Sarah Betts
@wromantichistry.bsky.social
5.4K followers 1.6K following 180 posts
PhD student researching memories and Public History of the English Civil War (Royalist Reputations) and Monarchy. Modern Monarchy section editor at Royal Studies Journal. Chronically ill mum of 3.
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wromantichistry.bsky.social
Reintroducing myself for the influx of people coming over from the other place.
I'm a PhD student at the University of York. My thesis is on representations and cultural memory of royalists and royalisms of the English Civil War from the 17th Century to the present day.
Reposted by Sarah Betts
teonipassereau.bsky.social
I was invited to co-organise this upcoming conference being held later this month at the University of Exeter. With two days of exciting talks and panels, plus a walking historical tour of Exeter and a group dinner, I'd highly recommend coming along if you can!
Reposted by Sarah Betts
sophiecoulombeau.bsky.social
En route to London to deliver a paper at the Warburg: ‘Libraries & Delinquency: The Case of Charles Burney.’ Looking forward to learning from some of the world’s most knowledgeable experts in the history of libraries. Hope some friends & mutuals can join us!
histlibraries.bsky.social
All welcome (online & in person) to our seminar on Tuesday 7 October, 5.30pm. Sophie Coulombeau will be discussing classicist, author, critic, educator, clergyman & thief Charles Burney (1757-1817). More info here: bit.ly/LibrariesAnd... @sophiecoulombeau.bsky.social @warburginstitute.bsky.social
Book cover: Reading with the Burneys: Patronage, Paratext, and Performance, by Sophie Coulombeau.
Reposted by Sarah Betts
menysnoweballes.bsky.social
Self promo plug to say if you’re interested in this & wanna invite me to your dept, esp if your city is nice - then invite me!! I am a good value seminar guest 😅
menysnoweballes.bsky.social
Our History Research Seminar @uninorthampton.bsky.social kicks off next Wed 1 Oct with a talk by me on my new project 'Medievalism, gender and politicised nostalgia in the British extreme right, 1962 – 1982'. It will be at 12pm UK time and on Teams. Email rachel.moss @ northampton.ac.uk for a link.
Reposted by Sarah Betts
royalhistsoc.org
We've updated our three BlueSky starter packs for historians.

Our principal list now includes details of 130+ societies and networks, based in the UK and Ireland, that advance the study, research and promotion of history go.bsky.app/AZaYQDd

Please let us know if there are gaps.
#Skystorians 1/2
Reposted by Sarah Betts
vpfa.bsky.social
🚨Call for Papers!
❓Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities: A VPFA Study Day
🗺️Loughborough University
📅27 March 2026
💷 FREE
For full CfP: victorianpopularfiction.org/studyday/for...
Contact the organiser Anne-Marie Beller (@braddonite.bsky.social) at [email protected] for more information
Mentally ill patients dancing at a ball at Somerset County Asylum. Process
print after a lithograph by K. Drake, ca. 1850/1855.
https://wellcomecollection.org/works/xswz3swa
CFP: Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities
A VPFA Study Day
Loughborough University, 27 March 2026

The Health Humanities and Victorian popular fiction intersect in revealing ways, offering insights into how 19th-century literature shaped and reflected contemporary understandings of health, illness, and the body. Popular narratives not only mirrored anxieties surrounding public health and medical progress but also contributed to shaping public perceptions of health and healing. Health Humanities approaches re-examine these texts to uncover how cultural narratives and literary representations influenced attitudes toward physical and mental well-being, gendered experiences of illness, and the ethics of care in an age of rapid scientific change.

Health Humanities is a particularly useful approach to sensation fiction because it illuminates the ways in which these emotionally charged, often morally ambiguous narratives explore and interrogate concepts of the body, illness, and mental health. Sensation fiction, with its focus on secrets, trauma, nervous disorders, and abnormal psychological states, frequently dramatizes the anxieties of Victorian society surrounding health, gender, and identity. By applying the lens of Health Humanities, scholars can uncover how these texts reflect and shape contemporary medical discourse. Interdisciplinary approaches also highlight how sensation fiction critiques institutional medicine, domestic care practices, and the pathologization of women’s experiences. Ultimately, Health Humanities allows us to see sensation fiction not just as entertainment, but as a culturally significant form that negotiates the meanings of illness, morality, and human vulnerability in a rapidly changing world.

20-minute papers are invited on any aspect of the health humanities and sensation fiction. Topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

•	Madness, Hysteria, and the Sensation Heroine
•	The Role of Doctors and Medical Authority in Se…
Reposted by Sarah Betts
cathamclarke.bsky.social
I'm hugely honoured and very excited to be giving this year's Historical Research #Lecture at @ihr.bsky.social, on 'Can popular #history be radical? Historical research and writing for the #public'. Tuesday 4 November, all welcome. More info in AltText. Book here: www.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...
In this lecture, Catherine Clarke will re-visit the question of what makes history radical, asking what kind of radical history we need in our public life and contemporary context today. In particular, she’ll explore ways in which popular history – trade publishing for a wide public audience – has the capacity to be radical, drawing on experiences and examples from her own new book A History of England in 25 Poems (Penguin Allen Lane, September 2025). Catherine’s lecture will move towards a manifesto for how research-led, scholarship-driven popular history can and does make necessary, vital public interventions – from opening inclusive conversations and confronting the rise of AI, to modelling radical empathy and imagination.
Reposted by Sarah Betts
womenshistnet.bsky.social
We are delighted to share the Call for Papers for our Spring Seminar Series 2026:
wromantichistry.bsky.social
Yes - and belief that parcelling out different parts of the system to different people and then not having those different parts communicate or crosscheck (and sometimes even preventing them from openly communicating) is just efficient and responsible re privacy laws and standardised protocol
wromantichistry.bsky.social
...they treat students (and often staff) involved not as people but as numbers and tasks on a spreadsheet. Increasing depersonalisation at every stage possible, for all sorts of reasons but esp. in pursuit of 'objectivity' in standards allows this to happen for questionable educational benefit.
wromantichistry.bsky.social
Also have had many thoughts and feelings about this. Its is horrifying and would be shocking if it were not just in many ways unsurprising. From bitter experience lots of central university sytstems are inadequate, discriminatory and sometime actively harmful because they lack nuance and empathy...
wromantichistry.bsky.social
Today is a grim day. Had a rubbish night fuelled by inadequate pain relief and perpetuated by stress about family and work issues most of which I can do nothing about but which still make me feel like I am letting everyone down and am just not upto either motherhood or academia, or general life.
Reposted by Sarah Betts
jeanneologist.bsky.social
It's Michaelmas, so it's also the anniversary of the battle of Auray (1364), which marked the beginning of the end of the Breton War of Succession begun 23 years earlier. And you know what? Let's mark it with a 🚨BOOK GIVEAWAY🚨 this time! (Charles de Blois has never had a stranger memorial...)
photo of two book covers, one called "Princely Power in Late Medieval France: Jeanne de Penthièvre and the War for Brittany", and one called "Gendered Reputations and Aristocratic Partnership: Re-Presenting the Breton Civil War from the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries", both by Erika Graham-Goering. Princely Power has a green cover with a picture of a medieval document and green wax seal, while Gendered Reputations has a grey cover with a medieval drawing of a crowd of people raising their hands to a man and woman couple.
Reposted by Sarah Betts
rwldproject.bsky.social
🚨What's that?🚨

You want FREE access to 17 brilliant #RailwayHistory articles from the @jtransporthist.bsky.social?

All yours!

For #Railway200 the JTH has put together a virtual collection of articles, & until 15 October they're free!

Download & read now: journals.sagepub.com/topic/collec...
Cover of the Journal of Transport History. A dark blue background, white sans-serif text, with 10 small images of various forms of transport & mobility – an airship, a bridge, a compass, a shoe, a propeller aeroplane, an early pneumatic tyre, bicycle gears, a steam locomotive boiler, a tunnel and a late pneumatic tyre.
wromantichistry.bsky.social
I feel grateful its not more complicated though - my sister is in Oldbury and even though my eldest niece is only in year 5 she is already doing all the open days and trying to make decisions eg about 11+ because she's so stressed about doing it next year.
wromantichistry.bsky.social
...but we're still advised to apply to 5 ranked preferences or risk being allocated to 'a school you aren't happy with'
wromantichistry.bsky.social
We're doing this too at the moment and finding it stressful even though York is much simpler (there are no grammar schools we live opposite a really good school which is also next door to sons' primary school and last yrs yr6 cohort all went to that school)...
Reposted by Sarah Betts
tomaashby.bsky.social
1/14 "... [for] their weal, not their woe". Today is the publication date of "Le Républicanisme d'Algernon Sidney" @classiquesgarnier.bsky.social, co-edited by myself and Christopher Hamel (@univrouen.bsky.social). This is the first ever volume on Sidney classiques-garnier.com/le-republica...
The book cover alongside a small painting of Sidney from 1659
Reposted by Sarah Betts
onslies.bsky.social
AN #EARLYMODERN POST!! They still exist! And a lovely one at that, for five years and with the brilliant people at KCL who have turned that place in quite the hub of exciting early modern research.

Run, don’t walk.
Lecturer in the History of Early Modern Europe and the World at King's College London
Discover an exciting academic career path as a Lecturer in the History of Early Modern Europe and the World at jobs.ac.uk. Don't miss out on this job opportunity - apply today!
www.jobs.ac.uk
Reposted by Sarah Betts
menysnoweballes.bsky.social
Re-reading this chapter now (I haven't since we submitted the corrections!) I do feel quite proud of it and hope colleagues working in popular culture will consider citing it. If your institution doesn't have access let me know! #Barbie
Both Ken and the Trump of the 2016 Presidential election campaign can be seen as absurd figures on the fringes of the political community, united as much by their distinctive hair and tans as by their line in garbled non-sequiturs. Just as serious political commentators dismissed Trump when he first ran for office, the Barbie film tells us repeatedly ‘we’re never worried about Ken’. But much like Trump, who successfully moved from the margin of politics to the highest office of the US state in both 2016 and 2024, Ken is not a misunderstood and ultimately unthreatening buffoon. In Barbie, Ken becomes an active, and eventually actively malevolent, political agent extending significant influence over his own community of ‘deplorables’.
wromantichistry.bsky.social
...or if you are unsure and want a sounding board for ideas and a chat about the experience of editing a cluster then feel free to contact me (on my Uni of York email as I still don't have DMs set up on here with the new ID rigmarole)
wromantichistry.bsky.social
If you work in Royal Studies and would be interested in exploring or promoting a particular key topic in the field then please do get in touch with Ellie at [email protected]...