7 April 2024 / Last week I went for a walk/climb on and around Box Hill! It rained just enough to keep most people away, but unfortunately we saw very few bugs.

Since last time, I've survived supervision and getting comments back on my hot mess of a rewritten chapter. The consensus is it needs to be shortened (which I already knew). I'm currently working on finishing up a first draft of the unplanned bonus substantive chapter, then I need to proofread the chapter that this material came from to make sure it all still makes sense.

I've finished A Restless Truth and am about a quarter of the way through A Power Unbound. I also started to listen to the audiobook for Last Night at the Telegraph Club, which is fantastic so far!

25 March 2024 / Literally all I do now is write, so things have been.....pretty boring! But I did get to go too the Natural History Museum at Tring yesterday (there was a group from the main NHM going, and I got to tag along so I wasn't trying to get there alone!). So I've got photos again. :)

Overall, since my last update, I finished first drafts of my two introductions, got comments back on the main one, and completely restructured/rewrote my first substantive chapter. I have a supervision meeting on Thursday to discuss the (rough) new version. It has serious flow issues at the moment, but I didn't want to commit more time to it without feedback on the structure.

I'm currently working on reading Insect Migration by CB Williams to be used as a primary source in the one chapter that I...don't actually have a full draft for because it's getting split off from an existing very long chapter (chapter 4 is becoming chapters 4 and 5, and I'm using this book to expand on the case-study-that-will-be-chapter-5). Then the plan is to break off the new chapter 5, expand it, and add a bunch of the random anecdotes I cut for length back into the original, already drafted chapter 4.

Then it's introduction revising time, I think. I want to have that in a decent state before thinking about my conclusion.

In terms of fun reading, I've finished...a bunch! I reread The Virgin Suicides, and I read A Stitch in Time and Avatar book I (Deep Space 9 post-canon novels), finished Prelude to Foundation and read Forward the Foundation, and I'm now going back to the Last Binding trilogy. I'm a bit more than halfway through A Restless Truth. Then I'll do Avatar book II and A Power Unbound.

11 February 2024 / This is so so so late, but I have a last couple of Christmas photos to share. I'm a HUGE fan of the fact that the archivists at the Natural History Museum dress up slippers!Darwin for the holiday.

My supervisors and I came to the conclusion that I really need two introductions: one to introduce my thesis and one to introduce the statistical methods I use. This is good for me in many ways (more words, all this work isn't relegated to an appendix), but UUUUUGH more writing. I have most of the stats intro written and just about finished, and I'm about halfway through smashing a bunch of materials together to make the main introduction.

Luckily I should have plenty of time to get these done well before our next meeting.

I've also finished The Hollow and am now working on Prelude to Foundation because I loved the Foundation tv show. So. Much. They have absolutely nothing in common, but I'm enjoying the book too!

Aaaaaah thank you for the shout out!

I don't actively do a ton of environmental sci stuff, but I do be out here doing envsci-related stats and paper-writing. And posting pictures of specimens and museums and stuff. :)

I'm sooo glad to find an envi sci studyblr!!! It feels like it's so rare.

yess!! there are like none of us out here! possibly it has to do with the venn diagram of tumblr users and people who go outside being separate circus tents, but that said, I'll list some cool people I follow if you want more env sci on your dash.

i was in parasocials with mallaidh-ann when he was working with seals and now he's doing salmon fishery work? swoon

headspace-hotel does environmental rage like no one else and also insanely good poetry

@hellsitegenetics is new and very funny

MC does fantastic work with @reasonsforhope to promote good environmental and human rights stories

@memecology makes me laugh, though they've been afk for a bit

@deadnaturalhistories is a natural history PhD candidate

@ecologie-txt is an ecology PhD candidate

@botanyshitposts is what is says on the tin (also, very smart)

@fatehbaz does anticolonial ecology 👌🏼

@weird-ecologies does wildlife conservation and scicomm

I really liked my friend's blog eco-filth but I think our upcoming master's thesis ate them...

mutuals with @endless-forms who's a science journalist

@wilder-thyme does archaebotany (wow!)

@moon-thestars is/was a biodiv conservation student, may be afk

nollectquest posts some foraging/homesteading content that I really enjoy

gallusrostromegalus likewise has an excellent #The Garden At The End Of The Universe tag

wild-west-wind is a park ranger

I've tagged those who are studyblrs and simply linked to those who are more personal blogs so as not to bother them too much. The best advice (imo) for finding envsci people on this hellsite is to hover around the solarpunk/tolkien/hozier/gardening/trc/justice tags and reblog-hop until you find somebody cool.

Feel free to add recs or nominate your own blog if you fall into any kind of botany, environmental science, zoology, conservation gig! Love to extend the circle!

26 January 2024 / Have a random couple of photos from London-at-Christmas!

Since my last update, I finished writing the last body chapter of my PhD!!! All that's left is introduction and conclusion. :) I also need to go back and edit the other body chapters of course.

I also........filed my taxes. woooooooooooo!

I've also finished A Marvelous Light and Dead Man's Folly. I'm taking another Agatha Christie interlude next with The Hollow.

I love you people going into "useless" fields I love you classics majors I love you cultural studies majors I love you comparative literature majors I love you film studies majors I love you near eastern religions majors I love you Greek, Latin, and Hebrew majors I love you ethnic studies I love you people going into any and all small field that isn't considered lucrative in our rotting capitalist society please never stop keeping the sacred flame of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and understanding humanity and not merely for the sake of money alive

5 January 2024 / A friend lives in a tall tall building in South London, so I went to her place to watch the New Years fireworks from her roof! I'm going to really try to post regularly from now on, but my success in this remains to be seen. I'm in the writing-and-nothing-else phase of this PhD, so it's all pretty boring to be honest.

Since my last update, the big thing I've managed is finishing the third body chapter of my thesis! I've also done a variety of other tasks here and there for papers and for admin, etc. Today I fixed a set of maps in one of my chapters, proofread all three of my methodological appendices, and wrote 1,000 words of my final body chapter.

Tomorrow, I need to keep working on the same chapter, hopefully getting another 1,000 words in.

I've since finished the audiobook for Ready Player One, reread Catch-22, and started like..... three other books, including A Marvelous Light, which I am really enjoying! I've also finished Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, so after I finish The Last Binding trilogy, I'm going to move on to the DS9 post-canon novels. I loved DS9.

22 November 2023 / I went AWOL for a variety of reasons, and agreeing to give a seminar at Cambridge wasn't the least of them! I LOVE this Auzoux papier-mâché cockchafer beetle, on display in the Whipple Museum! Sadly I couldn't figure out how to get a good picture. I did quite a few fun things over the last month, so hopefully I remember to post regularly to share.

Since my last update, I finished another chapter, turned it in, and am now 3/4 of the way through a third chapter! We also had our paper finally published!

I also survived giving an invited seminar at Cambridge - it went really well, but also it ruined like. A week of my life because stress.

I've finished The Little Friend, and I read all of Masters of Death, Evil Under the Sun, and The Outsiders. I'm now listening to the audiobook for Ready Player One, which I think would be good if the main character wasn't......awful.

Also, I'm onto the last season of Star Trek: DS9. I don't know what I'll watch after I finish this! I think I need a break before I start Voyager.

dissertation writing advice

Web Sculpture by Ann Carrington

Masterpost of Free Romantic Literature & Theory (European) (Gothic Literature)

British Romanticism

Songs of Innocence & Songs of Experience by William Blake Poems and Songs of Robert Burns Don Juan & Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Baron George Gordon Byron Collected Poetry of Lord Byron The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth Collected Poetry by John Keats Ivanhoe; Waverly & The Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott The Complete Poetical Works by Percy Bysshe Shelley

French Romanticism

The Count of Monte Cristo; The Three Musketeers & The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances by Théophile Gautier Notre Dame de Paris & Les Misérables by Victor Hugo Collected Prose and Essays of Victor Hugo Poems by Victor Hugo Carmen by Prosper Mérimée The Red and the Black by Stendhal Cinq Mars by Alfred de Vigny

German Romanticism

Were I a Little Bird; The Mountaineer; As Many as Sand-grains in the Sea; The Swiss Deserter; The Tailor in Hell & The Reaper by Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano The Broken Ring by Joseph von Eichendorff Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Collected Poetry by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Fairytales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine by Heinrich Heine Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel The Golden Pot; The Sandman & The Devil’s Elixir by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann Undine (Selections) by Friedrich Baron de la Motte-Fouqué Henry of Ofterdingen: A Romance by Novalis The Iron Idol by Jakob Schaffner The Robbers & Mary Stuart: A Tragedy by Friedrich Schiller Tales from the “Phantasus,” etc. by Ludwig Tieck

Polish Romanticism

Moja Beatrice by Zygmunt Krasiński Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz Anhelli by Juliusz Słowacki

Russian Romanticism

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Iurevich Lermontov Poems by Alexander Pushkin Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin Collected Works of Alexander Pushkin Collected Poetry by Fyodor Tyutchev Poems by Vasily Zhukovsky

Spanish Romanticism

Cantares gallegos by Rosalía de Castro El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections by José de Espronceda The Cid Campeador: A Historical Romance by Antonio de Trueba

Historical Theory and Background 

Literary and Philosophical Essays: French, German and Italian The French Revolution of 1789 by John S. C. Abbott Rousseau and Romanticism by Irving Babbitt A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century by Henry A. Beers Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - The Romantic School in Germany by Georg Brandes On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism by T. S. Eliot The Destiny of Man by Johann Gottlieb Fichte The Faust Legend from Marlowe to Goethe by Kuno Francke The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature by W. F. Kirby Romantic Ireland by M. F. Mansfield and Blanche McManus The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, 1816, Relating to Byron, Shelley, etc. Romance: Two Lectures by Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays by Percy Bysshe Shelley On Liberty by John Stuart Mill The Legend of Sir Lancelot du Lac by Jessie L. Weston

Academic Theory

Introduction: Replicating Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture by Will Abberley Walter Scott’s works perception by his russian contemporaries by O. G. Anossova Theories of Space and the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Isobel Armstrong The Romantic subject as an absolutely autonomous individual by  Miljana Cunta Russian-German Connections in the Editing Practice in the Mid-19th Century: Vasiliy Zhukovsky and Justinus Kerner by Natalia Egorovna Nikonova and Maria Vladimirovna Dubenko Fichte as a Post-Kantian Philosopher and His Political Theory: A Return to Romanticism by Özgür Olgun Erden Negotiating boundaries: Encyclopédie, romanticism, and the construction of science by Marcelo Fetz Wandering Motive and Its Appeal on Reluctantly Wandering Franz Schubert by  Dragana Jeremić-Molnar The Caucasian Motif in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s ‘House of the Dead’ in the Light of the Polemic with Lermontov by Xuyang Mi The Core of Romanticism by Monika Milosavljević Romantic worldview as a narcissistic construct’by Branko Mitrović Topographic Transmissions and How To Talk About Them: The Case of the Southern Spa in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction by Benjamin Morgan Lermontov’s Romanticism and Jena School by Liudmila G. Shakirova The Self in a Crystal Sphere: Juliusz Słowacki’s Concept of the Subject (in his works from the 1830) by Marek Stanisz The Many Faces of Nature: An Ecocritical Reading of the Concepts of Wilderness and the Sublime in John Keats’ Selected Poems by Morteza Emamgholi Tabar Malakshah & Behzad Pourqarib

The transformations (or metamorphoses) of insects. 1882. Book cover.

Internet Archive

16 October 2023 / I'm REALLY loving the return of pumpkin spice latte season.

Last week I had a meeting with my supervisors wherein the chapter I sent them was declared done! It was a first draft! But I'm glad to at least have one chapter finished (with the exception of a last proofread and whatnot). I'm now more than halfway through writing the chapter that comes before it.

I also finished a bunch of tasks for the paper I'm still collaborating on, and I got started on work that will go into the third chapter of my thesis. So we're making progress.

Tomorrow I need to do some more writing, and I'm going to help retrieve an insect collection that's being donated to the museum.

I also already finished my random Agatha Christie novel and am back to finishing The Little Friend.

7 October 2023 / More from the Linnean! I love seeing Wallace specimens.

Since my last post, I finished drafting my chapter, sent it off to my supervisors, and finally took a whole day completely off. The bee code also finally finished running, and the results have been uploaded to the group fileshare. And I sent a bunch of emails, as usual. AND we had a paper accepted! And I had a very productive meeting with another person in the department who does statistics stuff to get help with building a model.

Today I got to working on my next chapter (which is actually the chapter that comes before the one I sent to my supervisors). Tomorrow I need to keep working on it and also hopefully get to coding the first attempt at The Model.

I also finished Demon Copperhead! Instead of finishing The Little Friend or starting Masters of Death, I'm....speeding through a Christie novel. For funsies.

1 October 2023 / Went to a lecture at the Linnean Society a little while back and got to see their display of Wallace's notebooks and work! I was, of course, especially interested to see the materials on butterflies.

Since my last post, I fixed all of my butterfly and moth code, finished making all of my figures for this quantitative chapter, AND managed to draft the entire thing! I've got bee code running in the background now, and tomorrow I'll work on writing something else before going back and revising the chapter I finished. For one thing, I need to assemble an appendix with all of the statistical nitty-gritty that isn't going in the main chapter.

Tomorrow, I also need to send emails, make my planner for November, and generally chill before getting started on revisions.

I'm almost done listening to Demon Copperhead! Then I'm either going to finish The Little Friend or start Masters of Death. One of the two.

19 September 2023 / It's been a while since I shared any bug photos! My favorite Starbucks barista and I went to the Horniman before she moved out of the UK. It was the first time I actually went into the butterfly house!

Discovered that my code for the butterflies and moths wasn't running properly, so now I have to run it all again. Luckily it should all be fixed now, and I'm going to check it every 8 hours or so to make sure. Once it's all run, I have the code for making all of the figures from this stuff already prepped.

In the meantime, I can draft 80% of the chapter this goes into - I spent all day today just getting this code to behave properly. No writing was done. :( I have a couple of textbooks to consult, amongst other things; my chapter deadline is 10th October.

I'm also going to be on the hook for some other (bee) code early next week - I'm going to try to get as many of the butterflies and moths run between now and then as I can, though the bee code shouldn't take me long to finish and run.

Tomorrow is museum volunteering day, but I'll check that my code is behaving first thing in the morning.