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Anna Girling

@annagirling.bsky.social

1.4K followers 630 following 60 posts

Teaching English at the University of Edinburgh. Generally reading, writing, day dreaming. Writing and thinking about Edith Wharton, Nancy Cunard, modernism, decadence, anti-colonialism, anti-fascism, cosmopolitanism, & other people and things like that.

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Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · Jun 13

A complete honour to be able to write about Una Marson and her magazine, The Cosmopolitan, for @thetls.bsky.social: www.the-tls.co.uk/politics-soc... There is so much I didn't get to include, but hopefully this gives a taste of the importance & scope of Marson's Cosmopolitan - in Jamaica, & beyond.

Our young people

“Where there is no vision the people perish.” With this proverb, the Cosmopolitan, a new Jamaican magazine, announced itself to the world in May 1928.

www.the-tls.co.uk

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Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · 1d

'Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.'

(Oscar Wilde, 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism', 1891 - full text here: www.marxists.org/reference/ar...)

Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · 2d

PS @atarbuck.bsky.social have been reading Pink Witch - and loved your My Little Pony poem!!

Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · 2d

oh no! Rivals was a seriously important book to me at a key teenage moment - it sustained me through the bleak grimness of Higher Physics, etc. (in a beloved copy that had belonged to my mother I think - and was later stolen by an awful person who ended up on Celebrity Big Brother!).

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Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · 2d

'I find earth as beautiful as heaven, and the body as beautiful as the soul. If I do live again I would like it to be as a flower — no soul but perfectly beautiful. Perhaps for my sins I shall be made a red geranium!!' Oscar Wilde dissing the (suburban? bourgeois?) red geranium in 1885.

Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · 3d

Wonderful - lucky you!

Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · 5d

can't wait for your Swift/Pynchon double review

Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · 5d

Congratulations Kate!

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Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · 6d

As Jane Goldman says, would Nancy Cunard not have been on that flotilla?

Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · 6d

Nancy Cunard in 1938, spelling out the links between 'articifically constructed race "superiority" & "inferiority"; the Nazi "Aryan" farce acted out in blood, Mussolini's brutal "pacifications," Anti-Semitic campaigns, & the setting of Arab against Jews throughout North Africa, Syria and Palestine.'

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Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · 6d

Very sad to hear about the death of John Lucas. Among all of his other achievments, I have always been grateful to him for his 2005 edition of Nancy Cunard's poetry with Trent Editions– I think it was the first republication of her poems & laid the groundwork for a lot of subsequent interest in her.

Deryn Rees-Jones @notjustdancing.bsky.social · 13d

John Lucas (1937-2025) — poet, novelist, critic, teacher, editor of the incredible Shoestring Press…cornet player, cricket lover, socialist, enabler, and kindest and dearest of friends

Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · 7d

'I'm a very aesthetic person' vs. 'I'm an aesthete'

Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · 8d

This is huge (though I can’t help but think that the years of my PhD I spent downloading the library of Alexandria in PDF form in anticipation of being cut off really shaped me as a researcher).

Warwick History Post-Doc Club @post-doc-club.bsky.social · 8d

Great news!
JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month

www.jstor.org/action/showL...

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Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · 11d

hand-drawn angels from the cover of one of Sylvia Townsend Warner's scrap-books and on the plaster above a cell door in a fourteenth-century Umbrian convent

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Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · 12d

Some images from Wael Shawky’s amazing opera Drama: 1882 - first shown at last year’s Biennale and now on as part of an exhibition of his work at the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh. It ends tomorrow - I highly recommend catching it if you can!

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Reposted by Anna Girling

Alan Lester @alanlester.bsky.social · 13d

Stephen Mullen, a highly regarded historian specialising in Scotland's links with Atlantic slavery, objects to a right wing scholar's flagrant misrepresentation of his own work and that of Glasgow's Kelvingrove Museum's curators in @thetimes.com

alanlester.co.uk/blog/falsify...

Falsifying Heritage: The Denial and Disavowal of Glasgow’s Links with Atlantic Slavery

By Stephen Mullen In a recent article in The Times, (‘Scottish Taxpayers should not have to pay the price for Slavery, 7 June 2025), Professor Nigel Biggar misrepresented an exhibition in Glasgow’s…

alanlester.co.uk

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Reposted by Anna Girling

School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC) @uoe-llc.bsky.social · Jun 6

Can literature’s ‘what if’ questions help us reset our relationship with money? Dive into speculative fiction and the emerging field of the Economic Humanities in the new episode of Beyond the Books ft. Paul Crosthwaite, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature.

Full ep: youtu.be/hWlrWuaz5IQ

Extract from a podcast episode where the speaker says virtually every sci-fi text of film will have a kind of money.

Extract from a podcast episode where the speaker says these [speculative] genres are really good at prompting us to ask what if questions

Extract from a podcast episode where the speaker asks what are radically imaginative ways in which economic reality can be reconceived?

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Anna Girling @annagirling.bsky.social · 24d

BBC radio news this afternoon was cheerfully describing the march as largely peaceful and 'celebratory' in tone – before cutting to Yaxley-Lennon screaming about it being time to 'rise up'...

Reposted by Anna Girling

eldanjof.bsky.social @eldanjof.bsky.social · Sep 8

@ucuedinburgh.bsky.social FIRST DAY OF WELCOME WEEK STRIKE ACTION ‼️#StopTheCuts

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Reposted by Anna Girling

Grant Buttars @gbuttars.bsky.social · Sep 8

Today is the first of 5 strike days by @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social #DefendEveryJob www.ucuedinburgh.org.uk/welcome-week...

Welcome Week strike — UCU Edinburgh

www.ucuedinburgh.org.uk

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Reposted by Anna Girling

UCU Scotland @ucuscotland.bsky.social · Sep 8

Busy @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social picket lines this morning at Edinburgh University with staff striking to defend jobs and oppose the biggest cuts seen in Scottish higher education #SaveHE #NoCompulsoryRedundancies #StopTheCuts