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
James A. S. Sunderland, University of Oxford james.sunderland@merton.ox.ac.uk @JamesSMandate ‘I am a Zionist – and so I have come to Palestine,’ says Ruth, a young woman in Tel Aviv in the late 1930s. She is sat in a café opposite twenty-year-old British journalist Barbara Board. Unlike her male colleagues who were always clambering to grab … 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
Simon P. Newman, University of Glasgow and University of Wisconsin Jack was one of more than two hundred enslaved people who escaped from their enslavers in London during the second half of the century. There were no doubt many more, but we know about these few because of advertisements like these that appeared in London’s … 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
Steph Bennett, University of Leeds @historiansteph Since the COVID-19 crisis began, clothing has become increasingly significant in our daily lives. From shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) to wearing face masks, our clothing choices have been paramount to our health. Like today, people in the early modern period wore certain clothing and materials to try … Continued
Dr Janna Coomans, University of Amsterdam j.coomans@uva.nl Although the idea of the late medieval city as the apex of disease, chaos and dirt still looms in textbooks and popular culture, a range of recent publications have made efforts to ‘clean up’ the Middle Ages. This was not an era from which things gradually improved in … Continued
Rachel Bynoth and Ellen Smith, Bath Spa University and University of Leicester distantcommunications2021@gmail.com @DistantCommuni1 In the middle of July 2020, just after the end of the first lockdown in the UK, we met by chance at a postgraduate online conference thinking about distance. We had so much in common: one examining expressions of anxiety in … Continued
Anna Maguire, Queen Mary, University of London a.maguire@qmul.ac.uk @AnnaMaguire24 In his oral history, A Chief is a Chief by the People (1975), Stimela Jason Jingoes, who served with the South African Native Labour Corps, recalled arriving in Liverpool in 1917. When we boarded the train, before we left Liverpool, the girls of that place arrived … Continued
Alice Tomlinson, University of Manchester @alice_the_ant When I started researching women’s changing work patterns in the early modern period for an essay last autumn, I had no idea the rabbit hole I would end up exploring. Initially, I found that much work on women’s employment suggests that either women have been marching slowly towards emancipation … Continued
