Deciding I might as well embrace my new status as “unfunded hobbyist researcher” (sorry: UK-only in-joke), so here's my new kit just arrived from the Hand Engravers’ Association. (I had to supply my hand measurement so that the burin/graver could be made to the right size.)

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I also hope it might support some meta-reflection: I’m looking forward to a fruitful collision between Pamela Smith’s notions of embodied knowledge and artisanal epistemology and the experience of being taught manual skills via Zoom. Wish me luck!

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This is ahead of an introductory online course in a fortnight. I hope it will make me better appreciate and interrogate historical instrument engraving - though I'm not expecting to display my new-found abilities any time soon.

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I’m having intro chats with dissertation students this fortnight, and one of them asked which historians I’d recommend for beautiful writing they could absorb to further develop their own writing style. So, gang, which are your favourite *writers* among historians, any time, any topic, any place. 🗃️

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Looking forward to this afternoon's session on “Medical Modernities” at the @scsclassics.bsky.social meeting in Philly. I'll be presenting on "The ‘Genetics Turn’ in Disease History: What It Means to ‘Retrospectively Diagnose’ in an Age of Evolutionary Pathogen Histories" www.academia.edu/126062775/

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