Sometimes a workshop is only a workshop, and sometimes it is the beginning of a whole new project. With the recent Translating Cultures event held at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany on 26 and 27 June, my co-convernor Thomas Munck and I soon had the feeling it could be the latter. We got… Continue reading Translating Cultures in Early Modern Europe – What’s Next?
Category: Academia
Early Modern Political Thought and Twenty-First-Century Politics
I love Newcastle and the Lit&Phil, and this workshop on Early Modern Political Thought and Twenty-First-Century Politics in mid-May was probably one of the most fun public history events I have yet participated in. Rachel Hammersley managed to get together a panel of early modern historians who all had something to say about how the… Continue reading Early Modern Political Thought and Twenty-First-Century Politics
Translating Cultures – Workshop at the Duke August Library, 26/27 June
If you are an early modernist interested in translation, print and the book trade in Europe and you can make it to Wolfenbüttel this summer, drop in on our workshop on 26 and 27 June. We are gathering at the excellent Duke August Library (HAB) once in the charge of the Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Ephraim… Continue reading Translating Cultures – Workshop at the Duke August Library, 26/27 June
On Misogyny, ancient and modern
Mary Beard’s Women and Power is one of those books that will make you shout: “Yes, she’s so right!” – “Very well put!” – “So glad someone is saying this!” For those of you who haven’t read it yet, the book consists of two essays on ‘The public voice of women’ and ‘Women in power’… Continue reading On Misogyny, ancient and modern
Uncertainty and the post-truth society
The word ‘Brexit’ entered the Oxford English Dictionary for the first time this month, only weeks after Donald Trump was elected as the next president of the United States and ‘post-truth’ was chosen as the word of the year. All three events are to a greater or lesser extent manifestations of anger with the establishment,… Continue reading Uncertainty and the post-truth society
Historians and the Fifth Estate
Historians should get more actively involved in shaping policy, in particular foreign and defence policy. That is the gist of a recent call by Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson in The Atlantic for a Council of Historians to be established in the US. Taking advice from historians, they suggest, could have helped President George W.… Continue reading Historians and the Fifth Estate
Political Thought in Times of Crisis, 1640-1660 – Symposium, 1-3 Dec
Sponsored by the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought, Washington, US. Was the mid-seventeenth-century crisis in Britain and Ireland essentially one aspect of a broader “global” crisis? How might scholars theorize the relationships between political thought and other verbal and non-verbal expressions of change and instability (political, economic, social, cultural, and… Continue reading Political Thought in Times of Crisis, 1640-1660 – Symposium, 1-3 Dec
You can’t buy an education
As university lecturers in the UK remain locked in a dispute with their employers over pay and working conditions in Higher Education, a survey published by private student loan company Future Finance this week revealed that less than half of students think their degree will help them get a graduate job to pay off their… Continue reading You can’t buy an education
Incredible universities
When I left my last academic job, a good friend and colleague gave me Ian McGuire’s campus novel Incredible Bodies, in case I would have any regrets. Like Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, it’s a satirical novel about academic life and the dysfunctional characters that populate our universities and take… Continue reading Incredible universities
Redefining the independent scholar
Three weeks after quitting my job as an academic historian it’s high time I reinvented myself. I might no longer work at a university, but that doesn’t mean I love history any less. On the contrary, maybe I had to leave because I loved my subject too much to see it destroyed by a changing academic culture… Continue reading Redefining the independent scholar
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