Jennifer McFarland and Olivia Formby, University of Cambridge jmm269@cam.ac.uk occf2@cam.ac.uk Held at St John’s College, University of Cambridge on 24 June 2024, Age and Health 1500-1800 brought together nine postgraduate and early career speakers working on various aspects of health and the life cycle, with a further thirty attendees in person and online. In … Continued
Dr Roseanna Ramsden, University of Leeds R.Ramsden@leeds.ac.uk @RosieRamsden92 In July of this year, Barnabas Balint and Charlotte Gibbs, of the University of Oxford and the University of Southern California respectively, together hosted an academic workshop on the topic of animals and the Holocaust. Held at Magdalen College, Oxford, with the generous support of the … Continued
Dr Howard Webber, independent scholar hwebber@metronet.co.uk You can learn a lot about the strength of a movement by looking at its opponents. It became clear that the wonderfully named League of Audiences was worth a deeper look when I discovered that T S Eliot had devoted an essay to dissing it. The League of Audiences … Continued
Joe Moran, Liverpool John Moores University J.Moran@ljmu.ac.uk My new article for Cultural and Social History, ‘An Intimate History of Social Mobility in Post-War Britain’, focuses on the lives of my parents. My mum and dad were baby boomers, beneficiaries of the 1944 Education Act and the opening of new universities in the 1960s. But my … Continued
Hester Barron, University of Sussex H.Barron@sussex.ac.uk Most of the writing for my new monograph, The Social World of the School: Education and Community in Interwar London, was done during the pandemic. The lockdowns were a strange time to be writing anything, but to be completing a book which reflected on the purpose of school felt … Continued
Beckie Rutherford, University of Warwick b.rutherford@warwick.ac.uk @B_Rutherford_ We are delighted to share this blog, which is winner of the 2022 SHS Postgraduate Prize. You can read the announcement here. In 1980, Nabil Shaban (a disabled student and aspiring actor) and Richard Tomlinson (an English lecturer at Hereward College in Coventry) co-founded Graeae Theatre Company. It … Continued
Dr Lorinda Cramer, Australian Catholic University lorinda.cramer@acu.edu.au Some consider them a symbol of modern masculinity: a marker of business, power and authority. Others call them a uniform. More still see them as stuffy and overly formal. I’m referring, of course, to men’s suits. Suit-wearing has a complex and fascinating history across the twentieth century, so … Continued
Dr Rosamund Oates & Dr Jessica Purdy, Manchester Metropolitan University r.oates@mmu.ac.uk j.purdy@mmu.ac.uk In 2018, the Communities of Print research network hosted a conference in conjunction with Chetham’s Library, Manchester. The conference sought to bring together a range of researchers from PhD candidates to ECRs to established academics who all shared an interest in the history … Continued
Rosanne M. Baars @RosanneBaars ‘Never was there a time more suited for the dissemination of rumours. After all, people mostly follow their emotions; they forge and shape news reports as they like to favour their own party, by adding something, leaving fragments out, even by inventing news reports and re-creating them from their own imagination. … Continued
Jon Verriet, Radboud University Nijmegen j.verriet[at]let.ru.nl ‘A fiercely antifat culture’, is how the LA Times described U.S. society in 1976. In the corresponding article, the founder of the activist Fat Underground, Vivian Mayer – then known by her radical name Alderbaran – was interviewed about prejudice against people with high relative body weight. At the … Continued
