Penny Summerfield (Emerita Professor of History at University of Manchester) recently published a new book, Histories of the Self: personal narratives and historical practice (Routledge, 2018). As she explains, the book was inspired by teaching courses on personal testimony and historical research at Manchester. One of my favourite courses, when I taught at Manchester, was…
Category: Research News
Sandbags, strikes and scandals: James Connolly reflects on his latest article on occupied Roubaix in 1915.
Roubaix, c. 1900. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/ This post is a pseudo-confession: whilst my latest article will be published this month in the journal Historical Reflections, when I was researching and writing it there were often moments when I thought that it would never see the light of day. It is one of the…
RESEARCH NEWS: “Opportunities and challenges in the sharing economy” Dr Alexia Yates discusses what Airbnb can tell us about nineteenth-century Paris.
As a historian of cities and economic life, I am interested in how markets transform our understanding and use of space, as well as how local governments grapple with the political and social consequences of those economic changes. Studying real estate as an object with a history offers useful insights for some contemporary urban issues….
RESEARCH NEWS: “Corpses of Mass Violence and Genocide”: Dr Jean-Marc Dreyfus discusses uncovering the ‘forensic turn’ in his recent ERC-funded project.
Skulls displayed at the Nyamata Memorial Site, Rwanda. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. What was the starting-point for this project? Histories of genocide have tended, to date, towards examining the aftermath of mass violence in relation to issues of trauma and memory, and how these factors shape the subsequent political, cultural, and social characterisations of…
