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Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

My first talk to come with a souvenir

Photograph of a screen with the title page of a slideshow presentation, for a talk titled "The Shape of history: Time Travel in the Eighteenth Century"

Bronze bas relief medal of Samuel Johnson

November 24, 2025 at 6:03 PM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

Oh, I’ve missed you

Photo of a hand holding a can of Trader Joe’s black cherry vanilla sparkling water

November 20, 2025 at 8:31 PM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

Today is the second anniversary of Ady's death. Carl said, "I can't believe it's been two years. So much has happened, but it feels like just a year." We miss him every day.

While we're in York for the fall, Ady's caregiver Izamar set up this beautiful ofrenda for him at our house in Santa Barbara.

Wooden chest topped with colorful flags, candles, marigold flowers, and small skulls, surorunding an urn

November 1, 2025 at 8:47 AM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

OMG (yes that’s the Acropolis)

Hill topped by the Parthenon rising up above buildings, with a bright rainbow to the right

October 21, 2025 at 9:39 AM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

Pilgrimage to see the Difference Engine at the London Science Museum (9-year-old mostly unimpressed)

Photo of Charles Babbage’s difference engine prototype in a glass case with a boy rolling his eyes in the background

October 18, 2025 at 3:27 PM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

WSECS proposals due Nov. 1! Come spend Presidents' Day weekend in sunny Santa Maria, CA, or present remotely. This year's theme is "Eighteenth-Century Collaborations."
www.wsecs.org/upcoming-eve...

CFP for the 2026 WSECS conference, "Eighteenth-Century Collaborations." The CFP reads:
Eighteenth-Century
Collaborations
WSECS 2026
Allan Hancock College,
Santa Maria, CA
February 13-14, 2026
Featuring Keynote Speaker
Jillian Hess,
Bronx Community College,
CUNY

This HyFlex conference invites in-person and remote attendance and takes place Friday and
Saturday of the Presidents’ Day weekend. We welcome proposals from all disciplines for
individual papers and full panels. Potential topics for the conference theme, “Eighteenth-Century
Collaborations,” include:
Commonplace books, scrapbooks, and ephemera collections that represent authorial
collaboration, as well as collaborative relationships across various media; collaborative
assignments or pedagogical practices for teaching the 18th century; collaborative readings of
18th-century texts; collaborations between the 18th century and other time periods; digital
collaborations surrounding 18th-century materials; 18th-century musical collaborations;
collaborations across 18th-century visual culture; collaboration and conviviality in 18th-century
social culture; collaborations across the arts and sciences; collaborative collecting practices;
institutional collaborations; collaborative research practices.
We also welcome papers and panels not directly related to the conference theme and that conceive
of the 18th century in broader terms. Please indicate your modality preference when applying and
send an abstract (approximately 250 words) by November 1, 2025 to WSECS2026@gmail.com.

October 17, 2025 at 9:01 AM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

I'm so happy to finally share this news. This book is about how the past 9 years changed my ideas about family, community, and care, and how those ideas fit into a long history. Huge thanks to my agent @carolineeisenmann.bsky.social, who held my hand through much angst, and to my editor Abby Mohr.

A Publishers Marketplace Deal Report for "How Much, How Little" by Rachael King. "UC Santa Barbara professor Rachael King's HOW MUCH, HOW LITTLE, about how her life was transformed in the wake of her late husband Ady Barkan's ALS diagnosis, and how it galvanized her to search for a new vision of caregiving in America, to Abby Mohr at One Signal, by Caroline Eisenmann at Francis Goldin Literary Agency (world English)"

September 23, 2025 at 1:47 PM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

I did it. I just sent the revised manuscript of The Book of Improvement to the press. This was such a productive (still painful) revision process: the reader reports were so engaged and incisive. Reader 2 gave me a run for my money but we worked it out.

TOC and first paragraph below!

page of text: "Table of Contents

Preface vii
Acknowledgements xix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. Before and After: Landscape Gardening and the Visualization of Improvement 39
Chapter 2. The Impression of Improvement: Interactive Print and the Material Texts of Early Abolitionism 75
Chapter 3. Lines and Colors: Stadial Theory and the Shape of History 112
Chapter 4. Her Book: Women’s Accounts and the Spaces of Self-Improvement 148
Chapter 5. Improving Literature: Periodicals, Novels, and the Question of Genre 189
Epilogue: The End(s) of Improvement 236
Notes 246"

Page of text: "Introduction
“This is still a country that is less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement.”
—Pres. Barack Obama, Nov. 15, 2019

In the early seventeenth century, “improvement” meant the development, beautification, and monetization of land; by the end of the eighteenth, almost everything apparently needed to be improved: estates, agriculture, roads, trade, nations, morals, literature, language, the law, the arts, the sciences, the self. This book is about how improvement came to dominate and direct thinking about social change during this period, as Britons used this concept to explain to themselves the bundle of ideas and practices that we call Enlightenment. While “improvement” now denotes generally “making something better,” in the earlier era its meaning was specific and significant: it described the daily, on-the-ground activities that people could undertake to effect change, such as keeping a diary, tending the land, or reading the right kind of books. It explained the connections between these disparate realms, shaping the period’s understanding of the trajectory of both personal and historical development. In this way, it operated as a hinge between the individual and the world, as improving activities connected personal choices to social goods. But this apparent benignity also legitimized the concept’s role in colonial, racist, sexist, and classist projects, as women, the poor, the colonized, and/or the enslaved were deemed incapable of self-improvement and sometimes forcibly “improved.” The progressive view of history implied in “improvement” ultimately forked into divergent paths, leading to its collapse as a meaningful metric.
A central argument of The Book of Improvement is that the concept’s trajectory—and its deviations—was charted by the material object of the book, which itself underwent important"

August 20, 2025 at 7:52 PM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

Does your library have a Pacific View Room? It should.

Photo of a university campus with the Pacific Ocean and palm trees in the background.

August 13, 2025 at 8:16 PM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

This one! (Which I use on the first day of my 18th C lecture 😄)

Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting “experiment on a bird in the air pump”

August 5, 2025 at 2:42 PM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

Me: I don’t want my new headshots to be too girly. I am a Serious Academic.
Also me: PINK WALL

Picture of me wearing a navy top and jeans standing in front of a pink brick wall

July 28, 2025 at 2:48 PM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

Canadian Rockies 😍

July 17, 2025 at 5:55 PM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

9-year-old made his bed (unprompted) like this before leaving for camp and 🥹

Photo of a stuff bear tucked into star-patterned sheets

July 7, 2025 at 10:09 PM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

Get you an archive buddy who will go straight from the NYPL to the Grand Central Oyster Bar

Photo of me and Stephanie DeGooyer in the grand central oyster bar

June 28, 2025 at 12:14 AM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

Last NYC mayoral post (pretending I still live in NYC is my favorite hobby). Zohran’s win is huge but part of the reason it feels so transformative is this partnership. The love for Brad at Zohran’s party last night was palpable. Can’t wait to see them building a better New York together.

Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander with their arms around each other during Zohran’s victory speech.

June 25, 2025 at 3:13 PM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

Realizing how much 2020 ptsd I still have from how happy it makes me to see these two out there working together today

Zohran Mamdani and Brad lander talking to the media together on the upper west side

June 24, 2025 at 6:13 PM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

It’s one million degrees in New York and I am so happy to be here today, and so proud of this campaign.

Photo of me standing next to Brad Lander, I’m wearing a Be A Hero shirt

June 24, 2025 at 3:00 PM

Rachael King

@rscar.bsky.social

Genuinely moved by the solidarity at the Working Families Party GOTV rally tonight. All of these candidates want a better world for all New Yorkers and they’re working together to keep a power-hungry abuser out of City Hall.