50th Anniversary
The University of Warwick celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2015. 50 years that the University has been forward-thinking; 50 years that the University has been constantly imagining, realising and creating the future. Throughout the 50th anniversary the University will be hosting a diverse mix of events, including two major campus-based festivals. Many academic and central departments will be contributing to those festivals and hosting some of their own events. The History Department's celebration of the 50th anniversary include the following:
Simple Scoff: The Anniversary Edition
Students and academics from the University of Warwick, working with the Vice-Chancellor’s wife Lynda Thrift, have put together a cookery book as a part of the University’s 50th anniversary celebrations, Simple Scoff: The Anniversary Edition. The book offers cheap, simple recipes and cooking tips from around the University. It also features illustrations and poems by former students and staff such as BBC media correspondent Torin Douglas.
The cookery book will be given out free to new students joining the University this year as a part of their welcome packs. It is hoped the books will help students to eat healthily whilst living away from home, in some cases for the first time.
The book, put together by Professor Rebecca Earle of the University’s History Department, updates Simple Scoff, an innovative cookbook first published in 1972 by the University of Warwick Student Union and Lady Doris Butterworth, the wife of the University’s first Vice-Chancellor. Simple Scoff consisted of recipes and cooking advice contributed by students and other members of the University community, aimed explicitly at students.
Interview with Former Head of Department, Professor Volker Berghahn
“My memories are very fond because Warwick was a very dynamic university”: Volker Berghahn looks back at his Warwick years.
Volker Berghahn, who was born in Germany in 1938, is the Seth Low Emeritus Professor at the Columbia University. Educated in the US and London, Professor Berghahn was at Warwick between 1975 and 1988. In late 1980s he moved to Brown University, and in 1998 to Columbia. Professor Berghahn is one of the internationally most esteemed historians of 19th and 20th century German history. While living in Leamington, Marion Berghahn, his wife, also founded what is today Berghahn Books, a key academic publisher in modern German and European studies.
Professor Berghahn was interviewed by Dr Anna Hájková, his current successor as the History Department’s historian of modern Germany, in May 2014. An extract from the longer record of the interview is available to read.
Young Women at University in the 1960s and 1970s
A 50th Anniversary special event of the History Department Research Seminar Series, featuring:
Margaret Drabble: CBE and DBE, independent scholar, award-winning author of 18 novels (The Millstone, The Peppered Moth), short stories (A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman), biography (Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson), literary criticism (The Genius of Thomas Hardy), history (For Queen and Country: Britain in the Victorian Age), and memoir (The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws), and editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.
Carolyn Steedman: FBA, Emeritus Professor, History Department, University of Warwick, whose publications include Landscape for a Good Woman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age, and An Everyday Life of the English Working Class.
Alumni Celebration Dinner
A celebratory dinner hosted by the History Department to remember the past, talk about history, and have a good time. The dinner, which is free for alumni to attend with a guest, is on Friday 27th November 2015 in the Chancellor’s Suite, in the Rootes Building on the Warwick main campus.
The evening will begin with drinks and an informal talk by the distinguished historian and former member of staff James Hinton (pictured left) on everyday life in Britain since the 1960s. The talk will be followed by dinner, and an on-going visual installation of material drawn from the University’s past. We will be joined by former staff members such as Bernard Capp, Robin Okey, Fred Reid, Carolyn Steedman, and Guy Thomson, as well as many former students.
The idea is to provide an opportunity for a bit of a reunion, at the same time as offering an interesting and stimulating perspective on how Warwick historians view the history of life in Britain since the 1960s, while also enjoying some good cheer.
Venice Celebration
Since 1967 the Warwick History Department, joined later by the Warwick Art History Department, has sent a group of third-year undergraduates to Venice every autumn term. Warwick has its base in a fifteenth-century palazzo near the Grand Canal, the Palazzo Pesaro-Papafava. Apart from teaching rooms, the palazzo also houses our own library.
A special programme of events will take place in Venice in October to celebrate Warwick’s 50th anniversary, running over two days – 23-24 October – and we warmly invite our alumni to join us in this celebration.