Helen Smith
Professor, @UoYEnglish. Printer, @thinicepress.
Opinions mainly culled from the dustier corners of the sixenteenth century.
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- Reposted by Helen Smith🚨 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.
- Reposted by Helen SmithIf 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. 👇&🧵
- 📣 (or 🔔?!) #Skystorians of York & North-East England! Can we tempt you to a free, informal afternoon of #ECR community, support & networking? Join the @historylabplus.bsky.social committee for our 'CHRISTMAS CONNECTIONS@YORK' event on 17 December from 12:00 at York Art Gallery cafe! 👇 for more info
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- 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.
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- 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?
- I am writing more about buttocks today than I had anticipated.
- Reposted by Helen SmithIn London, hate will never win.
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- 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.
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- 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/...
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- Reposted by Helen SmithThanks 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...
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- 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.
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- 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...
- Say you were going to a mega Shakespeare conference, perhaps next week, and had the chance to visit the most delightful of small presses and teaching facilities, what would appeal to you most as a souvenir bookmark to print and take home?
- So far I have: 'Mark you this' (Othello) 'A mark! O, mark but that mark!' (Love's Labour's Lost) 'Mark thou my words' (Winter's Tale) 'She hath been reading late' (Cymbeline; I love this but the context is ... not great) 'A book? O, rare one.' (also Cymbeline) 'Words, words, words' (Hamlet, obvs)
- THEY WERE ALREADY LISTED IN THE CATALOGUE. theonion.com/scholars-dis...
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- 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 '.
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- 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!
- A contributor has had to withdraw from something I'm editing, late in the day. I'm looking for a sprightly 10,000 book historical words on the broad theme of 'consumers/consumption' and the period 1450-1650 (not necessarily all of it).
- Open to teachers, academics, writers, policymakers, and anyone else with an interest in how English is taught and what it means for us.
