We are holding the next seminar in our criminal justice history series on Friday July 12th, at the Open University's campus, Walton Hall, in Milton Keynes. The speakers are all researchers who have conducted, or are in the process of conducting, ground-breaking research into the criminal justice systems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Programme:
10.30 Open: Tea, coffee, biscuits.
11.00 Bob Love (University of Leicester) 'Somerset before the police - policing the county 1830 - 1856'
12.00 Elaine Saunders (Open University) 'Policing a rural county: eighteenth-century systems of policing in Hertfordshire'
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Dr. Francis Boorman (University of London) 'The spatiality of policing, crime and disorder in Chancery Lane, c.1760-1815'.
15.00 Dr. Dave Churchill (University of Leicester) 'The police and the public in Leeds, 1850-1900: the contexts and content of popular animosity'
16.00 Close
If you would like to attend, please could you register by contacting Yvonne Bartley (y.s.bartley@open.ac.uk)? There is a charge of £10 for lunch and refreshments for non-OU attendees. If you've got any special dietary requirements, please let us know.
12 June 2013
We mourn the passing of Colin Russell, Professor of History of Science and Technology, who died on the 16th May. Colin started work at the Open University in 1970 and played a key role in creating the Department of the History of Science and Technology. He became Professor in 1982 and retired in 1993, continuing as Emeritus Professor. A Service of Thanksgiving will take place at noon on Thursday, 30th May at Bunyan Meeting, Mill Street, Bedford. Professor Russell will be sadly missed by his former colleagues.
22 May 2013
Described as ‘the first serious investigation of criminal offending by members of the British armed forces both during and immediately after the two world wars of the twentieth century’, Clive Emsley's Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief: Crime and the British Armed Services since 1914 was published by Oxford University Press in January 2013. Find out more about this book.
22 February 2013
Dr Catherine Lee, who studied for her PhD in the department, has recently published a monograph based on her thesis research. Policing Prostitution, 1856–1886: Deviance, Surveillance and Morality was published in Pickering and Chatto's Perspectives in Economic and Social History series. Find out more about this book.
12 December 2012
Sponsored by the British Association for Victorian Studies, the Economic History Society and the Social History Society, this one day colloquium will be held at the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies. Full details of the programme and a registration form are available from the British and Irish History research group website. The deadline for registration is 29 October 2012.
2 October 2012
Congratulations are due to Alice Smalley, a History research student, who won the Arts category in the recent OU Postgraduate Poster Competition and goes forward to compete in the Midlands Hub final on 12 July. Her entry demonstrated the use of GIS to determine where crimes reported in the 19th-century illustrated Police News actually took place.
3 July 2012
The History of Medicine research group will hold its third workshop on 4 July 2012 at The Open University in London. Attendance is free, but places are limited, so please email Yvonne Bartley to reserve a place by 20 June. Further details and the workshop programme are available online.
31 May 2012
Dr Hack's War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012) has just been published. Further information about this book is available from NUS Press's website. He presented some of its findings to a public audience of more than 200 at Singapore's Supreme Court, on 16 February 2012 at an academic conference on The Causes and Impact on the Fall of Singapore.
16 May 2012
Dr Karl Hack has been awarded a British Academy Grant of £7,868 for a project on 'New Documents on the British Use of Violence in Decolonisaiton and Counterinsugency' from 2012-2014. This is funding research on the United Kingdom, Malaysia and Singapore.
16 May 2012
Empire is a major five-part series telling the story of the British Empire in a new way, tracing not only the rise and fall of the Empire but also the complex effects of the Empire on the modern world – political, technological and social – and on Britain.
Members of the Empire: 1492-1975 (A326) module team assisted in the preparation of the series and some of the content and activities associated with it. Karl Hack, A326 chair, wrote the text for the free wallchart to accompany the series. RSVP Empire, an
interactive Empire themed activity, was written by A326 Associate Lecturer, John Kirkaldy. To find out more, order a free Empire poster or play Empire interactive, go to: www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/empire.
27 February 2012
David Lemmings, from the University of Adelaide, will talk on the afternoon of 28 November (4pm) on 'Henry Fielding, moralist, justice and journalist: narratives of panic, authority and emotion in English newspaper crime and justice reportage, 1748-1752', Walton Hall, Milton Keynes campus. Please see the attached flyer for further details.
26 October 2011
Lotte Hughes has been appointed reviews editor of the top-ranked journal in area studies, African Affairs, published by the Royal Africa Society. It is ranked number 1 in the ISI citation index for Area Studies (http://afraf.oxfordjournals.org/), and has a wide and influential readership of politicians, policy-makers and business people as well as academics. To contact Lotte, if you wish to review new titles, please email l.hughes@open.ac.uk.
4 October 2011
Lotte Hughes is the guest editor of African Studies Volume 70 Number 2, August 2011 Special Issue: Heritage, History and Memory: New Research from East and Southern Africa with Annie E Coombes and Karega-Munene. This is one of two main written outputs from the AHRC-funded research project ‘Managing Heritage, Building Peace: Museums, memorialization and the uses of memory in Kenya’, led by PI Lotte Hughes, that ends on 30 September 2011. It contains articles by the 3 guest editors, and by another member of the research team, Dr Neil Carrier (University of Oxford) who was employed as a field-based consultant.
4 October 2011
Rodney Harrison’s article ‘Excavating Second Life: Cyber-Archaeologies, Heritage and Virtual Communities’ published in Journal of Material Culture 2009 14: 75 was the most downloaded article in 2010 in this journal (of all articles published in 2009 and 2010).
Follow this link to read the article as a free download.
4 October 2011
This was held at the British Library in London on 9 September 2011, and involved scholars from Kenya, the UK, Sweden and the US, including Dr Rodney Harrison (History Dept., OU). Hosted by Lotte Hughes (PI, OU), with Profs. Annie Coombes (Co-I, Birkbeck College, University of London) and Karega-Munene (United States International University, Nairobi, Kenya), this closed event featured presentations on a wide range of heritage and history-related subjects, including: memorialization as a human right; exhibiting photographic histories in Western Kenya; an examination of memorials to Barack Obama at K’Ogello; Akamba carving; memorialising Mau Mau; managing heritage as a resource for building nationhood and social cohesiveness; community conservation of sacred forests; an examination of displays on material culture and Kenyan identity at National Museums of Kenya; the challenges of commemorating former president Daniel arap Moi; and efforts to commemorate Giriama heroine Mekatilili wa Menza.
4 October 2011
The Crime And Punishment Collections Network and the International Centre for the History of Crime, Policing, and Justice are holding a seminar on "Oral History & Criminal Justice Museums, Libraries & Archives" on Friday 28th October 2011, Library Seminar Rooms 1 & 2, The Open University Library, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes. Follow this link for more information.
4 October 2011
The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland in conjunction with the Open University Ireland is hosting a lecture series for members of the community to delve into the history of family, poverty, religion and local Northern Ireland. Starting on 29 September 2011 the series will be delivered by Dr Janice Holmes, Dr Olwen Purdue and Dr Barry Sheen from the Open University Ireland and will examine the major themes of local history and the sources available to local historians. PRONI staff will present examples of these sources from the archives.
Follow this link for further information.
16 September 2011
On 21 July 2011, the War, Conflict and Politics Research Group hosted a Seminar Day on Twentieth Century European History, with a focus on War, Peace, Modernity: details of the programme are available online. You can also download the programme and abstracts as a PDF file [47 KB].
27 July 2011
Annika Mombauer is organising an international conference to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Fritz Fischer’s book Griff nach der Weltmacht, which sparked the so-called Fischer controversy, one of the most heated historiographical debates of the 20th century. The conference, jointly organised with Professor John Röhl (Sussex) and supported by the German Historical Institute, London, The Journal of Contemporary History, and the German History Society, will take place at the GHI, London, on 13-15 October 2011. See the conference website for further details and the programme.
11 July 2011
Ole Grell's Brethren in Christ. A Calvinist Network in Reformation Europe, will be published by CUP this August. Further information is available from CUP's website.
27 June 2011
Ole Grell has been invited to speak at the Yale University conference: Pluralism, Conflict and Co-existence: Religion, Politics and Society in Western Europe from the Confessional Age to the Present (22-24 September 2011).
27 June 2011
The Faculty has decided to withdraw its third level History residential school AXR312 Total War and Social Change. This decision has come about as a result of a steady decline in student numbers and a review that concluded that the residential school is not a viable option for the vast majority of those studying AA312. As a result of this the 2011 presentation of AXR312 will be the last. If you would like to register for the final presentation you will need to do so before 1 July 2011.
5 May 2011
In recent years the history of police and policing has become a key area of debate across a range of disciplines: criminology, sociology, political science and history.
This authoritative series, published by Ashgate, brings together the most important and influential English-language scholarship in the field, arranged chronologically across four volumes. The series includes articles on the shifting meaning of 'police', the growth of bureaucratic policing during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, consolidation in the twentieth century, and the international diffusion of export models and practices. The texts included come from a range of disciplines and chart the recent debates from traditional Whig history, revisionist work published during the last quarter of the twentieth century, and subsequent reassessments.
Each volume is edited by a historian recognised as an authority in the area, and features an introductory essay which explains the key changes in the period and the significance of the selected articles and essays. The series provides a valuable resource for scholars new to the area as well as for those who may have overlooked an important essay or article published in an edited collection, or in a journal with limited circulation or from a discipline that they might not normally consult.
Further information is available at: www.ashgate.com, or you can download a flyer for each volume:
The New Police in the Nineteenth Century, Paul Lawrence
Police and Policing in the Twentieth Century, Chris A Williams
Globalising British Policing, Georgina Sinclair
Theories and Origins of the Modern Police, Clive Emsley
16 March 2011
AD281 and Elluminate have been in the OU news recently. In 2009 Dr Susie West and IET’s John Pettit led the introduction of the live voice-based conferencing system, Elluminate, in AD281, working with Heritage tutors Kate Crawley, Stella Gambling and Brian Gurrin and the AD281 ALs. This month John received an OU Teaching Award in recognition of his lengthy record of innovation in teaching and learning, including his work on AD281. The Arts Faculty is continuing to innovate in the area of Elluminate, with a large-scale pilot under way in the current presentation of AA100 The Arts past and present. Both John and AD281 tutor Richard Marsden are working in this pilot.
13 December 2010
Rodney Harrison is one of the partner investigators on the research project 'Museum, Field, Metropolis, Colony: Practices of social governance', which was recently awarded $AUD238,000 funding over three years. The project will comprise a comparative international study of the role played by anthropology museums in the cultural governance of both colonial and metropolitan populations during the early fieldwork phase of anthropology. It will address these questions in relation to Australian, New Zealand, French, British and North American museums in the first half of the twentieth century.
2 November 2010
Chris Williams and Georgina Sinclair have been specialist advisers and contributors to the latest update to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. They have added biographies of forty individuals who shaped the history of policing in Britain and overseas territories under British rule.
30 September 2010
After Modernity Archaeological Approaches to the Contemporary Past by Rodney Harrison and John Schofield has just appeared with Oxford University Press. Follow this link for details
30 September 2010
Rosemary O’Day has been awarded a two year Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship.Prof O'Day will spend her two year fellowship completing the research for and writing a book Hester Temple, matriarch of Stowe in the seventeenth century: Hester Temple, Masterful Mistress? The Temples of Stowe, Buckinghamshire, 1580-1660.
30 September 2010
Rosemary O’Day becomes our second Leverhulme emeritus fellow from October 2010. Clive Emsley was awarded a fellowship in 2009.
28 May 2010
Dr Lotte Hughes has been awarded £369,114 by the AHRC for her project, Managing Heritage, Building Peace: Museums, memorialisation and the uses of memory in Kenya. This project will run for 3 years and involves collaboration with Birkbeck, University of London (Professor Annie Coombes) and a wide range of Kenyan partners.
September 2009
Please see our news archive for past items.
