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Roger Luckhurst Profile
Roger Luckhurst

@TheProfRog

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Writer, academic + freelance. Gothic, SF, lit + film. Recent book: Gothic (2021). *Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead* coming soon.

London
Joined May 2010
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
5 years
The Death of the Author and The Birth of his Trousers
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
10 years
Beautiful mid-sentence Farage screen capture http://t.co/KPBL2VhyAV
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
2 years
How hot does it have to be to melt London’s worst statue? Asking for aesthetics in general
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
2 years
@AlexHardwick95 Fond memories from undergrad days in the 1980s where the lecturer turned on a slide machine, the slides all popped out like toast, + as she stepped back to assess the disaster leant on a door + fell into a cupboard full of cleaning equipment, neatly locking the door behind her.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 months
…which is to teach the ineffectual youngest sons of the minor aristocracy how to be curates agonising about transubstantiation in minor parishes in and around the Cotswolds, yeah?
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
In a burst of nostalgia for actual books, just popped into Gower Street Waterstone's. In the science fiction section there's a giant Dalek which, if you get within ten feet of it, barks 'SANITISE!' at you very suddenly. Well played.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
Royal Mail are doing a classics of British science fiction set of stamps on Friday — books selected by me, with weirdly active involvement in the design of the stamps too! 1/3
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
6 years
David Remnick, on New Yorker Radio Hour, trying to sum up #Brexit : ‘It sounds to me like it’s a ... giant bollocks’ English guest: [long silence] ‘No one in England would use that idiom, David, although it is indeed, as you say, “a giant bollocks”’
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
8 years
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
9 months
There's an advert out there for a Senior Lecturer in literature at Geneva University with the salary range of £108-146k. Ever get the feeling you're in the wrong country at the wrong time with the wrong job under the wrong government?
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
6 years
Here’s the official announcement by my college that we are withdrawing from UK league tables. Fantastic decision for a college committed to radical democratic access to higher ed, not divisive hierarchies. Good job!
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
5 years
Scenes from the British Library, no. 1: there’s a woman over there reading Diderot in the original French through a GIANT magnifying glass, chortling madly. Next up, she has a huge biog of Jane Fonda.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
11 months
Friday motivation
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
The advance copies are in! Out for Halloween. Looking gorgeous, @thamesandhudson #gothic
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
For 197 years my college #Birkbeck has basically said: you know what, forget what your #AlevelResults are, let’s just have a conversation about your aims and ambitions instead. Take a look, give us a call.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
9 years
Brilliant apocalyptic strap-line for an ice lolly! http://t.co/JE9ksCnRFf
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
11 months
For anyone in university arts busy internalising Sunak's mean-spirited attack on 'low-value degrees', my English dept more than meets the measures of completion and success in further study or jobs, thank you for asking. It's business + computing that can be concerning 1/2
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
Head down so much at work I forgot today is actually publication day in the UK. This beauty is now released into the community! Hurray!
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
When Prince Philip met Derrida (this week’s TLS)
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
2 years
@BellaHonessRoe @AlexHardwick95 Best unscripted pratfall I've ever seen, and I've seen a poor woman sit down with a grande latte, only for her handbag to fall off her shoulder jolting her arm, causing her to very tidily tip her grande into said handbag.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
Ah, it’s such a shame that you are a complete cancer on our civil society, otherwise I’d say yes.
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Sunonlinepicdesk
4 years
@TheProfRog @TheProfRog Hi Roger, The Sun Online would like to feature your Tesco Tweet with a credit. If you could let me know if that's okay, it'd be very much appreciated. Thanks, TC.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
Man on phone in Waitrose: “Darling, it’s like Armageddon in the spices — there’s just no way I’ll be able to get any star anise”
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
2 years
I just got a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Science Fiction Research Association! How’s your Friday going?!
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
Boris Johnson invited to meeting by Scottish fishermen
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 months
You know, I thought there was something off about that Royal photograph
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
2 years
Nine month job, 4 hours teaching per week for two terms + to act as Director of Studies for all English students in the college: yours for exactly £7188 — a fraction of what’s spent on a single term at a public school to get many of those students to Oxford in the first place.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
8 years
This!
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
6 years
Senior resignations from UUK must surely follow this strike — and we all need to step up to matters of governance to stop these pirates taking over the future of the university #ussstrike
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
People often ask me: ‘but what’s your new book about, Roger?’
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
2 years
In a university lecture theatre in a recently converted building, where the lecturer is set up to speak from … behind a pillar. Genius.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
My sister is self-isolating and bored, so just sent me this German advice on sex etiquette during the coronavirus crisis 😮
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
5 years
Hey, I wonder if Rees-Mogg was deliberately trying to echo the doomed hero of the 1885 Gordon Relief, Frederick Burnaby, killed in a deeply pointless expression of national pride?
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
5 years
So, folks, it’s official publication day for this vital contribution to the field of corridor studies!
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
5 years
Also, the correct prefixing honorific for any Rees-Mogg is ‘that cunt’, with no comma e.g. ‘that cunt Jacob Rees-Mogg’. During Michaelmas term only it is acceptable to use intensifiers, e. g. ‘that absolute cunt Jacob Rees-Mogg’. Check your work.
@itvnews
ITV News
5 years
ITV News exclusive: @Jacob_Rees_Mogg issues new style guide to his staff demanding male MPs are called Esq, the use of imperial measurements and which words are banned (but not 'not fit for purpose'), reports @PaulBrandITV
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
2 years
@DrMatthewSweet Yes. My mother-in-law, mid-stage Parkinson’s, c.2013, was asked who the Prime Minister was and responded brightly “It’s Ed Millipede!”
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
5 years
@geraintgriffith UPS — we experimentally delivered this by drone, it’s now in a field outside Mosul, do you have time to answer this 850-question customer satisfaction survey?
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
The actual Prime Minister, actually sacked from a newspaper for actually lying, expresses hopes the BBC will soon get its house in order.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
Sudden pang to be in a minor German city, walking slightly too far in bad shoes to a museum that remains mystifyingly closed despite repeatedly checking opening times, then ordering a mildly disappointing lunch with weird-tasting sauerkraut
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
2 years
The military to be called in to universities to break the strikes: “C’MON YOU ORRIBLE TOE-RAGS GIVE ME SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY NOW OR YOU’LL ALL FIND OUT WHAT THE ROMANTIC AGONY REALLY IS”
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
No one tells you that if you spend 25 years in academia you eventually get promoted all the way to being a data entry clerk on clunky digital interfaces for 10 hours a day. It's really very exciting.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 months
Awful news from Goldsmiths College, back for another 130 job cuts, and another sign of systemic collapse in arts and humanities at universities outside the elite circle. Yet we seem okay with this slow, deadly impoverishment of cultural life. Just awful.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
Christ, I knew I should have washed up my campus office tea cups
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
6 years
“Its a star, where’s the fucking tuna?”
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
2 months
In a migraine cluster: here’s a good representation of the scintillating visual aura that unfolds in my eye for c20 minutes before spooling out to the periphery of vision. Very weird, freaky and uncanny every damn time it comes to visit.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
Beginning to think I should probably change my Zoom background
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
Many universities remain on strike for the whole of this week. Support your local #UCUstrike . You may not give a shit about our pensions, but let’s at least try to get more stable working conditions for young people entering the profession
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
8 years
Pleased to see the Giant Invisible Thing has at last been installed at Waterloo station
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
2 years
Lovely project ‘Hospital Senses’ by Victoria Bates et al over in Bristol: six booklets on hospital spaces, with Corridors, OBVIOUSLY, the most important.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
8 years
Exactly
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
7 years
Apparently, in response to criticism, 78 minutes of it will be following a really slow raven flying around
@WatchersOTWall
Watchers on the Wall
7 years
UPDATE: @HBO has confirmed the @GameOfThrones season 7 finale episode title and running time!
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
2 years
@TimSkeltonMK Could it be placed on top of Liz Truss?
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
5 years
Theresa May only needs to be defeated another 8 times, then she’ll have the exact experience most of us have of applying to the AHRC for grants #NicheAcademicBitterness
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
6 years
So universities, as well as somehow being tasked to solve social inequalities ingrained in an intrinsically unequal school system, now also have to be responsible for the career choices students make after graduation. We also do juggling, bar mitzvahs and world peace.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
Hey, I guess I should tell you that I've been asked to step in to the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of 19th Century Studies at Birkbeck, with the retirement of Hilary Fraser. Amazing! As you know, you must approach an established chair backwards, respectfully showing yr arse to chair.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
5 years
Outstanding work
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 months
Into second printing, both at Thames & Hudson and Princeton UP!
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
6 years
Moderating marks of a colleague, who comments to a student: 'Whenever someone uses "interestingly" in an essay, it's a sign they still need to think something through a little more' *breaks out in cold sweat of appalled self-recognition*
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
6 years
I once saw #BorisJohnson get on a tube, just before the Mayoral election, to show he was a man of the people. He looked immensely pleased with himself for at least 20 seconds before someone shouted: 'You may be on the tube, Boris, but you're still an absolute c*nt!'
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
Thinking a lot about Mark Fisher’s project ‘Boring Dystopia’ recently. Who knew that the definitive onset of climate collapse would be so tedious, so bureaucratic, our last years of security filling out online forms and converting docs to PDFs and back again, all day? It’s weird.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
1 month
Congrats to my old mate Sherryl for this coming out — I wrote a chapter for it about Bucky Fuller geodesic domes and how the hippy counterculture took them up in the architecture of Drop City onwards.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
6 years
Shiny, creepy cover for my edition of M.R. James for @britishlibrary — out soon!
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 months
Novelist Christopher Priest died yesterday. He could make reality slide out from underneath you like nobody else, always putting out deeply unsettling, provoking reads. He was one of very few writers I bought the *instant* his books came out. RIP.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
Perhaps now is the time to admit I only got my job at Birkbeck in 1994 because Laura Marcus liked my boots. Lord knows, it wasn’t my presentation, which was utterly, utterly shit. RIP
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
You know, I’ve just re-read Goblin Market for the first time since I was an undergrad and I have the sneaking suspicion that it may not be about juicy fruit after all.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
2 years
My first two PhD students back in the 90s, brilliant scholars and teachers both, have now taken voluntary redundancy rather than enter a Darwinian fight for their own jobs. The talent and commitment lost. The sheer waste of it. It’s happening everywhere. Fuck this government.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
6 months
How books by women were introduced in 1974.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
2 years
German CompoundWordle 0 85/85 ⬜️⬜️🟩🟨🟨⬜️🟩⬜️🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️🟨🟨🟨⬜️🟨⬜️🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️🟨🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️🟨⬜️🟨⬜️🟨⬜️🟩🟩🟩⬜️🟨⬜️🟩⬜️ 🟨🟨🟩🟩🟩🟨⬜️🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️🟩⬜️🟩🟩🟨⬜️⬜️🟨🟨🟩🟩🟩
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
1 year
Here’s the Lucien Freud painting I was looking at when I got the news my father had died. John Bernard Sinclair Luckhurst 21.06.1932–27.12.2022. Peace out x
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
5 months
Always magnificent to see former students get to stage of publishing their projects as books! Congrats @GordonDLBates !
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
“Nah, mate, the other eye’s fine, I’ll drive us back to Durham yeah?”
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
5 years
I'm giving a talk tonight about the life and work of Philip K. Dick, and I was literally seconds away from pressing send on an email of my Powerpoint images to the organiser under the title 'Dick pics'
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
It’s only a couple of weeks away to my Gothic: An Illustrated History coming out. People often ask me: “But will there be double spread images where the book stares back at me in a malignant manner?” and I’m here to reassure you that will never, ever happen
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
11 months
on some measures ... so why not recommend doing a classic, wide-ranging and highly flexible humanities degree to anyone thinking about going (or going back) to university this autumn? #EnglishCreates
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
Today thinking about the valuable advice my PhD supervisor gave me 30 years ago: “If you ever have to lecture on something you’re not at all confident about, wear a very loud shirt”
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
1 month
“I know, Natalie, it *is* an unusual meeting room, isn’t it, but the Parliamentary Labour Party always holds its meetings in here, I can assure you. Please, after you.”
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
At last the British Library has re-opened and my timeline can get back to being 63% complaints about the cost of the Victoria sponge in the cafe.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
Meanwhile, my laptop is balanced on a pile of old Stephen King novels...
@manojkdora
Prof Manoj Dora
4 years
Harvard University classroom 🤗
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
11 months
From today, I’m launching an all-new recipe: 60% professor, 40% freelance writer & researcher. Daunted, relieved, mildly terrified. Hit me up!
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
The replacement for the EU ‘Erasmus’ student exchange scheme with a UK ‘Turing’ scheme is so perfectly named: toleration of brilliance while never properly funding it, followed by some state persecution, and a belated apology for screwing it all up over 50 years later.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
8 months
I know there are several urgent issues facing the world currently, but I need to alert you that there is an ABSENT-MINDED, LOUD, TUNELESS HUMMER at large in one of the British Library reading rooms RIGHT NOW.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
6 years
This is a screen grab of what I believe my right honourable friend @IanMartin once called 'a peloton of cunts'
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
11 months
It’s improbably Ballardian outside my hotel window
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
2 years
That’s an amazingly diverse Cabinet: the first time in history all four horsemen of the apocalypse have held the top posts (also a promotion for Pestilence, congrats!)
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
6 years
Thank Christ for this, we haven’t been ranked for something in nearly six hours and I was beginning to enter a crisis of ontological worthlessness.
@timeshighered
Times Higher Education
6 years
We’re proud to reveal a world first in global rankings and a step towards a more sophisticated view of international higher education: the Times Higher Education Europe Teaching Rankings #TeachingEx #THEunirankings
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
5 years
Today is the first day of term at my college, which means today is the day I mark 25 years working at Birkbeck College. It also means that *this* Kit-Kat here in front of me is the 18, 457th Kit-Kat I have eaten at Birkbeck College.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
6 years
Apologetic note from Swedish academic that they can only offer £850 for a PhD viva, followed by deeply apologetic note from Italy: merely £400. We are such absolute mugs in the UK, complicit in the devaluing of academic labour!
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
5 years
Genuine PhD viva question I was in the room for this week: “if you were to burn your thesis on a sacrificial altar not everything would disappear in the smoke of its own meaning: there would be a residue. What would that residue be made of?”
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
5 years
My favourite thing this week: one of the local baristas is venturing into English idiomatic usage after a very hesitant start. For the last two days he has welcomed me with the salutation “Hello, girlfriend!” If anyone ever corrects him on this, I will be peeved.
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
(and, P.S., if you go for first day issue, available from 15 April, the text was written by me too)
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 months
Another Popular Conservatism event today
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
4 years
Just sat on a park bench and a had a chat with a smiley biddy who told me about the time her dad went to the local working men’s club in 1905, and had a bit of a row with the guest speaker, Lenin. Extraordinary
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
3 years
It’s so completely perfect that they’ve chosen the acronym OBON for 25th June — Obon Day is the Japanese Day of the Dead
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
1 year
‘Ah no, Professor Luckhurst, you are merely *in scope* for redundancy, no more than that, perhaps we could discuss this more in the special meeting room we’ve set up?’
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
10 months
“Keir Starmer: I wouldn’t be able to go to university today.” One thing he cd do in his own constituency is fight to keep Birkbeck College alive as its mission of access to higher education for working Londoners is ground under the heel of Tory policy
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
1 year
We got my dad in the Guardian today, and happenstance put the announcement next to the obit of the great travel writer Jonathan Raban. The sun shone and the Mendips were beautiful. Peace out xxx
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@TheProfRog
Roger Luckhurst
6 years
Thank heavens universities have been ranked for something this week, it's been at least 5 days since the last one and I was beginning to worry those feelings of worthlessness and despair were receding #TEF
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