Dear Blog,

Lots has happened recently. We’ve finished the filming for our MOOC (a massive open, online course) on William Wordsworth: Poetry, People and Place. Filming took place at Dove Cottage with the full support of the Wordsworth Trust (https://wordsworth.org.uk/visit/dove-cottage.html). The course is online and completely free. You can watch the trailer and sign up for it here: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/william-wordsworth/details. The course will begin on Sept 7th and run for four weeks. My bit is in the second half of the fourth week and I’m talking about Dorothy Wordsworth. There’s some film from inside Dove Cottage, quizzes about Dorothy’s life and her journals, some lovely audio readings of the journal extracts from my colleague Jenn Ashworth (http://jennashworth.co.uk/) etc etc. I think it will be a lot of fun. In any case, it’s worth checking out the many courses offered by FutureLearn. I quite fancied a few of these myself and it’s pretty amazing that they are completely free.

Since then it’s been pretty manic. Those people who think that academics get three months off in the summer are very much mistaken. We finished teaching before Easter at Lancaster and I’m not sure that it’s made any difference at all. In fact I’ve found myself wondering how I used to fit teaching in. I spent a week in Glasgow as external examiner, I’ve been doing REF2020 interviews with every member of staff in the dept, and I haven’t managed to revise my ‘Literature and Chemistry’ chapter for the Ashgate Companion. We have our own exam boards this week, a Davy Letters meeting arranged for 29th June and I’m hoping that after 3rd July I might be able to get back to some research. I’m attempting to do the revisions on that essay, work on the collection as a whole with my co-editor John Holmes, and write another essay for the Literature and Medicine journal over July, August and September. I’m going to the BARS conference in July and contributing to the Analogy symposium in Cambridge in September. I’ve booked a week in London at the end of July so that I can get lots of reading done in the British Library. So, well, research is being planned but not yet executed. Lots to do before then.

Best,

Sharon