Tim Hitchcock

Now go see the Bicycle Thief.

Francesco Algarotti (1712-1764), Venetian polymath, champion of Newtonianism; friend of Voltaire & Émilie du Châtelet, patron of Tiepolo, commissioned Panini’s View of Pantheon c 1734, & owned Liotard’s La belle Chocolatière c 1744.
NGADC |Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister | Liotard portrait Rijksmuseum

The Bills are much less explored and there is now a freely available, beautifully cleaned dataset.

If they have a historical bent both the Bills of Mortality (300 years of London death stats) or the Old Bailey Online are fun.

The Ship Bedford: Atlantic and Archival Crossings in the Long Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade British History in the Long 18th Century Seminar

Really pleased to see the recording of Phillippa Hellawell (TNA) & Liberty Paterson (TNA)'s seminar on The Ship Bedford and the slave trade @long18thsem.bsky.social @ihrlibrary.bsky.social www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

I suspect vector maths people would argue the ability to model the relationship between any given word and the millions that give it context take the process a little beyond collage.

Not to advocate for LLMs but our object of study is the layer of inherited words and images and landscapes upon which LLMs are built. What we don't have is a clear agreement about how that relates to a knowable truth.

Gender critical folks also don't believe us when we tell them "sex-based rights" is an idea they themselves made up in just the last handful of years.

Hiring established scholars to junior Oxbridge roles imperils disciplines As lay-offs continue elsewhere, postdocs’ inability to land permanent roles will block the pipeline of future faculty, Cambridge academics argue

Raises some important issues but also ignores the fact that many Humanities staff outside the magic circle are facing redundancy. They are naturally willing, indeed desperate, to apply for entry-level Oxbridge posts. The situation is grim. 1/2

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

Librarian & Executive Director of the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut, 06032 | Other at Yale University Apply for Librarian & Executive Director of the Lewis Walpole Library job with Yale University in Farmington, Connecticut, 06032. Other at Yale University

JOB ALERT 📜📚

Librarian & executive director of Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library (Farmington, CT)

•Research center for 18th-century Britain
•You’d report to the fabulous Michelle Light

careers.yale.edu/us/en/job/13...

Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years Interior Minister Davor Božinović announced Friday that Croatia is officially free of landmines. Thirty-one years after the end of the Homeland War, all known minefields have been cleared — a major milestone for the country.

Croatia 🇭🇷 declared free of landmines after 31 years

glashrvatske.hrt.hr/...

⚓️ [Land Mine action Ukraine 🇺🇦](demine.gov.ua/en)

The Body as Property and the Moral Limits of the Market: Attitudes towards the Sex Trade in Eighteenth-Century England This article explores understandings and attitudes surrounding the nature of commercial sex and the moral limits of the market in eighteenth-century England. It examines this contested commodificat...

Hot off the press and available open access. #Skystorians

Great to see @polly-lowe.bsky.social 's article on 'The body as property' available on open access:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2025.2570609#abstract A really smart analysis of Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies and 18th c. attitudes to commercial sex.

The Lewis Walpole collection of British Art at Yale is great and free for both academics and commercial publications. Given the changing copyright situation in both the US and UK, people should start pushing the repositories more.

It is also just cheaper and more efficient. It is not even about compassion.

‘A Christ Church Set’: Exploring the Discourse of Political Friendship in Late Hanoverian Britain, 1780s-1830s

Very much looking forward to @brendantam.bsky.social speaking about political friendship in the late 18thc. @long18thsem.bsky.social next Wed. @ihrlibrary.bsky.social All welcome either in person or online, but please register www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

CFP: Race, Law and Empire

The pancake bakery, 1560, Northern Mannerist work by Dutch artist Pieter Aertsen. Known as ‘the Dutch Peiraikos’, he created monumental genre, with sturdy figures in domestic scenes of intense realism, often of religious significance. #shrovetuesday
@boijmans.nl

I enjoyed the comment, and thought it got a lot right. Getting historians to shift so much as an inch on any of this has been the vane work of decades. Citation alone is a disaster. What I don't see is any engagement with character of the post-AI data landscape - which we really need to talk about.

18TH CENTURY BRITISH HISTORY PHD LIGHTNING TALKS CFP

Are you at the start of your PhD? Want to tell an eager and engaged audience about it in 5 mins? We want to hear the best PGR research about 18th Britain at our #LightningTalks event 29 April 2026.

Please see the poster for further information!

Three speakers at the front of a room with a screen behind. The audience in the foreground.

A great talk by Philippa Hellawell and Liberty Paterso on ship biography and the 18th c. slave trade @long18thsem.bsky.social @ihrlibrary.bsky.social

Bill Turkel and I have just published an article in DHQ. It is about the emergence of Manslaughter as a charge at the Old Bailey, and the working methods we used to analyse the data. dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/19/4/000... Thanks to Gabor Toth for shepherding it through peer review.

The Ship Bedford: Atlantic and Archival Crossings in the Long Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade

Very much looking forward to @pbhellawell.bsky.social & @libertypaterson.bsky.social talking about The Ship Bedford and the Atlantic Slave Trade next Wed. @long18thsem.bsky.social @ihrlibrary.bsky.social All welcome, either online or in person, but please register www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

For anyone interested in our 18-month post in British Studies please follow the link below. @ihr.bsky.social

www.jobs.london.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

A new role at the IHR, supporting the 2027 NACBS conference to be held in Senate House. It looks like a great position. www.jobs.london.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

Towns, gestures, elections, sociability and time: An appreciation of the work of Professor Penelope J. Corfield

Very much looking forward to celebrating Penny Corfield's history writing on Wednesday www.history.ac.uk/news-events/... @long18thsem.bsky.social @ihrlibrary.bsky.social All welcome both online and in person, but please register.

Senate House Library launches Printer in Residence Scheme Senate House Library is seeking to appoint a Printer in Residence, to produce a contemporary response to the Caxton and Beyond exhibition.

In February 2026 @senatehouselib.bsky.social is seeking to appoint a Printer in Residence.

This is to be an important part of the public engagement programme for the upcoming exhibition ‘The English Print Revolution: Caxton and Beyond’, and to provide a contemporary response to it in print.

1/3

Very generous prize for an essay of up to 8,000 words

Some example academic book proposal forms in case they help A pivotal moment in my academic career, or at least one I remember clearly, was when a very senior professor in the US sent me his book proposal for an acade...

Here are 8 successful *proposals* for academic books/monographs. I am hoping that these help someone who is starting out trying to write one and wants to see what worked for me. They are provided as examples, rather than exemplars. A lot of it was just finding my own way eve.gd/2026/01/16/s...