Jen Gallagher
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jengllagher.bsky.social
Jen Gallagher
@jengllagher.bsky.social
Librarian. Historian. PhD publishing student, working on Wilfred Owen’s publishing history. Over achiever. Super gay.
Reposted by Jen Gallagher
THE BELL JAR

HARD ❌

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York

EASY ✅

That summer was sizzling, and so were the Rosenbergs
November 17, 2024 at 3:03 PM
You may not think that the hours of 6am to 7am are the perfect time for a screaming argument, but my neighbours would like to heartily disagree with you.
May 23, 2025 at 5:53 AM
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I love these old texts, the words somehow feel more poetic, more romantic, more... hang on a minute... ;)
May 22, 2025 at 10:09 PM
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"The nature of forgeries, a subject on which I may boast of some small expertise, is to fool the least discerning, not the most; it is to convince the general public that true greatness never existed, that imitation is reality, that shoddiness is quality. It is an assault on pleasure itself."
May 23, 2025 at 2:16 AM
Spending the morning tracking down articles and chapters to save and upload to the reference manager…totally counts as PhD work, right?

I have done five hours of work today, please say it counts 🙏

#phdlife
May 16, 2025 at 12:45 PM
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Dr Carla Hayden was a truly great Librarian of Congress. It is an outrage that she has been sacked - a national shame on the United States. I had the pleasure of knowing her and working with her - she’ll continue to do good in the next phase of her career whatever that is.
May 9, 2025 at 8:55 AM
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NEW: ALA salutes Dr Carla Hayden for her exceptional service to the nation as the Librarian of Congress. We are deeply disappointed in Dr Hayden's abrupt & unjust dismissal last night, an insult to the scope & breadth of her work.

Read ALA Pres. Cindy Hohl's statement: www.ala.org/news/2025/05...
May 9, 2025 at 6:22 PM
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Using AI to 'create' something is like teleporting to the top of Everest and comparing yourself to Edmund Hillary. The AI 'creator' has risked nothing, achieved nothing, has not been forced to dig deep, and is unchanged by the experience.
May 6, 2025 at 6:20 AM
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ON WEDNESDAY 21 MAY: Dr @noreenmasud.bsky.social (English) is in conversation with SJ Kim to discuss her new memoir, This Part is Silent: A Life Between Two Cultures

⏰ 7-9pm
📍 @gloucesterroadbks.bsky.social
🎟️ bit.ly/3GAUpy1

[2/3]
May 2, 2025 at 1:11 PM
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AKA "writers' sweet spot".
Current stage of book writing: quite tired of it and wish it was just done now, but also a little worried about how close the deadline is.
May 2, 2025 at 2:51 PM
Clutching at (paper) straws
even Fox News is having a hard time spinning Trump's first 100 days
April 29, 2025 at 2:41 PM
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Someone should remake "Conclave," but from the point of view of inconvenienced tourists
April 28, 2025 at 1:59 PM
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This is pretty much my approach to PhD writing except for “fifth volume” it’s “each paragraph”
In 1771, historian Catherine Macaulay burned herself out so badly writing the fifth volume of her recent history of England that she spent four months eating ice cream and bathing in the sea to recuperate.

Writers, I present to you your role model.
September 9, 2024 at 8:17 AM
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What a depressing irony that my #Burningthebooks & seven of my scholarly articles have been pirated by Meta for LibGen. We are experimenting with AI @bodleianlibraries.bsky.social using only public-domain materials. This industry needs to be regulated! www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...
The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem
Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI. Search through them here.
www.theatlantic.com
March 20, 2025 at 8:49 PM
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The new OpenAI creative writing bot's "short story" has the phrase "democracy of ghosts". It's the sort of phrase that would make me stop and admire it, if I were reading a human author - which, it turns out, I was, because it's from Nabokov's 1957 novel "Pnin".

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...
March 13, 2025 at 8:28 AM
It’s just cruel to make us wait over a year for this! Cannot contain my joy for how great I know this book is going to be.
March 10, 2025 at 9:55 AM
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Reminder: with it being International Women's Day yesterday, anything we sell in our store this weekend sees 25% of the price donated to Sheffield Women's Aid. Please buy something if you can. It includes everything available and all preorders!
www.northodox.co.uk/bookstore
March 9, 2025 at 12:42 PM
Accidentally fell into a book shop. Was powerless to stop what happened next
March 9, 2025 at 8:18 AM
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This is digital humanities
Books designed to be read only by human eyes are different from books designed to be read by machines, which is why Google will tell you that the phrase “shake my booty” can be found in an 1863 English translation of Don Quixote.
February 20, 2025 at 9:50 PM
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Had to clamber over a barbed wire fence, rip my coat and trespass to get a photo of this folkloric monster pretending half-successfully to be a tree. I have no regrets.
February 5, 2025 at 9:17 AM
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At a time when so many UK universities are closing Humanities courses and limiting so-called 'unfunded' Humanities research, this investment in 14 three-year postdoctoral fellowships by @official-uom.bsky.social 's Faculty of Humanities is especially impressive. Deadline 7 March.
February 5, 2025 at 7:36 AM
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Trump supporters tolerated in our bookshop but not welcomed. #BookSky
(Poster from the former Albion Beatnik bookshop in Oxford, adapted from a design by Beatrice Warde.)
February 5, 2025 at 8:57 AM
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Dr. Jones illustrating the most important and rewarding part of being an archaeologist.
January 21, 2025 at 8:07 PM
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‘The great children’s writers trusted children with irony and with sophisticated ideas: they trusted them to see in language a set, not of rules, but of possibilities.’

Katherine Rundell on children’s literature: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Katherine Rundell · Why children’s books?
Children’s books, to a great extent because they are written for those who cannot participate in the market, can offer...
www.lrb.co.uk
February 1, 2025 at 9:10 AM