See below for past news items.
Events
Conference: Religion as Agent of Change Ole Grell has been invited to chair the Reformation session at the Religion as Agent of Change international conference at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, (25-26 August 2011).
Workshop: ‘Bodies for Knowledge: Perspectives on Anatomy, 1600-1900’, The Open University in London, 20 June 2011 The history of anatomy is a blossoming area of research, stimulating the interactions between scholars with different approaches, from medical to social historians and from anthropologists to art historians. Recent studies have called into question received accounts of a disciplinary continuity, stressing fundamental changes in anatomical practice and knowledge. This makes all the more important to recapture the historical specificity of such key activities as the procurement of bodies, the production of visual knowledge and the management of intellectual controversies. Bringing together scholars with a wide range of expertise, this workshop takes stock of recent developments in the field and charts future avenues of investigation. The programme is available online.
Seminar: ‘Criminal Book History’ Friday 18 February 2011 This themed seminar explores the links between histories of crime and the history of print in the nineteenth century. Crime and its punishment has long been a topic which has attracted readers and filled the coffers of publishers. However, from the turn of the nineteenth century, developments in printing technology, the emergence of cheap publications and rising literacy levels meant that interactions between crime and print culture flourished. The four papers at this seminar will explore the ways in which crime shaped forms of writing, publishing, print distribution and reading. Follow this link fordetails of the papers and a registration form.
Seminar: Reassembling the Collection: Indigenous Agency and Ethnographic Objects Rodney Harrison is co-chairing an Advanced Seminar ‘Reassembling the Collection: Indigenous Agency and Ethnographic Objects’ at the School for Advanced Reseach in Santa Fe from September 26-39. More information is available online. 30 September 2010
Public Lecture: The significance of the Reformation for medicine and natural philosophy Ole Grell has been invited to give a public lecture at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany on 2 November 2010 on ‘The significance of the Reformation for medicine and natural philosophy’. The lecture is part of a 4-day conference: The effects of the Reformation on science and education. 30 September 2010
Seminar: Biographical Methods Seminar Thursday 30th September 2010 12.30 – 1.30 in Library Seminar Room 1 Dr Rebecca Jones ‘When I get older’: Imagining bi futures Gerontologists have noted for many years that people find it hard to imagine themselves growing old, characterising this failure of imagination as both arising from and contributing toward ageism and the ill-treatment of older people. To the extent that people are able to imagine their own ageing, they often draw on older people they know, especially family members, as role models. They also draw on cultural resources around them, such as films, books and other media. Further details from the Biographical Methodologies website. 20 September 2010
Seminar: Work in Progress’ at the International Centre for the History of Crime, Policing and Justice, 21 July 2010 Meeting Rooms 1, 2 and 3, Wilson A, Walton Hall This informal day seminar will provide an opportunity for several members of the centre to present research they are currently pursuing in the area of crime and justice and to receive feedback. A detailed programme can be found online. 13 July 2010
Workshop: Healing sites, public health and medical therapies: research in the history of medicine at the Open University To promote exchange and foster collaboration on medical history across the University, a workshop on Healing sites, public health and medical therapies: research in the history of medicine at the OU will be held at the The Open University in London on 12 July 2010. Follow the link for the programme. 28 May 2010
Conference: Ethnicity Crime and Justice; Historical and Contemporary perspectives, 8-9 June 2010 This two day conference on ‘Ethnicity Crime and Justice; Historical and Contemporary perspectives’ aims to bring historians and criminologists together around common themes. The conference partly comes out of a recent ESRC-funded research project on ethnicity, crime and justice in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the desire of Peter King and John Carter Wood, who are writing a book out of this research, to bring together historians and criminologists working in this field. Speakers include: Coretta Phillips, Marty Wiener, Paul Iganski, and Rene Levy.Further information including contact details, the conference programme and registration form is available from the ICCCR website. 13 May 2010
Conference: Shaping the Heritage Landscape: Perspectives from East and southern Africa Dr Lotte Hughes will co-host a workshop on ‘Shaping the Heritage Landscape: Perspectives from East and southern Africa’ on 5 and 6 May 2010 at the The British Institute in Eastern Africa, Nairobi. This workshop will focus on issues around heritage, memory, identity, culture and peace making in these two regions, drawing upon new research. Further information and abstracts are available online. 6 April 2010
Conference: Policing, Media and Civil Liberties in interwar Britain, 26 February 2010 The next conference in the series run by the History of Crime, Policing and Justice group (in conjunction with the International Centre for Comparative Criminological Research) will be “Policing, Media and Civil Liberties in interwar Britain” held at the Open University on 26th February, 2010. The conference programme is available online (PDF, 55 KB). 27 January 2010
Conference on Homicide, 4th December 2009 As part of the regular series of conferences put on by the History of Crime, Policing and Justice group (in conjunction with the International Centre for Comparative Criminological Research) this day conference aims to bring together major historians and Criminologists working on homicide. The conference programme is available online (PDF, 136 KB).
Talks
Talk: James Moore lectures in São Paulo and Beijing James Moore will give the plenary address, History and Philosophy of Biology Meeting 2010, Brazilian Association of Philosophy and History of Biology (ABFHiB), University of São Paulo (Brazil), 11-13 August. He has also been invited to present a public lecture ‘Darwin in Communication’ at Beijing University in August. 30 January 2010
Talk: Professor Jim Moore on ‘Phases of Darwin biography’ One of a series hosted by the The Biographical Methodologies Group, The Open University, 27th May, 2pm in Meeting Rooms 1, 2, and 3 Wilson A Building. The talk reviews how responsibility for shaping Darwin’s image and reputation shifted from Darwin, to his family, to ‘scientists’, to the ‘Darwin Industry’ and finally to social and intellectual historians. It concludes with a few words about the way that Darwin’s science-history is written today. Jim Moore is Professor of the History of Science at the Open University. He has published extensively on Darwin and Victorian lives. His and Adrian Desmond’s best-selling Darwin(1991) won many prizes and has been widely translated. Their Darwin’s Sacred Cause. Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, was hailed by London Review of Books as the Darwin bicentenary’s ‘most substantial historical contribution.’ 29 April 2010
Talk: Anne Laurence on Women making money Anne Laurence is giving a public lecture at the University of Plymouth on 9 March 2010 on “Women making money: women and the stockmarket from the South Sea Bubble.”
Awards
Prize: Sandip Hazareesingh awarded David Berry Prize Sandip Hazareesingh has been awarded the 2009 David Berry prize for his article ‘Interconnected synchronicities: the production of Glasgow and Bombay as modern global ports c. 1850-1880’, Journal of Global History, vol. 1, part 4 (spring 2009). The prize is awarded annually by the Royal Historical Society for the best published scholarly article on a subject dealing with Scottish history.
Award: Saving Britain’s Past wins BUFVC Learning on Screen Award The series Saving Britain’s Past, which forms part of the course materials for AD281Understanding Global Heritage, has won the Special Jury Award at the British Universities Film and Video Council 2010 Learning on Screen Awards. The award was announced at the Learning on Screen Conference held at the Open University on the 27th April, 2010. The series first screened on BBC2 over the summer of 2009, and Rodney Harrison and Susie West, both Lecturers in Heritage Studies in the Faculty of Arts, acted as academic consultants on the series.
Award: ESRC grant award: Exploring UK policing practices The Economic and Social Research Council has awarded £98,000 to Clive Emsley and Georgie Sinclair for a 14-month project called “Exploring UK policing practices as a blueprint for democratic police reform: the overseas deployment of UK Police Officers, 1989 -2009”. This oral history project will involve interviewing British police officers who have been involved in missions abroad designed to encourage the adoption and development of community policing. It will also involve a user workshop which will bring together researchers, research subjects, practitioners, policy-makers, and other stakeholders. It forms part of a broader project on global policing which is taking shape in the European Centre for the Study of Policing.
ESRC award for project on Ethnicity, crime and justice in England 1700-1825 Pete King has just been granted an ESRC award for a project on Ethnicity, crime and justice in England 1700-1825. This project will explore the degree to which ethnic minorities, and especially the black and Irish inhabitants of the metropolis were differentiated against by the criminal justice system.
Research Funding Success Professor Pete King and Dr John Carter Wood have been awarded £98,440 by the AHRC for an 18 month project titled: Police, Press, public and the ‘Celebrity Female Victim’ in Britain, 1926-1930.
Publications
New publication by postgraduate student A recent postgraduate student in the History department has recently had part of her thesis published as: Janet Clark, ‘Sincere and Reasonable Men? The Origins of the National Council for Civil Liberties’, Twentieth Century British History 2009 20: 513-537
The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity, Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay (1900 – 1925) Sandip Hazareesingh has recently published this book as part of the series ‘New Perspectives in South Asian History’, from Orient Longman. This is an original story about the coming of ‘modernity’ in Bombay city in the early twentieth century. In this account, Sandip Hazareesingh shows how this most global of forces had complex and contradictory meanings in the local urban setting of colonial Bombay. It offers fresh and stimulating insights into the multi-layered relationships between modernity, colonialism, and the production of urban space.Further details are available online.
Paperback edition of Colonial Armies in South East Asia Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig, Colonial Armies in South East Asia, first published in hardback by Routledge in 2006, came out in paperback in summer 2008. A review in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History stated that it ‘opens up substantial new ground in Southeast Asian studies and world history’.
The Politics of Vaccination In February 2008 Deborah Brunton’s monograph The Politics of Vaccination: Practice and Policy in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland 1800-1874 is published by Rochester University Press in their prestigious series Studies in Medical History.
New publication: paperback edition ofDarwin’s Sacred Cause The paperback edition of Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Originsby James A. Moore and Adrian Desmond has been issued by Penguin books. Further details are available online.
New publication: War Planning 1914 Annika Mombauer has contributed a chapter on German War Planning to a new book entitledWar Planning 1914, edited by Richard F. Hamilton, Ohio State University, and Holger H. Herwig, University of Calgary, published by Cambridge University Press in January 2010. This tightly focused collection of essays by international experts in military history reassesses the war plans of 1914 in a broad diplomatic, military, and political setting for the first time in three decades. Collectively and comparatively, the essays in this volume place contingency war planning before 1914 in the different contexts and challenges each state faced as well as into a broad European paradigm.Further details are available online.
Other News
Courses: Video introductions to new Arts courses You can now watch brief introductions to our new courses on YouTube. These include the Level 2 course Understanding Global Heritage(AD281) by Dr Rodney Harrison and an introduction to the new MA in History by Professor Ian Donnachie. Both of these courses will be presented for the first time in October 2009.
Teaching and Learning History from Police Archives In August 2008 the ICCCR launched its first teaching packages based on material from the Police Archive held at the OU. The materials, aimed at Key stage 3 and sixth-form students explore the role of the police during the Second World War and Police and Citzenship. The preparation of these materials was funded by the AHRC and the Heritage Lottery Fund. Follow this link to see the materials online.
