Proud of this special issue of Affirmations: of the modern, co-edited with @robbiemoore.bsky.soc2024 @drfergusedwards.bsky.social , arising from the 2024 @austmodernist.bsky.social conference, Modernism and modernity at the edge, hosted @utas.edu.au. affirmationsmodern.com/index.php/up...

SA Track 24hr Ultra: 182.3km, PB, 2nd A well organised event, lovely volunteers, a great stadium, and supportive crew: a good day out all round.

A new paper! "Bringing a HASS lens to work-integrated learning: Australian contexts, challenges, opportunities" We challenge institutionalised oversimplifications and ideologically underpinned suppositions found in tertiary education policy and funding... journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

“Instead of a group discussion or a tutor teaching you, it’s a class activity done with a robot,” the student said. “I feel like I’m teaching this robot how to take jobs away from my teachers.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Macquarie University swaps in-person psychology classes with AI chatbot for two subjects

University’s move is part of trend that critics within academia say will lead to further staff cuts and the loss of ‘everything that makes the job worth doing’

theguardian.com

"what insults my soul is the idea popular in the culture just now that we can+should write only about people who are fundamentally "like" us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally. I do not believe that. I could not have written a 1 of my books if I did" Zadie Smith

I wrote about Adam Ouston's MINE for Guardian Australia. I think if I'd had 5000w allocated to the review, I still would have had a lot more to say about this thorny book. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/a...

Mine by Adam Ouston review – novel told in a single sentence is a hallucinatory reading experience

Ouston’s second novel follows a poet who is trapped in an abandoned mine in Tasmania while searching for inspiration for his ‘last great work’

theguardian.com

Looking forward to discussing this very book - this very sentence - 'Mine' - with the author, Adam Ouston, at Devonport Library on Thursday 27th August; come along! he's erudite, thoughtful, amusing: everything you'd want your author to be: come, come, come...

‘Mine’

A poet and environmental activist experiences a fever dream of Tasmania’s landscape and mining history in Adam Ouston’s brilliantly imagined novel

mnth.ly

The Monthly@themonthly.com.au · 2mo ago

Ouston writes that “a country gets the poetry it deserves”. That might account for Gina Rinehart, but not this extraordinary novel. ‘Mine’ is proof that, every now and then, a country can produce a work of imagination far better than it deserves. mnth.ly/DPxYqm3

Sophie Woods: fastest human to cross the Alps on foot... 🏔️🏔️🏔️ ... by a six day margin. Awesome 🥳 www.bbc.co.uk/sport/articl...

Sophie Woods completes Via Alpina endurance challenge in record 29 days

Ultra-runner Sophie Woods runs 2,000km across eight countries in only 29 days to break the record for completing the Via Alpina - one of the world's toughest endurance challenges.

bbc.co.uk

I reviewed Adam Ouston's new novel Mine (it's very good) www.themonthly.com.au/august-2026/...

‘Mine’

A poet and environmental activist experiences a fever dream of Tasmania’s landscape and mining history in Adam Ouston’s brilliantly imagined novel

themonthly.com.au

'Amid a cost-of-living crisis, the ‘Australian Dream’ is crumbling—and if I’m honest, my creative one is starting to show some cracks too.' Read more from Nina Culley on who can afford to be a writer: www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/who-...

Who Can Afford to Be a Writer in Australia These Days?

Local writers are refusing to give up on creatively fulfilling lives.

buff.ly

Reading Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah for the Modernist Reading Group @utas.edu.au while here in Launceston... ... by a highly appropriate 19th century French fountain. (No Mmes d'Arpajon were soaked in the taking of these photos.)

🥳New publication!🥳 🎭SO happy to have work appear in Modern Drama (published by @utpjournals.bsky.social ) 🎭 😍SO SO happy to be in the 'Sixty Years of Stoppard' edition😍 🤓Get your analysis of Stoppard, Havel, theories of comedy, and comedies of censorship here!🤓 utppublishing.com/doi/10.3138/...

“The Anatomy of the Gag”: Havel, Stoppard, and Comedies of Censorship | Modern Drama

Václav Havel’s The Memorandum and Tom Stoppard’s Cahoot’s Macbeth are both comedies set in Czechoslovakia about authoritarian attempts to control the use of language. Surprisingly, it is Havel, writing within a Soviet-aligned, Communist-run state, who ...

utppublishing.com

It's Proust's birthday so I must share this photo again!!!!!

Emily Herring@emilyherring.bsky.social · 3y ago

Marcel Proust playing air guitar on a tennis racket appreciation moment

International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) World Congress - continued to be superb! 💀🦘 Suicide in comedy; the uses of AusStage; material theatrical archives; cine-theatre's possibilities and constraints; and catching up with the Australian Comedy Studies Collective!

International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) World Congress - has been superb so far 💀🦘 Highlights: presenting "Stoppard's Dramatic Philosophy"; listened to work on translations and adaptations of The Bacchae and Iphigenia; on slop aesthetics; Suzy Izzard's keynote; only 1/2 way through..!

'Your Name Here': the earlier riffs on Wittgenstein were fun, though we know there's a market for that. Keyword: 'utterance'. Strawson: narrower, but sure. Especially the bat. Evans: just us philosophy grads here now. McDowell: I love it and who else are you writing this for, Helen DeWitt???

The Modernist Reading Group @utasenglish.bsky.social is about to start Proust's 'Sodom and Gomorrah', inspiring this morning's delicious visit to 'Madeleine de Proust'

🎭 The Tom Stoppard Theatre 🎭 Delightful, and, classily, Arcadia opens there tonight. The current associations of its old name - the Duke of York's - probably didn't argue against the change either. www.thestage.co.uk/news/duke-of...

Duke of York's Theatre renamed in honour of Tom Stoppard

The West End’s Duke of York’s Theatre is to be renamed in honour of playwright Tom Stoppard

thestage.co.uk

I'm presenting 'Stoppard's Dramatic Philosophy' at the International Federation for Theatre Research World Congress this time next week! No Zeno's paradoxes though. If I started writing about them now, first I'd have to write half the paper; then I'd have to write half the remainder; then...

Launceston has an infinite jest of Yoricks Looking forward to tutoring HEN310 Shakespeare: Page, Stage, and Screen @utasenglish.bsky.social this semester

Launceston: YOUR liminal space

I've loved all Dave's plays since watching 'Serving It Up' as a work in progress in a London pub in 1996(!) Among other things, he continues to insist plays need to be written and performed by and about *every* class background youtu.be/XZlxoKESMIA?...

David Eldridge | Writers Portait | National Theatre

YouTube video by National Theatre

youtu.be

Looking forward to talking to @helenshield.bsky.social tonight on ABC Hobart, about stumbling across a new edition of Julian Barnes's "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" in the wild - and now re-reading it after a 37 year gap... www.julianbarnes.com/books/histor...

I reviewed Amanda Lohrey's Capture theconversation.com/amanda-lohre...

Amanda Lohrey’s UFO novel captures the uncertainties of reason, doubt and belief

Amanda Lohrey’s Capture takes place in weird shiny rooms, where humans are studied with curiosity and partial incomprehension.

theconversation.com

‘Higher education cannot function like a genuine market, where consumers can try out one brand of soap powder this month and another next month.’ Stefan Collini on what went wrong in UK higher education. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Stefan Collini · Squadrons of Pigs: Bonfire of the Universities

The problems with Britain’s universities are systemic and deep-rooted, not just local or contingent. Yet political and...

lrb.co.uk

Staff at UTAS are on strike this afternoon, in part to gain protections against AI betterworkplaces.nteu.au/priorities/a...

"Film it now so Oldman can join the ranks of the great Krapps on camera." @royalcourttheatre.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/m...

Matching Gary Oldman’s Krapp with a teenager’s take on Godot is a masterstroke

The Royal Court is presenting the Slow Horses star’s version of one Beckett masterpiece alongside 19-year-old Leo Simpe-Asante’s riff on another. They combine beautifully

theguardian.com

A beautiful day at Run Narawntapu! You only got to run these beaches on the 50km... Congratulations to Annabel and Nick for their new course records, thanks to Jase, Jonno, Amy and everyone else who helped put on such a great local event. Next stop: 24 hours round an Adelaide track in October 🥳

Looking forward to the 52km at Run Narawntapu tomorrow: checking everything's progressing nicely towards the 24hr SA Track Ultra in October. It's always spectacular on the beaches, but ideally we'll have this sort of weather again...

A landmark publication is out today: the Poems of Sylvia Plath. This is the definitive edition of the poet's work, drawing on decades of research and almost doubling the content of the first Collected Poems in 1981. faber.co.uk/product/9780571372041-the-poems-of-sylvia-plath/