Enjoyed first seminar of @ihr.bsky.social Migration + Mobility seminar series led by the fantastic @kabcommons.bsky.social, starring legend @profpanayi.bsky.social and great presentations by @endeeekay.bsky.social (see pic for book out soon w/ @punctumbooks.bsky.social) & @marcloureiro.bsky.social

Happy to say that my recently completed PhD thesis 'Identification Documents and the Governance of Mobilities in,through and beyond Seventeenth-Century London' is now available to download online open-access if anyone ever fancies having a read etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/37...

📣🎉 We are pleased to announce 3 new IHR Seminar Series starting in September 2025.

• African History
• Migration & Mobility History
• Planetary History

Find out about the new series on the IHR website: www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

By 'very interesting' I mean 'very interesting to people who have a weird obsession with early modern bureaucratic forms like I do'

Also very interesting that the creator of this volume chose to include the inserted details of an individual (presumably of the copy he translated from?) as opposed to leaving blank spaces. Unclear whether the original document was a printed form or manuscript though

This is the only example I've come across of a copy of a passport included in a printed book in this way, but I don't normally venture this far in the 18th century, so I'd be interested to know if there's any others

Very interesting document from today's visit to Brotherton Cutural Collections: a translated (German-English) printed copy of a passport issued to a Protestant exile from Salzburg in 1731, included within a 1732 book containing several other translated documents related to the expulsion

So excited to be co-convening this seminar with a fantastic team of migration scholars! Can't wait for it to get started this autumn

Thanks!

Passed my viva yesterday with editorial corrections! A massive thank you to @renaudmorieux.bsky.social and Stephen Alford for examining and to everyone who's supported me over the course of my PhD

This Monday! I'll be talking about how migrants seeking protection creatively use paperwork to make moral claims to rights - in Britain today and 16thC England. Does a lack of rights limit the impact of paperwork? And how can we use of paperwork recentre migrants in histories of protection?

Finding out that (shockingly) the knowledge I gained from writing a PhD thesis on seventeenth-century identification documents does not in fact transfer to attempting to navigate the unnecessarily complex process of trying to update a UK passport when you're a dual national in 2025

Finally got around to making an account on here! Mainly as a scheme to distract myself from the marking I really should be focusing on this afternoon, but also definitely looking forward to being able to keep up with academic stuff without having to deal with Xwitter in its current state