On 18 June 2015 our visiting PhD student in history Carolin Schmitz (Instituto de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia “López Piñero”, University of Valencia) gave a talk on ‘Crossing healing spaces: the sick and their mobility in early modern Spain’. Carolin works on health care in early modern Spain. She is using trial records to recover the perceptions and actions taken by sick people seeking help and care.
On Saturday 27 June 2015, the Open University and the Social History Society hosted a one-day conference ‘Privacy, literacy and the self’ in honour of David Vincent. The conference, held at The Open University in London, included established scholars and newer researchers, with papers considering the significance of David’s scholarship and the new directions it points to. The programme and registration details are online.
Pickering and Chatto have just published The Making of the Modern Police 1870-1914. These 6 volumes of source material cover the history of policing.
Four of the volumes were edited by Paul Lawrence and Rosalind Crone of the History deptartment and by Robert Morris and Janet Clark, two former OU History PhD students. For further information, see the publisher’s website.
Rosalind Crone has been awarded £177,131 from the AHRC for an Early Career Fellowship to research on ‘Educating Criminals in Nineteenth Century England’.
Further details on the project can be found here:
http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/projects?ref=AH%2FL009692%2F1
Lotte Hughes (History Department and The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies) has been awarded £628,157 by the ESRC for research on Kenya. The three-year project, ‘Cultural Rights and Kenya’s New Constitution’, will examine the ways in which Kenyans are exercising their rights to culture using provisions in the new constitution.
For further information, click here to visit the project website.
Karl Hack (and Alex Tickell of the OU English Department) have been awarded an AHRC-funded collaborative studentship with the Imperial War Museum, to the value of £55,000.
Consequently, Kathryn Butler will be joining us in October 2014 to start a thesis on ‘The Impact of postwar counterinsurgency on the psyche of the British military’.
A key purpose of the British and Irish Research Group is to encourage and support members in the advancement of their research projects. This seminar will showcase the work of three members of the History department and provide a forum for discussion. The formal papers will be followed by a general planning session for the Group’s activities in 2014-15. Everyone is welcome to attend; feel free to come for only part, or all, of the event. For further information see the British and Irish History Research Group’s website.
Time: 2:00 – 4:00pm
Venue: Open University Milton Keynes Campus, Faculty of Arts, Meeting Rooms 1 and 2, Wilson A Ground floor
Lotte Hughes, Annie E Coombes and Karega-Munene have just published Managing Heritage, Making Peace: History, Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kenya (I.B. Tauris 2013). Kenya stands at a crossroads in its history and heritage, as the nation celebrates its fiftieth anniversary of independence from Britain in 2013.
At this important juncture, what parts of its history, including the Mau Mau uprising, do citizens and state wish to remember and commemorate and what is best forgotten or occluded? What does heritage mean to ordinary Kenyans, and what role does it play in building nationhood and forging peace and reconciliation? Find out more about this book.
Deborah Brunton’s book Health and Wellness in the 19th Century (Greenwood, 2013) has just been published.
The book explores medical ideas and practice in the 19th century around the world, this book showcases the wide range of medical ideas, practices, institutions, and patient experiences, revealing how the exchanges of ideas and therapies between different systems of medicine resulted in patients enjoying a surprising degree of choice. The work provides an introduction to 19th-century medicine and sets the advancement of medicine within the context of wider historical changes. Chapters examine areas of dramatic change, such as the development of surgery, as well as the fundamental continuities in the use of traditional forms of supernatural healing, covering western, Chinese, unani, ayurvedic, and folk medicine-based understandings of the body and disease. Additionally, the book describes how the culture of medicine reflected and responded to the challenges posed by urbanization, industrialization, and global movement. Find out more.
The British Library has launched a major exhibition The Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain. Amanda Goodrich acted as an advisor and wrote the introduction to the accompanying book.
