Today (somewhat to my disbelief) marks the 12th anniversary of this blog. Although this project has always been an exercise in slow scholarship, it was never my expectation when I began that I would still be blogging a dozen years later. On one hand, this is a very positive consequence on the endlessly rich and fascinating story that my research is uncovering; on the other hand, it is a reflection of the fact that my progress, especially in the last year, has been slower than I would have liked.

While slow scholarship has always represented a small and symbolic (but also privileged) act of resistance to dominant modes of fast-paced academic production, it does feel even more difficult to sustain in the context of the present financial and ideological crisis in UK higher education, where barely a day passes without news of new rounds of redundancies. As one academic commentator recently put it, “it’s essentially amazing that anyone in UK universities—bar a couple of institutions—is producing any research at the moment…I genuinely wonder how anyone is doing anything”.

Once again, the anniversary of this blog gives me the opportunity to reaffirm my commitment to slow scholarship and to seeing this project through to its conclusion, day by day, word by word.