There is still time to register for @sadiahqureshi.bsky.social seminar "Empires of Extinction in the Anthropocene" on Tuesday, 15-16 CET (abstract below). For Zoom link please email: instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se #skystorians #histsci #envhist

The Instructing Colonial Natural History Seminar Series is back and we have a stellar line up: @sadiahqureshi.bsky.social, 6 Oct; @cberiksen.bsky.social, 28 Oct; Jim Endersby, 25 Nov; and Ma. Mercedes G. Planta, 9 Dec. All seminars are on Zoom, 15-16 CET

On the 17th of August 1803, Enlightenment speculation on racial variety ran aground on Wreck Reek, just off Australia's north eastern coast. This is just one of a surprising range of unlikely settings in which @lindaaburnett.bsky.social and I pursue the intellectual history of race & Enlightenment.

Today’s class ‘the empire of Enlightenment’ and an opportunity to engage with the iconography of Captain Cook, and reinvention by First Nations artists.

Visiting fellowship for PhD students in medical humanities at Upsala www.uu.se/en/centre/me...

Call for applications: Visiting PhD-student position in Medical Humanities, Uppsala University, spring semester 2027 – Centre for Medical Humanities (CMH) – Uppsala University

uu.se

EXC: 90 programmes in Edinburgh University's College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences are to be closed. The casualties, which include 48 language and literature programmes, will be 'taught out', w/ no admissions after 2027. @heraldscotland.bsky.social www.heraldscotland.com/news/2655839...

Ninety programmes to close at leading university as savings plan takes shape

According to the document, a total of 90 programmes will be “taught out” over the next several years, including 48 in the School of Language.

heraldscotland.com

Australia's Department of Trade lists our first colonial exports: whaling (1791), coal (1801), & wool (1807). Yet one 'export' predates them: the skulls of First Nations people (1790). Australia's first trade would endure for another 160 years. Read more here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Enlightenment enslavement and the Indigenous dead: trafficking slaves and skulls in the early colonisation of Australia

In 1787, as the First Fleet made its way across the Atlantic to colonise Australia, it traversed an ocean made synonymous with the violently forced mobility of enslavement, then reaching an unprece...

tandfonline.com

Why did medicine and moral philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment give rise to a global and colonial science of race? Find out here! @lindaaburnett.bsky.social and me in History of Science, Volume 64 Issue 3, September 2026. Out now, open access: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.....

Deadline for this post at the University of Limerick is THIS WEEK on Friday, 8/14! #earlymodern #medievalsky

Medieval and Early Modern Orients (MEMOs)@memorients.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A new batch of jobs this week in early modern and medieval studies! Assistant Professor in European and or Global History (pre-1800) memorients.com/news/assista...

If we want to sincerely weigh #Enlightenment’s #legacy in #Australia or #globally, we should begin here in tracing the global flows of peoples, bodies, and ideas in the era #colonisation and #ScientificEnslavement. muse.jhu.edu/pub/275/arti...

Race and the Scottish Enlightenment

How colonialism shaped the Scottish Enlightenment’s conception of race and humanity   In the decades after 1750, an increasing number of former medical st...

yalebooks.yale.edu

Three-fingered Jack was Jack Mansong, killed in 1781 while resisting slavery in Jamaica. His own #head and hand was #preserved in spirits “for the satisfaction of the curious”. #Pemulwuy and #JackMansong were enslaved in perpetuity because they resisted. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

So, when the English artist James Ward drew “2 heads of Botany Bay Men” in London’s Royal College of Surgeons in 1818, one of whom was probably Pemulwuy, he could describe him as a “chief of marauding predators, a kind of Three-fingered Jack of Botany Bay.” www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The #resistance to colonisation, and the violence of colonial repression, demonstrate the same agency historians identify among the enslaved. Their resistance to the prerogatives of white colonial power however, was frequently characterised as ‘savagery’ illustrative of imposed #racial designations.

Those whose remains were taken by #violence, or #collected by #theft, were not passive #victims. They were dismembered in this global flow of #EnlightenmentScience because they resisted. Pemulwuy, a Bidjigal warrior who led Dharug resistance against colonial expansion is one example.

The collection and transportation and display of #HumanRemains was a feature of “scientific head hunting” in service to the Enlightenment aspiration to catalogue the #varieties of #humankind in #taxonomies of #race. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

We argue “The #collection of the Indigenous dead could never match the volume of forced mobility of the #trans-Atlantic slave trade, nor its remorselessly #monetised suffering”, yet both slaves and skulls were #violently made globally #mobile without consent. yalebooks.yale.edu/2025/11/20/h...

Enlightenment in Australia can be gauged by the practice of “scientific enslavement of the Indigenous dead”. From 1788 the the human remains of #Indigenous peoples were taken without #consent to enrich in status, power, and reputation collectors and institutions. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

As @lindaaburnett.bsky.social and I argue, #colonial Australia was a vector of Enlightenment, not in spite of #enslavement but because of it. #Slavery and slave trading was integral to Europe’s Enlightenment and its global reach, not least in Australia. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

A former #Australian PM recently wrote, “[f]rom the outset [1788], Sydney could hardly have been less like a slave colony”, and thus embodied noble aspirations of Europe’s #Enlightenment. A haggard trope, that fabricates myth in service to a facile truism. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Mine & @brucealexb.bsky.social book 'Race and the Scottish Enlightement: A Colonial History' is reviewed in the recent nr of The William and Mary Quarterly. Thanks to C. D. E. Willoughby for his close engagement with our book yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300... muse.jhu.edu/issue/57168 #skystorians

Race and the Scottish Enlightenment

How colonialism shaped the Scottish Enlightenment’s conception of race and humanity   In the decades after 1750, an increasing number of former medical st...

yalebooks.yale.edu

@brucealexb.bsky.social and I have a new OA article in History Australia: 'Enlightenment enslavement and the Indigenous dead: trafficking slaves and skulls in the early colonisation of Australia'. Read it here: doi.org/10.1080/1449...

1 year fixed post, £36k, at British Museum working on their eighteenth-century collections. #18thC bmrecruit.ciphr-irecruit.com/Applicants/v...

Project Curator: Eighteenth-Century Britain and Europe (Documentation)

About the Documentation & Digitisation Programme

bmrecruit.ciphr-irecruit.com

UK government visa changes are “driving universities towards a cliff edge”. www.scotsman.com/education/so...

Glasgow University cuts: Social sciences to see biggest drop in overseas students

Voluntary redundancy scheme to open in August

scotsman.com

Warm congratulations to the wonderful Maria Floruțău on winning the @RoyalSociety's Notes and Records biennial Essay Award! Maria's prize-winning essay, "The manul or Pallas's cat" It was praised by the judges as "outstanding" and "beautifully written." More: royalsociety.org/journals/aut...

Notes and Records Essay Award | Royal Society

Open to early career researchers in the history of science.

royalsociety.org

Millie Schurch's article 'Paper Colonialism: Instructions and Institutions at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1770–1820', written as part of her postdoc in our ‘Early Citizen Science’ project is now published in Eighteenth-Century Studies ! muse-jhu-edu.ezproxy.its.uu.se/article/993281 🧵

Call for papers | Women in Long Eighteenth-Century Scotland and Beyond 41st Annual Conference of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, 6–9 July 2027, Sorbonne Université, Paris oraprdnt.uqtr.uquebec.ca/portail/gscw...

oh permanent full-time pre-1800 job at Limerick! Deadline 14 August -- start of the job in January 2027. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRU993/a... #earlymodern #MedievalSky #Skystorians #Jobfairy

Assistant Professor in European and or Global History (pre-1800) at University of Limerick

Apply for the Assistant Professor in European and or Global History (pre-1800) role on jobs.ac.uk, the top job board for academic positions in higher education. View details and apply now.

jobs.ac.uk

Permanent lectureship in Modern British History at the University of Manchester. FT, £42-58k, closing date 30 June 26, starting Sept 26 onwards. For international people, this is equivalent to a tenure-track Assistant Lectureship. www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai... #SkyStorians

Lecturer in Modern British History (post-1800):Oxford Road

jobs.manchester.ac.uk

Reminder: WOMNH Online Seminar, Wed. 10 June ,18:00–19:00 CET 🌿 Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium: Radical Ecology and the Global Plantation, Speaker: Claudia Horn To attend, please email laurence.talairach@univ-tlse2.fr for the link to the virtual room. 1/

Seminar reminder, @nulybranch.bsky.social Caomhanach : 'Collecting Rarity: The Conundrum of Instructing and Constructing - Histories of Malagasy Endemism from Colonial Plant Specimens', Wed 27 May, 15-16 CET, for Zoom link: instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se. instructingnaturalhistory.com/events