Looking back at the blog, it appears that it is nearly two years since I last posted a blog. And it turns out a lot can happen in two years.

Lancaster has seen a lot of changes… The history department was subsumed into a School of Global Affairs last summer, and my fixed term contract wasn’t renewed, so I was down to two days a week. Then they announced compulsory redundancies… In the end, they never happened, but it was a difficult period.

In November, I applied for a full time job at Liverpool Hope University, and I was lucky enough to be appointed. I started in my new position in January this year, and I am thoroughly enjoying myself. First, it’s good to be in a full time job, and one with a research element, as my Lancaster roles were on teaching and scholarship contracts. And it is really nice to be able to teach my own modules – an early modern survey course and a short course on the Habsburgs in first year, witchcraft in England and Colonial America in second year, the Spanish conquest of the Americas in third year, and an MA module on Communicating the News in Early Modern Europe. I am also lead of a new Digital Humanities and Culture Research Group, and responsible for liaison between the humanities and Tate Liverpool. I’m settling in well and I’m enjoying being part of a new school. And I’ve just started a new FutureLearn course, paid for by the university, on AI and education, so I expect that there will be more on that soon – long time readers of the blog might remember that I have done several FutureLearn courses in the past, and I wrote a post each week reflecting on what I’d learned, so maybe I will try to get back into that habit.

I’ve also had another publication – at the beginning of March, my article ‘Providence, News and Editorial in Early Modern Ballads‘ was published in early view by the Historical Journal. I’m hoping to write a blog post about it soon. I’ve also submitted revisions on two articles to journals in recent weeks, and I’ve been working on getting the subtitles put on the video of the Jigge so that it can eventually go on the Regional Heritage Centre’s YoutTube channel.

I’ve also been working as administrator again for the Social History Society, and having just completed work on the Society’s 50th Anniversary Conference, I’ve handed in my notice – I think now I have the job at Hope it’s time to hand on the admin role to someone else, so I will be staying on long enough to complete a handover, and then sitting back and enjoying my time as a member of the society rather than looking after it!

There’s no conference news to tell you – I haven’t presented at a conference since 2024, largely because I haven’t got a great deal of research done that I can talk about. In the last 12 months, I’ve mainly been transcribing documents, but I’m not at a stage where I’m analysing them yet. Again, I hope to be able to write a post about it fairly soon but it will be talking about the project, the grant application it feeds into and the research methods rather than anything I’ve found out.

So I’m hoping over the coming months to start updating the blog more regularly. I can’t promise that it will be every week, but I intend to publish another one in less than 18 months!