SHS Annual Conference 2019
Lincoln
10th June, 2019 – 12th June, 2019
The annual SHS conference is the largest gathering of social and cultural historians in the UK. Over more than four decades, our members have transformed historical research, inspired challenging work and explored the many ways in which our social worlds are made, imagined, shared and shattered.
Our 2019 conference was hosted by the University of Lincoln on 10-12 June.
Download a copy of the programme (pdf)
At the conference…
Our 2019 keynote lecture was given by Professor Olivette Otele (Bath Spa University) who spoke on ‘Transnational History and Cultural Memory‘. It also featured a plenary panel on the barriers to historical research.
Olivette Otele is Professor and Chair of History at Bath Spa University. Her research centres around transnational history and, in particular, the link between history, collective memory and geopolitics in relation to British and French colonial pasts. Her work explores the ways in which Britain and France have been addressing questions of citizenship, race and identity through the politics of remembrance. It also enquires into the value of public gestures, the meaning of public history and the impact of cultural memory. Prof Otele holds a PhD in History from the Sorbonne University in Paris. She is a co-editor of a forthcoming edited volume, ‘Post-conflict memorialization: missing memorials, absent bodies’ and author of a forthcoming book, ‘Afro-Europeans: a short history’. Her external roles include membership of the AHRC’s Strategic Advisory Group for the Global Challenges Fund and of the executive committee of the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies.
Access denied? Challenging barriers to historical research
This plenary panel addressed an issue that concerns all those conducting historical research across periods and places: the many and varied barriers that can impede access to historical archives, data and collections of sources.
It included contributions from:
Jessamy Carlson, a qualified archivist and PHD student at the Sociology department at the University of Essex. Her research looks at Approved Schools for Girls in England and Wales 1933-1973, considering the experiencing of and documentation of these institutions.
Dr Kennetta Perry, the Director of he Stephen Lawrence Research Centre and De Montfort University.
Dr Mark Roodhouse, a historian of modern Britain who teaches at the University of York. He is currently working on a second book about organised crime in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Oxford University Press published his first book Black Market Britain 1939-1955 in 2013.
The conference also included the official prize-giving of the SHS Book Prize to Professor Hannah Barker (University of Manchester) for her book Family and Business during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Further prizes were awarded to Katrina-Louise Moseley (Cambridge University) for the best postgraduate paper and Elizabeth Evens (UCL) for the best postgraduate poster.
Papers, panels and posters at the conference were grouped into eight strands. Each featured new and established historians, covering (pre)medieval, early modern, modern and contemporary research, from the local to the global. The strands were:
- Deviance & Inclusion
- Diversity, Minority & “Others”
- Economies, Cultures & Consumption
- Life Cycles, Families & Communities
- Politics, Policy & Citizenship
- Self, Senses & Emotions
- Social Action, Social Justice & Humanitarianism
- Spaces & Places
