The Humanities are being extinguished
Hi there! I am revamping my newsletter to keep you up-to-date on everything in academia, plus helpful writing advice and resources. I'll be sending this out once a week with three things: one piece of news from academia, one piece of writing advice I actually use with my coaching clients, and one resource to help you finish what you started.
This week: what the UK humanities cuts mean for the rest of Europe, why the ten-o'clock hour is your best-kept writing weapon, and an invitation to my August writing retreat.
01 ·"Humanities are being extinguished"
The Guardian reported this week that UK universities cut close to 4,000 academic posts in social sciences, humanities and the arts in the twelve months to December 2024, with more than 1,000 further losses now proposed at Russell Group institutions including Exeter, Nottingham, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Social work took the largest single hit at −9%, followed by English and classics (both −8%), anthropology (−7%) and linguistics (−6%).
Hetan Shah of the British Academy called it "a crisis for social mobility," while UCU general secretary Jo Grady demanded "an emergency rescue package."
Why this matters for us in Europe: 1) The UK squeeze is already redirecting early- and mid-career humanists toward continental posts, so expect even more competition for MSCA fellowships (9 September) and ERC Advanced calls (deadline 27 August). Your strategy should shift to include national funding applications to balance out the more risky applications.
2) Protecting your intellectual work during these times of precarity has become more important than ever before. It can be really stressful and hard to write with this kind of existential anxiety in the back of your mind, which is why I put together an important piece of writing advice in the next section.
02 · On the craft: The one hour that changes your writing week
The advice I give every one of my coaching clients in their first month is this: stop trying to write "whenever" you have time, and start writing when your brain is actually awake. Not every hour of your day is the same. For many academics, the afternoon is not the best time to concentrate—so just answer your emails or do some admin.
For most of the academics I coach, that best hour lands somewhere between 9:30 and 11:00 in the morning. You've had your first coffee. You've done a short check of your inbox so you're not anxious. You haven't yet been pulled into a meeting or a supervisor's Zoom call. Your mind is rested enough to do some intellectual work. This is the hour to protect. Not with willpower — with a calendar block called writing that you treat the same as a doctor's appointment. You do NOT cancel.
There's also a compounding effect I see again and again: when scholars write in that morning window together with other people, the concentration doubles. That's why I schedule my EMERGE Co-Writing sessions at 10 a.m. CEST — I chose the hour on purpose. The commitment to a dedicate group of academic writers makes it harder to check email, and the shared room makes it easier to start your writing process.
Try this week:
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Track your energy for three mornings — not what you did, just how alert you felt at 9, 10, and 11.
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Block a 90-minute focus session in your best window on next week's calendar. Label it writing, and show up.
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Consider whether writing with company would help you during this hour. Even one friend on a shared Zoom counts.
03 · Give yourself one real writing day
If regular 60-minute focus sessions sound good in theory but are hard in practice, this is my invitation to you. I'm running a two-day online writing retreat on 13–14 August, and the waitlist is now open. Sign up and, as a thank-you, you'll get my free guide How to Create Your Own One-Day Writing Retreat — a realistic hour-by-hour schedule and the planning templates I use with my clients to turn a single day into meaningful, calm progress on a paper. If your summer is too busy for regular weekly writing sessions but you need to make progress on that paper, grant, or chapter - come join us.
Whether or not the August dates work for you, the guide is yours to keep and use whenever you can carve out a day for your writing.
Join the waitlist and get the free retreat template →
That's the week. If one paragraph here made you rethink something, hit reply and tell me — I read every response.
Warmly,
Melanie Sindelar
Founder, EMERGE Scholars Collective
