From Claire’s 17th-century info, a link to this site from Channel 4; they’ve rounded up historians to review a number of historical films. I hope it’ll expand in the future, but early modernists should take note as Blair Worden rips into Cromwell (1970). (Which, from what I’ve heard, doesn’t even redeem itself by being any good as a film.)
Has anyone seen Stage Beauty? Is it any good as history or film – or even both? It sounds interesting.
I’ve just been informed that our university has the subscription to the new Dictionary of National Biography online. I haven’t checked yet whether that includes remote access using my Athens password. Hoping so. Yum yum yum.
Update: Frustration. Apparently I should be able to, but the link to the Athens login page doesn’t seem to work properly. I’ve emailed the tech support – so let’s see what happens.
Much juvenile giggling here. Thanks to scribblingwoman.
Warning: Do not visit if you think that swearing is A Bad Thing. And keep the volume down if surfing in a public space, perhaps.
I sometimes get emails from prospective history PhD students seeking advice. This seemed a good time of year to gather together and set out some of my usual responses in a post.
NB: What follows is geared specifically to the university system that I’m familiar with in Britain. Only some of it will also be relevant to the very different PhD programs of the USA (and other countries); feel free to add further thoughts based on your own experiences there and elsewhere, or useful links.
You should take your time and do plenty of homework. If you’re contemplating doing a PhD (or, indeed, a Masters) next autumn, you do need to be thinking about it now, especially if you’ll be applying for funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) or the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (and you probably should, even if you don’t think you’ll be successful!), which have strict application deadlines in the spring and complicated application procedures.
What is a British PhD?
The British PhD, essentially, is the PhD thesis (in American terms, you are ABD – ‘all but dissertation’ – from the word go). It is usually defined as a substantial piece of independent research, which should make an original contribution to an academic area or discipline. The PhD thesis is 80-100,000 words in length; the notional period of registration (standard period for funding) is 3 years full-time, and it usually must be completed in 4 years (the funding bodies set this deadline, and they get stroppy with departments that don’t achieve it with the majority of students…); for part-time students, it’s usually 5-7 years. (An MPhil is shorter, with less emphasis on ‘originality’, and many departments initially enrol students for this, ‘upgrading’ them after the first year if progress is satisfactory.) You will probably need at least an upper second class undergraduate degree in history or a related subject and/or a relevant Masters degree to be considered for a place.
Why do a PhD?
Perhaps the very first question you should be asking is if you really should do a PhD. It’s hard work, expensive if you don’t get funding, will eat several years of your life and probably drive you half-crazy in the process. Don’t go into a PhD simply because you can’t make up your mind what job you want or are having difficulty finding one, or because you aren’t keen on working 9 to 5 in an office or wearing suits (all that will seem even less appealing after three years as a research student). If you’re burning with desire to work on a particular topic then you might do it purely for its own sake, but you still need to think about the costs. If what you want is to be an academic historian, then it’s an essential qualification (though not a guarantee of employment; far from it). But otherwise? There are probably better ways to get a well-paid job than doing a history (or humanities generally) PhD. Yes, completing a history PhD will equip you with many skills beyond knowledge of the subject itself, which have value in the workplace beyond academia; the question is how much it really adds that you wouldn’t get simply from doing a Masters degree. Think it through very carefully.
A British PhD is an intensely personal, individualised experience. The only taught element will be research training in the early stages; that may involve a few exams or assessments, but the essential core of the PhD is independent research for the thesis itself. You will (nearly always) choose your own topic (unlike the sciences) and be responsible – with guidance from your supervisor – for designing and structuring the research. Some key issues follow from this.
Where to do your PhD?
The first is: it is not the overall prestige of a university or even a department that counts when deciding where to study. The first and foremost question you have to ask is: is this the right place for the research I want to do? If you can’t simply pack up and go where you please, because of, say, family commitments, don’t assume that you’re stuck with the nearest university whether you like it or not. Look into distance learning options (including the Open University). Think about whether you could commute once a month or so for meetings while using locally based library resources and inter-library loans. Unlike taught courses, it’s not necessary to be close at hand all the time, although you will miss out on some social aspects (and, perhaps, teaching opportunities). Some universities have quite strict rules about postgrads residing within a certain distance of the university; others seem to be more flexible.
You have to start, essentially, by looking for a department with at least one lecturer who will be a suitable supervisor (sometimes you will have more than one, especially if your research is interdisciplinary): someone who has the expertise to guide your research and, equally, someone you can feel comfortable with for three years plus. You’ll be spending a fair bit of time in intensive one-to-one discussions with them; you want someone who will both guide and challenge you, take your ideas seriously, treat you like an adult. There needs to be respect both ways. The precise nature of the ‘ideal’ relationship will depend on your own needs: how independent and mature you are; how much external stimuli you need to meet deadlines; how confident you are when it comes to developing your ideas (but remember, it’s not your supervisor’s job to massage frail egos or nag you into getting work done).
On the academic side, finding someone suitable is relatively easy. In Britain, you can check out the Institute of Historical Research’s list of academic historians, and visit departmental websites; where more specialised MA courses related to your interests are offered (this database is very good), that implies there are staff with the expertise to supervise PhDs. But you should already have an idea from your previous study and reading of historians whose work you respect and enjoy reading. Look them up. They aren’t gods just because they’ve been published. And they do not necessarily have to be specialists in precisely the narrow area in which you want to research (particularly if you’re doing something new); a supervisor who knows too much can actually, I think, inhibit the development of your own ideas. You don’t really want to end up doing their research for them, or feeling that you can’t approach their work critically where it relates to your own.
The personal side is harder. I was fortunate; I knew my supervisor well as an undergrad, I knew he was conscientious, highly knowledgeable and moreover that we were on the same wavelength. (I also knew several of his recent PhD students.) Not everyone can be in that situation. But this is something to emphasise: don’t walk into your PhD without having made personal contact. Don’t just fill in the forms, accept a place and turn up hoping that you’ll like it and they’ll assign you a good supervisor. Doing a PhD will require a lot personal initiative: get in some practice right at the beginning (OK, you can’t just demand a particular supervisor, but you can do a lot to make sure that the person you want chooses you…). If you can, go and meet potential supervisor(s) in person and also take the opportunity to look round the university’s facilities and environment too; if not, pick up the phone and write emails.
Get the insiders’ view
And not just to the staff. Perhaps the best way to find out about a supervisor – and a department and university generally – is from existing students. You could ask them questions like: How often do you get to meet your supervisor, and is it easy to get an appointment? Do you feel comfortable turning to the supervisor about problems like writers’ block or (say) family or work pressures that hold up your work? How long does it take to get work returned? Do you get constructive feedback? Are you encouraged to keep writing (conversely, do you feel under too much pressure to perform, too many deadlines)? Does this supervisor seem to care about their supervisees? And broader questions: What’s the library like? The computing facilities? The research training? Do you feel happy and at home in the department, or do you get treated like cash cows, ignored or condescended to? I don’t think that many prospective research students do things like this – but they really should if they’re planning to go to an unfamiliar institution.
How do you get in contact with students? If you can visit in person, then find out where the postgrad facilities are and go and talk to them. Otherwise, you may need to do a bit of work. Institutions don’t always provide the kind of information that helps to locate research students – unless they’re also on the teaching staff. But there is another way with history students in Britain. You can track them down through the IHR’s list of theses in progress (although it tends to be a bit out of date at this time of year); once you have names, you should be able to get email addresses – or write a letter c/o the department if the university doesn’t have an open-access email directory. The list of theses in progress (and the lists of theses recently completed at the same URL) is an important resource for prospective PhD students in another way: you can find out about the latest doctoral research in your topic area, potentially avoid replicating too closely someone else’s research (remember that ‘originality’ element of the thesis!) and, moreover, find people doing related work who you might want to strike up contacts and share ideas with.
That might be particularly helpful if you’re looking at studying in a department with few research students. Small departments and/or small PhD cohorts have advantages. Firstly, you’re more likely to get more personalised attention and not get lost in a crowd; individually, you (and the fees you pay, to be practical here) are more important to that department; your relationships with staff are likely to be closer and less formal. The thing is that they may well need to be, since there won’t be a large postgraduate community to fall back on for support, sharing of academic ideas and socialising. It’s something else to think about.
NB: check out the research training and facilities
Look at what’s offered in terms of research training – especially if you plan to go straight into a PhD from undergraduate study. Largely because of the demands of the funding bodies, some kind of RT programme is now pretty much ubiquitous. Some, I suspect, are better than others. Ask whether there is training geared to your particular needs as a historian (individually tailored training seems now to be the emphasis of the AHRB, while the ESRC has tended to more uniform approaches), or whether it’s a more general programme taking in students from across the university. Again, get actual students’ opinions (you really don’t want to know what we think of parts of the training in place at Aberystwyth over recent years…). It’s not the most crucial issue – though, frankly, don’t even look at a place that doesn’t offer some kind of RT – but, like library and computing facilities etc, it’s something that might tip the balance in a final choice.
Oh, and it’s worth checking out accommodation costs in the area (both university-owned and the local rental market), since these vary hugely around the country.
I hope to follow up this post with something on how to play the funding game (which is another reason to start communicating with potential supervisors and others who can give you advice that will help you in writing grant proposals). A final reiteration for now, however: don’t rush into anything. For autumn 2005, think in terms of spending from now until Christmas preparing to make your applications. Look around at different places, consider the possibilities open to you. Think hard too about what you do want to do a thesis on, what sources you would use and what facilities it would require. These are things that will need to go into a grant proposal.
I usually do this monthly, but I have a whole pile of these I want to clear out of my inbox. So, in no particular order…
Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination Seminar, Institute for English Studies, Senate House, London. Saturdays, monthly during the academic term, 2-4 pm. “The purpose of EMPHASIS is to provide a London forum for scholars working in the history of philosophy, intellectual history and the history of science of Europe in the period 1400-1650. ” Kicks off on 9 October 2004 with Dr Raphael Hallett, ‘Words in Abstract Space: Pierre Ramus, Rhetoric and the Geometry of Print’.
With the new term, Seminars at the Institute of Historical Research at Senate House will also be restarting. There are plenty for medievalists and early modernists, and no doubt there are other relevant English Studies seminars if you look around (I’ll see if I can find a general link)…
CFP: The 8th International Milton Symposium, Grenoble, France, June 2005. Deadline for proposals: 30 September 2004. Proposals are sought for the main theme of ‘Milton, rights and liberties’ (and other aspects of Milton studies will be considered).
CFP: The Margaret Cavendish Society 6th Biennial Conference, McMaster University, Ontario, July 2005. Deadline for proposals: 1 November 2004. The theme is: “Understanding will remember me in after Ages”.
CFP: Cultures in Conflict: New Perspectives on Encounters with Native Peoples of the Americas, University of Toledo, Ohio. A one-day conference on 9 April 2005 “to present new research on Native American history and ethnohistory of the contact and post-contact periods (15th thru 19th centuries). Our hope is to bring together scholars employing new methodologies to understand the experience of native peoples across the Americas. Therefore we invite contributions from scholars of diverse disciplines and all levels and encourage the submission of papers examining native societies of North America and Latin America.” Deadline for proposals: 15 December 2004. Proposals should consist of one or two paragraphs up to a page in length and be accompanied by a brief vita. “We look forward to bringing together scholars whose work may influence and inform one another of the variety of questions and methodologies as well as the diversification and connections between distinct regions of the Americas. As our conference is a one-day program we strongly encourage contributions from scholars of the north-east Mid-west. Our hope in this regard is to encourage the development of scholarly networks dedicated to native studies in the five-states region (Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois). At the same time, we encourage submissions from all interested scholars nationally and internationally.” Submissions to (golly, snail mail!):
Charles Beatty Medina
University of Toledo, Department of History
Mailstop #503
Toledo, OH 43606
(419) 530-5060
Does it mean you’ve really arrived in the blog world when you get your first spam comment? (Rapidly deleted.) And is it all downhill from here?
Not for the faint-hearted, perhaps.
(click on image above)
There is quite a lot of commentary with these images. I would appreciate comments on how much sense it makes to non-experts; there are some quite complicated issues that I have to get across to 2nd-year students next spring, and I always worry about whether my explanations are clear enough…
I should be starting to put some serious thought into that course, too.
Getting gravatars up and running reminded me: I did at one point attempt to put the main image up in the header, aligned against the right margin, but couldn’t quite make it work. Anyone know what I need to put where for that?
Caleb – many thanks – pointed me to this beautiful blog. (It is a little slow to load on my dialup connection, but worth the wait.) Go see lots of wonderful pictures and writing (there is an unmissable post on books and reading…).
And make sure you stop by at Caleb’s blog. Some outstanding meditations on book stores, reading, ‘climates of opinion’ and war lately…
Sepoy at Chapati Mystery is holding Dissertation Week
I will post various bits and pieces of my dissertation. I urge my readers who are in the academy, writing, researching their dissertations or major papers to have at least one post on their material next week. If possible, show us the nitty-gritty; some source selection or some analysis of the secondary literature. If you do participate, please share your link with me.
(If you have any lingering fears about people ‘stealing’ your ideas if you blog your research, make sure you read this from Culture Cat, OK?)
By pure coincidence, I’d just posted the latest document when I read sepoy’s call to action. But this is a great excuse to let you into more of what I’m doing at the moment (as other bloggers have commented, blogging on it seems to be helping to get some ideas flowing, thankfully). This (accepted) proposal for a conference paper seems as good an introduction as any (following George’s example, in fact) …
‘Common quarrellers’ and disputing neighbours: everyday violence in its local contexts in seventeenth-century southern Britain
The emphasis of much scholarship on violence in the early modern period has been on the extreme and rare crime of homicide. This paper uses the exceptionally rich legal sources of seventeenth-century Cheshire and north-east Wales to explore more common, ‘mundane’ violence (though occasionally with fatal consequences) in southern Britain and place it in its local, social and legal contexts. Thus, the concern is to explore both ‘practice’ and ‘representation’, behaviour and attitudes, and the ways in which they met in the law courts. Firstly, I examine the frequently intertwined use of law and violence, by both men and women, in disputes that often revolved around household livelihoods and reputations, from urban workshops to upland commons. However, the language of accusations against ‘bad neighbours’ of violent and disruptive behaviour is scrutinised; delving deeper into the archives often provides evidence that these should not be taken at face value. I therefore explore the range of legal strategies available (to both victims and aggressors) under these circumstances and their aims in turning to law courts, including the possible extent to which such use of the law might have been ‘vexatious’. I also examine violent and abusive responses to interventions by authorities, and the not-so-clear lines between ‘plebeian legalism’ and resistance to the authority of the law. Finally, some comparisons with the more heavily-studied counties of south-eastern England will be considered, to address the question of whether this border region could justly be regarded as a ‘dark corner’ of the land (or one that was growing less ‘dark’ as the century wore on) in terms of the use of and attitudes to violent behaviour and ‘the law’.
For ‘Assaulting the Past: Placing Violence in Historical Context’, Oxford, July 2005. This was the CFP:
Recent scholarship has expanded our knowledge and understanding of the rate at which interpersonal violence (particularly homicide) occurred in early modern Western Europe, showing that its incidence and classification are inextricably linked to the wider social forces operating in any given period or region. This conference seeks to build on such work by approaching the theme from a variety of historical perspectives centred on the notion of place. It will consider the factors evident at other times and in other geographical areas, examine the spaces in which quotidian acts of violence (as opposed to political or military violence) might flourish, and show how these change with time, location, education, modernization, etc., to create an international, comparative and qualitative assessment of violent behaviour and the experience of violence in the post medieval period.
By drawing together the various strands of thought explored by historians (of crime and gender, law and society, science and medicine) and social scientists (criminologists, geographers, psychologists and sociologists), and expanding upon them, it is hoped that a body of findings relevant to the study of violence and its place in modern society will emerge. Papers of an interdisciplinary nature are particularly encouraged.
I’ll try to explain a bit more later. Mind you, I’m already thinking this is one of those over-optimistic proposals sent off in a moment of crazy enthusiasm; am I really likely to fit all that in 30 minutes?
By the way, I’ve decided that I need a side-project that isn’t about people beating the hell out of each other (or claiming that they did, even). Just article-sized; something that doesn’t need vast amounts of new research (so we’re still talking 16th-18th century England and/or Wales). Maybe going back to my interests in women’s autobiographies. Maybe something literary or on religion. Any bright ideas?
Claire has of course decided (quite sensibly) to take a break from blogging at Fenland until her thesis is done (hope it’s going well, Claire). Still, she gives us an occasional update on what she’s been up to, and last weekend she took a trip to north Wales. Which was blowing a gale.
This weekend I went to see Harlech castle. I climbed the tower but it was so damn windy I went straight down again…
I climbed an almost mountain to see a ruined fort. It was so damn windy I couldn’t look at it properly…
I smiled, and found myself on a nostalgia trip. I remember the winds of Harlech. I turned up at Coleg Harlech almost exactly ten years ago, an eager but nervous student desperate to make a new start, get to university, prove something (to myself, mostly). We had a couple of weeks of gorgeous weather – I kid you not, we were sunbathing on this beautiful beach in north-west Wales in October. And then the wind and the rain arrived, and stayed (or so it felt) for the next six months. (I’m sure there were sunny non-windy days, but I don’t remember them.) Most of us lived in a twelve-storey tower block (known as The Block, or, when we got more stressed out, The Pressure Cooker). I was entirely unaccustomed to high-rise living, and was at first totally puzzled by a small phenomenon on the tenth floor: the water in the loo seemed to move. Or was that me being drunk and stoned? (Which happened a good deal, I should point out.) It dawned: the water wasn’t moving, and I wasn’t imagining it in a drug-addled haze. The building itself was swaying very, very slightly. Ah.
We didn’t spend all our time getting drunk (and laid, ahem). We worked damned hard; until quite recently the college’s diploma courses had lasted two years, until the government had decided only to allow funding for a year. And we were packing much of the two-year course into one year; good if you were as impatient to get to university as I was, bad in many other ways, not least the loss of continuity when every year was a fresh cohort. (And it meant that the college had to recruit twice as many students each year to remain viable, of course.) It was a small, close-knit community with no more than 150 students or so, even at full capacity. The walls were thin, we were living in extremely close proximity; it all tended to encourage sociability. (Our crowd on the tenth floor didn’t need much encouraging, come to think of it. Of course, it could all get a bit much too, which is why the Block had its other nickname.) And, unless you’re a real outdoors-activity type of person, there isn’t too much to do in Harlech except study, go to the pub, hold raucous parties (in the rooms and the Common Room, in the houses of students – and sometimes staff – who lived ‘out’, on the beach). We did all these things enthusiastically; and to anyone who thinks young undergraduates can be wild, you should see a bunch of twenty-something-plus students when presented with such an opportunity.
But it was first and foremost about the study (and the Diploma that was my key to getting into university); and it was much more than a standard FE college access course. I did a programme in ‘Literature, History and Ideas’ (which gave you the opportunity to range widely or to focus on a particular discipline, depending on what suited you); we were taught by experienced tutors (many of them respected academics and writers in their fields, although we didn’t really know that at the time) whose generosity with their time and understanding of the anxieties of mature students – who often came with a lot of baggage, personal problems, past negative experiences of education (all too many were dyslexics who had been written off as ‘stupid’), fear of failing again – was matched only by their teaching expertise and knowledge. It was a space in which the stirrings of academic and creative talent could be nurtured, supported, developed.
Few of the staff who taught me are there now. There have been a lot of changes.
Of course, it was obvious to everyone back in the mid-90s that Harlech was going to have to adapt in order to survive. But I’m none too happy about some directions taken since the college merged with (the official language: ‘was taken over by’ seems more accurate) the Workers’ Educational Association (North Wales) in 2001.
For one thing, you will no longer find Literature, History and Ideas in the prospectus. If you want to study ‘traditional’ arts and humanities subjects, you’ll have to go elsewhere, even though the website still proclaims that ‘Coleg Harlech and WEA share a common tradition of liberal arts adult education stretching back over many years’. The only remnants of the one-year programmes offered in 1994 may be in social studies (from the ‘Work, Politics and Society’ programme) and IT (there was IT, wasn’t there? Must try to find my handbook), now to be found alongside art and design, music technology and access to nursing. Even the then thriving drama and media studies programme has disappeared (and I didn’t think you got much trendier than that). And – hang on – what’s happened to Welsh studies? (Relegated, it would seem, to short courses.)
I don’t want to knock any of those subjects. But it feels to me as though Harlech is being turned into just another vocational further education college (the only remaining difference being that it’s residential and the students are older than usual), a place to get qualifications for work instead of a space to think, learn, reflect. What happened, most of all, to Ideas? Perhaps (although I wonder about the wisdom of duplicating what every other FE college does) this is what it takes to survive. But the excision of the subjects that I studied feels like a personal betrayal, as well as destroying a large part of what made Coleg Harlech so special for so many years to so many students who got a second chance there.
Dedicated to those unhappy souls who didn’t make it out of the pressure cooker. If we were a community, we were no better than most communities at looking after our misfits; and we should have been better.
Thanks to wolfangel, I have a cute gravatar. (Though not as cute as either wolfangel’s or Harrison’s.) No prizes for guessing what it is. I plan to install the plugin at this blog over the weekend so you’ll soon be able to see it in my comments here anyway.
One downside: the urge to keep posting daft comments just so you can see your picture again… Wolfangel, what have you started here?
As usual, I have selected sites that are free to access, and look informative and interesting, but I have no real expertise in this area so NO guarantees about accuracy, scholarship etc… By the way, this was originally going to cover all of Central and South America, but I decided to split it into two; the rest will come soon (when I’ve recovered from this one).
GENERAL RESOURCES (including South America)
LANIC: Latin American Network Information Center
Iberia, the Caribbean and Latin America Portal
H-Atlantic discussion list including links page
H-LatAm discussion list
What came to be called America
Historical Text Archive: Articles: Latin America/Colonial (some of the links are teasers for books/subscription services, but some are full-text articles or sources…)
Latin America: Colonial Economic History (including bibliography
Bibliography on Colonial Latin America
Bibliography on History of Ideas in colonial Latin America
Handbook of Latin American Studies
Colonial Latin America chronology
Vistas: Visual culture in Spanish America 1520-1820
Calidad and clase in Spanish America 17th and 18th centuries
Arts of the Spanish Americas 1550-1850
Map of Spanish America
Colonial Spanish America bibliography
Early colonial society, Spanish America
Consumption and excess in Spanish America 1700-1830
CENTRAL AMERICA (general)
Central America and the Caribbean: Native Peoples 1400-1600
Maya Area: Native Peoples 1400-1600
Mexico and Central America 1600-1800
Spanish colonial furniture of the West Indies
The rise of national identity in the early Spanish Caribbean and in Haiti
Caribbean pirates
‘New Spain’ (modern Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama)
New Spain: the frontiers of faith
Creating New Spain
The viceroyalty of New Spain
Early maps of the Pimeria
Native resistance and the pax colonial in New Spain (book review)
INDIVIDUAL COUNTRIES
Early history of Belize
Colonialism in Belize
Negotiating freedom in colonial Cuba (book review)
The social transformation of eighteenth-century Cuba (book review)
The captaincy of Guatemala
The marriage core of the elite network of colonial Guatemala
Juan Fermin deAycinena: Central Americal Colonial entrepreneur 1729-1796 (book review)
Guatemalan bibliography
Early history of Haiti
The Haitian Revolution (PBS)
The Haitian Revolution
Haitian Revolution (AHR forum)
Haiti
Jamaica 1494-1692
Jamaica 1692-1782
Jamaica 1783-1807
A failed settler society: marriage and demographic failure in early Jamaica
H-Mexico discussion list (Spanish)
History of Mexico
Aztec account of Spanish conquest
Exploring colonial Mexico
Spanish colonial Mexico
Timeline of Mexican history
History of the Conquest of Mexico
Mexico’s colonial era
Mexico: Native Peoples 1400-1600
Crime and punishment in late colonial Mexico City (book review)
Locating race in late colonial Mexico
Figures of speech: pictorial history in the Quinatzin map c.1542
The arts of viceregal Mexico 1521-1821: a confluence of cultures
The limits of racial domination: plebeian society in colonial Mexico City 1660-1720 (book review)
The Royal Indian Hospital of Mexico City 1553-1680
Property and permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico (book review)
Learning to heal: the medical profession in colonial Mexico 1767-1831 (book review)
An unsettling racial score card
The remarkable life of Juana Ines de la Cruz
From www.jobs.ac.uk
Lecturer A/B in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, Department of English, University of Leicester. Starting 10 January 2005. £23,643 to £ 35,883 pa. “Candidates should have substantial teaching and research experience in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature. Doctorate and sound publications records are essential.” Closing date: 1 October 2004.
Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in History, Sheffield Hallam University. £23,643 to £36,428 pa. “You’ll need a strong record of research and publications and proven teaching ability and will be contributing to undergraduate and Masters courses and a specialist final year module by developing existing areas of socio-political history, imperial history and cultural history, or by developing areas with a new thematic or subject focus. Ideally experienced in innovative teaching and learning strategies, you will be expected to contribute to the RAE.” Closing date: 4 October 2004.
Lecturer in History of Art, University of Birmingham. Fixed-term 3 year post, starting salary £23,643 pa. “Your research interests will be in an area of European Art c.1500 – 1950, or a complementary field. You will have completed your PhD in a related subject, and be able to demonstrate an established commitment to research and publication. Experience of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching is desirable.” Closing date 12 October 2004.
Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine, Oxford Brookes University. £28,360 – £36,428 pa. “This is an important new appointment in the History of Medicine and is central to the future development of our Wellcome Trust funded Centre for Health, Medicine and Society. The successful applicant will join a large group of established medical historians located in a 5* rated History Department. Applications are invited from those with teaching and research interests in any aspect of British or European medical history in the period 1600-1900.” Closing date: 15 October 2004.
Research Fellowships, National Maritime Museum, London. There are several short- and longer-term fellowships, tenable from October 2005. Closing date: 1 November 2004.
Research Fellowships, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. “Approximately 100 Fellowships are available to enable experienced researchers (but not only members of academia) to undertake a programme of research (but not towards degrees or other qualifications). Fellowships have a maximum value of £22,000 and provide research expenses over and above normal living costs and/or a contribution to replacement teaching costs or loss of earnings. Awards are tenable for between 3 and 24 months and must be started between 1 June 2005 and 1 May 2006. Any subject considered. Applicants must be resident in the UK, over age 30, and be a permanent member of the UK scholarly community.” Closing date: 10 November 2004. Application details not available after 3 November 2004. (I’m not sure what they mean by ‘permanent member of the scholarly community’ if it’s open to those who are not ‘members of academia’… check if interested.)
My web host cordially informs me that they’ll be doing server upgrades tomorrow, Friday 24 September between 1300 and 0100GMT. This means that at some point during the day – not for more than 20 minutes, they say – this site (and email) will be inaccessible. So don’t panic if you can’t get in; just come back later.
I have my fingers crossed.
Update: it would seem that no more than 20 minutes on Friday the 24th should in fact have been translated as at least an hour on Sunday the 26th… Ah well.
The latest edition of C18-L’s Selected Readings, their ‘ongoing’ bibliography of eighteenth-century studies (including web resources), is now online.
Via Crooked Timber (and a few others, but I read it on CT first): an article about academic blogging from The Guardian, featuring some familiar names. Well worth a read.
I’ve put the first of the promised documents up at EMR (click on the small image below for a larger version and transcript).
This kind of examination or deposition represents the first stage in the legal process; I haven’t checked whether there’s any subsequent prosecution in this particular case.
UPDATE:
The men accused of assault were bound over to appear in court and subsequently discharged.
Last night, I nearly posted a disgustingly self-indulgent post about how much I have to do once I finish this research trip in November. Except, of course, when I read the blogs of most academics out there, I know perfectly well that I don’t. I have, if you don’t know, a totally cushy post-doc fellowship that means I get to do my own research for three years. I could get away with not teaching at all if I really wanted (although it’s strongly encouraged; and I do in fact want to teach, even though it still scares the crap out of me), and I get to choose how much and when (hence being able to disappear for six-month research trips); I don’t have to deal with administrative baggage or jump through the usual ‘new staff’ hoops.
Yes, I do have plenty to do once I get home. But – even allowing for tiredness and the being just-back-in-London effect – that hardly excused the alternately whining/self-congratulatory tone (ie, generally sounding like a spoilt brat) of last night’s almost-post. I don’t have dozens of different things to juggle; I don’t have thirty-plus hours of teaching/admin work to get through before I can get to research and writing; I don’t have children or a partner to worry about/clean up after/try to civilise. With the possible exception of getting all my research material from this trip sorted into some kind of order (!), none of my winter tasks are going to be at all uninteresting (they include preparing a new course, which I’m looking forward to, and thesis-book revision).
I think the trouble with having got this fellowship is the nagging worry that I don’t really deserve it, that I’m not doing enough to justify having it… etc. Which is also a deeply self-indulgent thing to say, but is at least honest.
It doesn’t help that I usually enjoy research (in an odd love-hate sort of way), but this time I just can’t find much enthusiasm – the ‘what might I find today’ anticipation of my PhD research seems to have disappeared. And I have no idea what I’m going to write next, which unsettles me a lot. I’ve never experienced writer’s block, but I’m anxious that that might be about to change. I’m certainly finding it quite impossible to do anything ‘serious’ while I’m in London, and not simply because nearly all my books are in Aberystwyth (although that doesn’t help).
I need to be home. (I know millions of people love city life; I’m not one of them.) I need to be doing those tasks and keeping myself occupied. I need to be writing new stuff, not just reworking old material. (I’m never quite sure, by the way, whether to look on my blogging as a good thing that keeps my writing muscles exercised, or as something that’s distracting me from doing ‘real’ work. Although I really think it has kept me sane this summer.)
So please forgive me these few moments’ indulgence; it won’t happen too often, I swear. (I have some nice things planned for you all in coming days…) And if you want to administer some foot-to-arse-region tough love in comments, go ahead.
OK, there’s a lot of crap on our TV screens under the title of historical documentary. I particularly dislike the ones that tell us how everyone until now has got subject X all wrong and now this programme will in fifty minutes tell us the TRUTH. Blah blah blah. Or there’s all that heavily-trodden superficial ground of ‘The most evil men in history’ type rubbish (Channel 5, are you listening?). But I’m currently reading History and the media (ed. David Cannadine, Basingstoke, 2004), and I can only agree with Tristram Hunt in ‘How does television enhance history?’:
The question should no longer be, does TV enhance or diminish history?; it should be, how do we produce the highest quality history programming? (p. 99)
To which his answer is that we as academic historians must be involved working with programme makers and that we need to ‘assume as much editorial control as possible’. (Though I didn’t much like Tristram’s style on the box, if I’m honest. Shouty shouty, look at me, aren’t I a pretty blonde boy. Go away, brat. Er, I think I might be showing my age.)
TV history cannot do the same things as carefully, deeply researched and debated written history. Fine. It has other strengths. It can bring to a wide audience the fruits of that scholarship; it can engage the public with their past. It can tell stories about that past in different ways; it can often be more sophisticated in showing the problems of source material and interpretation than it’s given credit for.
One of my recent favourites was a recent Channel 4 programme – part of its Georgian Underworld series (2003) – on the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, which was unusual in being entirely a dramatic reconstruction, based on court records. (Well, we all love a courtroom drama, don’t we?) It was beautifully written and acted, deeply moving and utterly compelling. Or there was Channel 4’s Plague, Fire, War and Treason series (2001); moving away from my period, the BBC’s superb Pompeii: The Last Day (dramatic reconstructions – a great cast – as well as amazing CGI effects); I’ve written (gushingly) before about Meet the Ancestors and Terry Jones’s Medieval Lives; and now there’s Tony Robinson’s Worst Jobs in History (both the latter using humour to convey some serious messages; but there was a lot less piss and shit in Terry’s series…). Simon Schama’s History of Britain series had its faults, but it was nonetheless great viewing, and brought a wide sweep of British history to a vast audience.
There’s always something new and wonderful to watch, a vast array of techniques and a huge range, too, in terms of intellectual depth. And, as many of these links show, the TV programmes are increasingly complemented by high quality websites that provide background, develop their subjects and, at their best, also provide outstanding stand-alone learning resources (Channel 4′s Time Traveller’s Guides are wonderful, though mostly restricted to British history; the BBC’s History website is a wide-ranging treasure trove).
Considering the examples I’ve just given, it strikes me that ‘reconstructions’ of various kinds – by actors, by amateurs in ‘reality’ shows (which can be extremely variable, I agree, but I really liked The 1940s House), using computers – has really come of age in recent years. Reconstruction seems to have been considered deeply inferior as a technique by those who brought us the seminal documentaries of the 1960s to the 80s (The Great War, The World at War, etc).Working mostly in recent history, they created a formula that revolved around archive footage, interviews with participants and talking heads. Reconstructions were a last resort to be used only when ‘primary source’ film footage (which also had the virtue of being cheap) was unavailable, and industriously avoided even when it wasn’t. Jeremy Isaacs in the History and the media volume, comments on making a series about Irish history in the late 70s: ‘We set our face against reconstructions’ (p. 48) – problematic since half of the series covered the period before the invention of film.
Of course, bad reconstructions are really bad things, but good reconstructions bring home the ‘living’ past in a way that nothing else can. That’s why I so loved the Peterloo programme; or in a totally different vein, when Tony Robinson rolls up his sleeves and, trying not to gag – or in a few cases, freeze with fear – gets right in there to show us just what those awful jobs (many of them vital for society’s survival; or filthy tasks that made possible things of sublime beauty) really involved.
And all of that is why I love television history.
Everyone else puts up fun poetry (love this from Wolfangel). Now it’s my turn.
‘The sorrow of socks’
Some socks are loners -
They can’t live in pairs.
On washdays they’ve shown us
They want to be loners
They puzzle their owners,
They hide in dark lairs.
Some socks are loners -
They won’t live in pairs.
Wendy Cope, If I don’t know (2001)
Another tip from C18-L.
The Online Library of Liberty offers many early modern texts, including writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, the third earl of Shaftesbury, Niccolo Machiavelli, Sir Thomas More, David Hume (and less famous names too)…
PS: This has also been in my inbox for a day or two, from H-Albion.
Opinions Wanted–Digital Resources in Humanities and Social Science Instruction
A UC Berkeley based research project is seeking the input of humanists and social scientists about their instructional uses (or non-use) of technology in college and university settings… We cordially invite faculty and graduate students to take our online survey, which is designed to understand user preferences about the use or non-use of technology in humanities and social science undergraduate/baccalaureate teaching contexts. The study is focused on a broad range of rich media digital resources and tools (e.g., text, images, video, maps, GIS, etc.) that can come from a wide range of sources, including faculty personal collections.
The survey can be found at: https://digitalresourcestudy.berkeley.edu/survey/
By answering and returning this survey you will help ensure that this study includes faculty experiences and opinions from a diverse range of disciplines, institutions, and countries. This survey should take about 10 – 20 minutes. Please be assured of complete confidentiality.
This research project is conducted by UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE). You may find more information about the project, including our research methods, rationale, and confidentiality
assurances at: http://digitalresourcestudy.berkeley.edu
If have any questions, please email us at: heda {at} berkeley(.)edu.We thank you in advance for taking the time to respond to this survey, and for providing us with information that can support the needs of humanities and social sciences education…
OK, I believe that language evolves according to the needs of users rather than the petty rules of purists. And we all draw lines about acceptable new usages in different, subjective, often arbitrary ways. I certainly don’t mind the formation of new verbs from nouns. Mostly. But…
Guardian Unlimited headline on the science page:
Government appoints maths ‘tsar’
The government has tasked Professor Celia Hoyles with turning around years of decline in the subject.
Eeugh. Eeugh. Eeugh.
I often like John Sutherland’s columns in the Guardian education section. But the latest (from last Monday, although I only just noticed it) ends with a defence of the indefensible.
The most pernicious reform introduced into higher education over the last 40 years is “continuous assessment” (also called course unitation and modularisation). It is the pedagogic equivalent of CCTV, a monitoring and measuring of student performance from freshman to finalist.
Traditionally, you slacked for eight terms and worked like stink through the ninth, “revising” for the nightmare of finals week. Now you are examined from your first undergraduate essay onward. Hell starts on day one. Modularisation does for higher education what the conveyor belt did for automobile manufacture. No more hours of idleness.
Full disclosure: I loathe exams, and never did particularly well at them (both recalling all the stuff I’d revised and getting it down rapidly in a coherent form on paper were agony). I did significantly better at essays, which I could prepare and write – think about, plan, revise, write properly, as opposed to frantic scribbling – over several days. Which hardly means that I spent every waking second of every semester on writing essays, for chrissakes. (Also, to be picky, exams still made up more than half the assessment of most of our courses.)
I’m not saying that exams per se are not useful, however. What is indefensible is this championing of ‘finals’: assessing three years’ learning in a few weeks, with the possibility (as Sutherland says; I think it was probably extremely rare) of doing virtually nothing for over two and a half years beforehand. Does he really think that was something to be praised? (By the way, much of the article is about how great this system was in giving musical geniuses such as Coldplay time to hone their skills instead of being made to do what they were at university for… But, leaving aside whether you concur in his evaluation of the talents of Coldplay, there seems to be an implicit and pretty dubious argument that the university system should be tailored to the needs of a tiny minority of artistic geniuses.)
Besides, it’s absurd to compare continuous assessment to a conveyor belt (I’ve worked on those production lines in my time, and for longer than I care to remember; I doubt that Sutherland ever has). I never had too much difficulty making time off between essays, even though I probably spent a lot more time on them than the average student. It creates, instead, a more continous short-term cycle of work-idle-work. Individual students make their own choices about exactly how much and when, just as no doubt they did in the ‘finals’ system. And very often the results reflect the amount of work put in over the whole course – as they probably did for most students, whatever the mythology, in the finals system.
By logical extension, perhaps Sutherland also thinks that we shouldn’t ask undergrads to do things like read for weekly seminars either? And as for compulsory attendance at those seminars…