never win.

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Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

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

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 30/08/2025

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

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 29/08/2025

Oh how gorgeous! It's beautiful.

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

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.'

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

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.

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

A whole article about changes in the sector that doesn't once consider the possibility that universities should be funded to educate students.

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Oliver K. Langmead @oliverklangmead.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

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

change.org

Sign the Petition

Stop Mass Redundancies at Lancaster University – Hold Senior Management Accountable

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

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/...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Ethnographies of Paper in Early Modern England

Click on the article title to read more.

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Jennie Batchelor @jenniebatchelor.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

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?...

youtu.be

Margaret Atwood receives an honorary degree from the University of York

YouTube video by University of York

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Society for Renaissance Studies @srsrensoc.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

#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

Call for Papers: Poetry and Science, From the Renaissance to Enlightenment

University of York, June 26, 2026 - June 27, 2026
Deadline for submission/application: September 30, 2025

Keynote: Katie Murphy

Confirmed Speakers include: Liza Blake, Tita Chico, Jonathan Sawday, Helen Smith, Lizzie Swann

We invite proposals for the final conference of the AHRC-DFG project, ‘Scientific Poetry and Poetics in Britain and Germany, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, 1580-1750’.

From the late 16th and on into the first half of the 18th century, a large body of poetic writing addressed scientific subject matter. The conference explores this mass of scientific poetry – and a corresponding poetics of science – that reveals a vibrant facet of Renaissance, Restoration, and Enlightenment culture: the production not only of ideas, but of new, technical vocabularies and fast-paced neologizing, all forged in the particular demands of poetic form. Poetry, the era believed, did not function as mere ornament, but to reveal deep structures in the created world. This potential was theorized by the period’s emerging literary criticism, a practice that developed in demonstrable parallel with modern ‘science’.

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Susannah Lyon-Whaley @susannah-lw.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

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'!

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

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...

yorkmuseumstrust.org.uk

Edgar Allan Poe-stcards – letterpress workshop | York Museums Trust

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

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.

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

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

A flow chart titled 'What to call your Academic Event', poking fun at academic event titles.

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

But they will march across the landscape, ravaging the heather and exterminating the fledgling wutherings.

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gailrenard.bsky.social @gailrenard.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

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

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

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.

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

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...

universityenglish.ac.uk

Announced: University English Book Prize Winner 2023

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

Thank you Susan. I've had pneumonia, and am making a good recovery, but with a little bit of a wobble. But well in myself, and taking care.

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

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.

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The Poetry Society @poetrysociety.org.uk · 06/07/2025

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!

A zine with a title made of stamps that reads 'Poetry is in the Process'

A white board on which it is written 'How to make a poetry library'. Two zines stuck to the board and a sign saying before standard outcomes of progress comes belief, risk, uncertainty. A poetry library, perhaps.

A toy bike in red and yellow in front of a sign saying Everything starts with an idea (text crossed out). Then ' How do we tend to the space that precedes the idea?

A small zine with a cut-out picture of banana man saying 'There's a whole bunch of stuff going on in my head!'. With the word 'possible' below.

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

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...

little-vikings.co.uk

Unteaching Creative Writing – A free workshop • Little Vikings - York for Kids

How do we keep the creative spark alive, nurture a love of writing in children, or regain that love as adults? In this session we'll look at different techniques and games that unlock the block and ge...

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Helen Smith @wordsmith.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

I'm sure you'll be magnificent, but you shouldn't have to be. It was great to see you today, and thank you for a thoroughly rotten, soil-centred treat of a paper.

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