History Research Seminar on Wednesday 26 October: Andy Burn (Durham)

The next instalment in the History Seminar Series takes place on Wednesday afternoon, when we will be joined by Andy Burn from Durham. Andy will speak to us about a subject with increasing relevance in the twenty-first century – short-term work and unemployment in the North East. His paper is entitled: ‘”A hard and tedious winter”: seasonal work and poverty in seventeenth-century Newcastle’ (see poster attached).

The paper takes place in Lipman 121 at 4.30pm as usual, with drinks and dinner to follow.

Histories of Activism: Tracing Lives Beyond Borders Workshop, May 13

The ‘Histories of Activism’ research group at Northumbria University is delighted to host a half-day training workshop on ‘Tracing Lives Beyond Borders’, taking place on Friday 13 May. Please take a look at the attached programme.

·         The event is organised by three PhD students from the Histories of Activism research group – Jasmine Calver, Lara Green and Sophie Roberts. They will start off the workshop with brief case studies drawn from their own doctoral projects.

·         Matt Perry (Newcastle University) and Charlotte Alston (Northumbria University) will discuss the ‘challenges of biography’ with regard to monographs that they’ve written.

·         There will be research papers from Niall Whelehan (Edinburgh University) and Brian Ward (Northumbria University).

·         Three colleagues from Durham University (James Koranyi, Tom Stammers and André Keil) will facilitate break-out sessions for the participants.

·         Christophe Verbruggen – a historian from Ghent University – will give a keynote lecture on the way in which digital resources can be used to uncover and map transnational trajectories. He’s the director of the Ghent Institute of Digital Humanities and the chair of Flemish contribution to the European DARIAH initiative (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities).

The event is free, but participants should register via https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/tracing-lives-beyond-borders-postgraduate-workshop-tickets-24588608189 by 6 May at the latest. For further information on the activities of the research group, feel free to visit http://historiesofactivism.blogspot.co.uk. 

Funding Successes for Randall Stephens

Randall Stephens, Reader in History and American Studies, has received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship to take part in a seminar on “Problems in the Study of Religion.”  The grant amounts to $2,700/£1,910 and is for a three-week session.

UVA's Rotunda building, designed by Thomas Jefferson

This prestigious NEH University of Virginia seminar brings together college and university faculty as well as advanced graduate students to study, research, and write on the subject.

The seminar will be lead by UVA professors Charles Mathewes, an ethicist, and Kurtis Schaeffer, who works on Buddhism and Tibetan religions.  The programme's website further elaborates:

Problems in the Study of Religion brings together college and university faculty as well as advanced graduate students from the many disciplines that have a stake in understanding religion, for the purpose of coming to terms with the manifold changes in the study of religion that have occurred over the past decade.

Running for three weeks, the Institute will introduce scholars, within religious studies and without, to the enormously productive re-thinking of the idea of “religion” that has happened in recent years, in order to assist those interested in developing a richer and more nuanced understanding of the strengths and weaknesses, the opportunities and pitfalls, that come with using the category of “religion” to understand highly diverse manifestations of human practice and belief within the United States and around the world today.

The primary activities of the Institute will be close reading and discussion of important contemporary scholarship on the history, current hot spots, and teaching about religion, punctuated with lectures by specialists from select fields in the study of religion. Institute participants will also engage in independent research projects, making use of the University of Virginia’s world-class research facilities and staff.

Congratulations to Randall!

Research in History Newsletter, 2015-16

Thanks to Tawny Paul for putting together a marvelous Research in History at Northumbria University Newsletter.  The following is Professor David Gleeson’s summary of the year.  Download and read the full newsletter here.

The Historians at Northumbria pride themselves in offering exciting and innovative undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in History. After a significant number of new appointments there are now 24 History staff, teaching a wide range of modules that cover diverse subjects over large spans of time and significant geographical range. Moreover, History offers a vibrant research culture. All of our optional modules are informed by staff research interests and expertise, and, like our seminars and conferences, are designed to engage students with the latest research carried out in the discipline of History. Please visit our website for more details:

Welcome to the 2015/16 History Research Newsletter. Following our jump of more than 40 places in the 2014 REF from our 2008 position and our placing in the top 20 for Research Outputs, we have built impressively on that excellent performance. In collaboration colleagues in English, Arts, and Media we were successful in applying to the University’s REF fund for Multidisciplinary Centres (MDC) with a proposal linked to our new Institute of the Humanities. The Institute has received over £50,000 invested in new space and equipment. It is located in the old SASS suite on the first floor of the Lipman building and includes new rooms for staff and visiting professors as well as two meeting rooms. There are also two large spaces for public events and some of our work will be conspicuously displayed in the outer room. Signage is already up and the whole space should be ready by Spring 2016, when there will be a launch event. The plans to fill the posts connected to the MDC are well advanced with advertisements for two senior positions already out and two early-career ones to follow later in 2016. The Institute will prove useful in encouraging more inter- and multidisciplinary research and improve our research grant capture for the next REF.

In terms of the next REF for 2020 (or perhaps 2021), history research is already in good shape for this stage in the process. The list of publications since 2013 is substantial, including a large number of monographs. In 2015 we continued to have good success in research bidding with Tawny Paul’s award of the prestigious one-year Fellowship at the Huntingdon Library in California, James McConnel’s award of an AHRC grant to support research on WWI in the Northeast, Colin Reid’s award of a Visiting Fellowship to the O’Moore Institute in NUI Galway, Anja-Silvia-Goeing’s British Academy Network Grant, and Nicole Robertson’s capture of an AHRC fellowship (her success making History 6 for 6 in this category over the past 7 years!). Congratulations to all and we look forward to more successes in 2016.

For outreach and service both to the profession and the larger community, the history group remained very active. Along with the smaller events, outlined below by research groups in this newsletter, the American history researchers welcome the 2015 meeting of the British Association of American Studies on its 60th anniversary in April. Over 300 scholars from all over Europe and North America Kudos to everyone involved but especially to Joe Street who coordinated this massive effort so well. In 2016 our major conference hosting will continue when Lesley Twomy and Carlos Conde-Solares

welcome the 61st International Conference of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland, making Northumbria the first post-1992 university to host this premier organization for Hispanic Studies in the British Isles.

History, under the leadership of Joe Hardwick, hosted the AHRC-sponsored 2015 Newcastle Being Human Festival around the theme of Cities and Citizenship with hundreds of people attending more than a dozen free events throughout the city connecting humanities scholars and scholarship with the general public. Congratulations to Joe and the other history staff who participated (Tanja Bueltmann, Daniel Laqua, Laura O’Brien and Anja Silvia-Goeing). Thanks especially to PhD student Stan Neal for all the hard work he put into it. History continues to support research impact leaders participating in events and meetings with, among others, the Scottish and Irish governments, the Cooperative Society and the U.S. National Park Service. Under our new Impact Lead, Tanja Bueltmann, we will seek to expand our research impact even further in 2016.

We welcomed five new PhD students in 2015, including our first from the AHRC Heritage BGP. We also had won our first MRes scholarship under the same scheme. Congratulations to recent PhD graduates Andre Keil, Jen Kain, Maria Cannon and Liam Temple. We look forward to your continued success in the profession.

Finally, I’d like to welcome our new member of staff, Laura O’Brien. An historian of France with book just out with Manchester University Press on French caricature and republican identity, she strengthens our research in both the nineteenth century and modern Europe. Let me also recognize two of our professors who have moved into important leadership positions, Tom Lawson (Associate Dean for Academic Affairs) and Sylvia Ellis (Head of Dept. of Humanities). Despite their substantial administrative duties they still remain active members of the History research team.

Overall, then, we have had a successful start to the new REF cycle and with the new investment in the Institute of the Humanities, we look to go from strength to strength in the future.

David T. Gleeson
Professor of American History Research and Innovation Lead

Read more.

John Hulme, Northumbria University MRes Student, and North East War Memorials

Tony Henderson, “Northumbria University Academic in Call for North War Memorial to Mark Women's Efforts,” The Chronicle, April 3, 2015.  (See also this post.)

Labourers at Wallsend Slipway & Engineering Company.

A huge workforce of women produced millions of shells in North East factories during the First World War.

In addition to these munitionettes, thousands more women took over from men in a range of other industries and other jobs.

Now a research project at Northumbria University is launching a debate on whether women’s war efforts should be recognised by a regional or national memorial.

John Hulme, a Master of Research student in history at the university, is also questioning why so few women appear on North East war memorials.

He will present his case in a research paper, titled “Commemorating the Women of World War One, Never or Now?” at a Master of Research symposium at Northumbria University on April 27, which will be open to the public. read on>>>

Research Highlights Silent Warriors of First World War

1917 poster. Courtesy of the LOC.

From the News and Features section of the Northumbria University website.

A Northumbria University, Newcastle research student is calling for the women of World War One to be recognised.

John Hulme, a Master of Research student in History, asks why women rarely feature on war memorials despite the significance of their contributions during the war period. Using memorials, archives, databases and the works of several historians, John’s research considers the status of women in Edwardian England, contemporary views of the war and the role of women in it, and memory and memorialisation.

His research paper, entitled ‘Commemorating the Women of World War One, Never or Now?’ concludes that the time is right for a discussion of a new memorial: one that fully recognises the contribution women made to the British victory in the First World War.

John said: “First World War memorials are a ubiquitous feature of our built environment, present in every city, town and village. Writers of the time acknowledged the presence of women in many wartime occupations from 1914 onwards. Women replaced men in factories and offices as well as filling jobs created to meet the demands of the war, including producing munitions, manufacturing aircraft and nursing the wounded.

“My paper seeks to address why, given this contribution, women feature so rarely on war memorials.”

The topic is particularly timely as it takes place during the nation’s four-year commemoration of the Great War of 1914-18. With 2014 marking 100 years since the start of the war, the Government is leading on a series of remembrance activities taking place across the country. Coordinated by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the events will culminate in the building of a permanent commemoration that will memorialise this significant milestone in world history. >>> read on

Economic Culture and the Lower Middling Sort: Risk, Reputation and Reward in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Tawny Paul

In this coming academic year Tawny Paul, Lecturer in Early Modern History, will be undertaking a long-term (9 month) fellowship at the prestigious Huntington Library in California.  The work she will do there in the library's substantial collections will be crucial for her current research project.  While there she will also participate in the lively intellectual life of the research center.  Below Tawny briefly outlines the work she will be doing out west and presents the types of questions that will drive her research.

'Roast beef & port or Bully Bramble Esqr., Justice
of Peace in Wasp Town', 1772. Print courtesy of the
Library of Congress.

One of the major social developments in Britain during the long eighteenth century was the rise of a ‘middling’ sort of people. Like the middle class today, society’s ‘stout midriff’ included a broad swath of individuals, from merchants and lawyers to petty traders and artisans. In many ways, the application of the term ‘middling sort’ to this broad section of society seems problematic. While the middling sorts have been of interest to scholars for some time, most of this work has focused on the elite and most visible members of this broad group: merchants, professionals and civic elites. The ‘lower middling’ sorts remain largely neglected. This project aims to provide a much-needed account of this group.

The wealth, occupations and life experiences of the lower middling were intimately tied to processes of commercialization and economic expansion. In examining ‘economic culture’, I will explore the impact that the economic facts of life had upon individual identities, attitudes and social relationships. Accounting for the lower middling allows us to question some of the major narratives that have framed how we think about the texture of economic relationships in eighteenth-century Britain: For these individuals, was an interpersonal economy, based upon a personal ethic, replaced by a more modern and impersonal system of exchange? What role did gender, and in particular masculinities, play in economic life? How did men who were neither patriarchal providers nor polite gentlemen fabricate their gender identities? How did individuals make sense of the frequent bankruptcies and business failures that plagued middling business?

High Performance for History in the Research Excellence Framework

Congratulations to the Northumbria University History Programme for achieving such great results in the latest REF.  (Read about what it is and how it works here.)  The programme ranked at 18th for research outputs.  See the chart below. 

Lesley Robinson's Research Recognized by AHRC Programme

In July this year Lesley Robinson completed her PhD at the University of Ulster. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Englishness in England and the "Near Diaspora": Organisation, Influence and Expression, 1880s-1970s’ was done as part of the AHRC-funded ‘Locating the Hidden Diaspora’ Project. She is now working as a Senior Research Assistant on the ESRC-funded project ‘European, Ethnic and Expatriate’ led by Dr Tanja Bueltmann and is currently investigating the role that associational culture played in the lives of British and German expatriates in Asia.

In recognition of the quality of her research the AHRC has selected Lesley to take part in a 3-day course, ‘Engaging with Government’. The AHRC describes it as 'designed to provide an insight into the policy making process, and help participants develop the skills needed to pursue the policy implications of their research'. The initiative 'also aims to build links between policy makers and the most dynamic new research in the arts and humanities'.

There were only a few places available for the course, which entailed a very significant level of competition.  Lesley’s important research has clear impact dimensions. The Northumbria University History programme is happy to congratulate Lesley on this fitting honour!

Charting Northumbria Research in History

Randall Stephens

Below is an interesting visual representation of the research focus of our History staff.  (Senior Lecturer Joe Street put this together for Open Days and Applicant Visit Days.)  Most interestingly, it shows our strength across space and time.  It also reveals some clusters of strength: Irish history, American and European politics, the American South, British Empire, business history, America in the post-war era, Anglo-European relations, and more.