David Appleby’s compelling new book chapter on the aftermath of the English Civil Wars
March 22, 2023
The wars which ravaged the British Isles between 1639 and 1651 took a huge toil on civilian communities. Staffordshire, located in the English Midlands, was unfortunate enough to be considered strategically important to both Charles I and Parliament. The petitions of maimed soldiers and war widows not only reveal the extent of suffering within Staffordshire …
ISOS launches new book series with Cambridge University Press
February 22, 2023
With support from the Institute for the Study of Slavery (ISOS), Cambridge University Press has launched an exciting new book series, “Histories of Slavery and its Global Legacies.” Like ISOS, the series is global in its remit and seeks to break down traditional geographical and disciplinary boundaries in order to advance the scholarly understanding of …
Samantha Knapton’s New Book on Displacement, Occupation and Humanitarianism
January 27, 2023
Dr. Samantha Knapton’s new book on the history of migration and displacement in post-WW2 Europe has just been published with Bloomsbury Press. The author, who is one of the new staff in the department, had this to say about the work: “At the end of the Second World War, up to 60 million displaced persons …
A Hard Day’s Knight: Matt Hefferan’s new monograph
November 1, 2022
It was common in medieval Europe for kings to retain a number of household knights in their personal service. Doing so provided them with a small group of loyal servants who could perform a variety of valuable functions at the king’s command. In my recent book, I focus on the household knights of one of …
Dr. Kate Law examines women and nation-building in Zimbabwe
October 18, 2022
Questions of belonging, particularly in relation to the process of decolonisation in Southern Africa, remain an enduring research interest of mine. Yet scholars of the end of the empire have been remarkably slow in embracing gender as a serious category of analysis. Challenging this orthodoxy, my 2020 open-access article, ‘“We wanted to be free as …
Jörg Arnold’s new article on miners and masculinity in 1970s and 80s Britain
August 22, 2022
Even after the final demise of the Britain’s coal industry some seven years ago, the figure of the miner continues to exert a special hold on the cultural imagination. Miners are depicted as both admirable and pitiful. They represent the lost world of industrial Britain that was swept aside by the de-industrial revolution of the …
New book on Penguin Books from Dr. Dean Blackburn
December 7, 2020
The author writes: Penguin Books and Political Change traces the social and political thought of those intellectuals and policy-makers who helped to shape post-war. In doing so, it tells a story about the rise and fall of what we might call Britain’s ‘meritocratic moment’. From the 1930s, I argue, thinkers from across the political spectrum began …
New book by Anna Greenwood and Richard Bates
December 3, 2020
Florence Nightingale at Home by Paul Crawford, Anna Greenwood, Richard Bates & Jonathan Memel This co-authored monograph, released in the year of Florence Nightingale’s bicentenary, proposes a new understanding of Nightingale’s life, work, and ideas by considering them through the prism of the concept of ‘home’. This was a key notion in the nineteenth century, …
Dr. Arun Kumar’s new article in Past & Present
December 2, 2020
This article examines the emergence of mass letter-writing in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial north India, a region marked by the growth of an unprecedented labour mobility, postal expansion, vernacular print, and workers’ literacy. It narrates how workers’ and their family members’ abilities and failures to read and write letters shaped their experiences …
Dr. Sascha Auerbach’s new project awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship
September 14, 2020
Dr. Sascha Auerbach has been awarded a one-year Leverhulme research fellowship to pursue his third book project on race, labour and migration in the 19th c. British Empire. The project was featured this month in the Leverhulme’s “Grants in Focus” newsletter.
Find, follow, join us
