History News

 
The Department of History is pleased to announce - on this the forty first anniversary of the military coup in Chile - the launch of a website dedicated to the World University Service scholarship programme for Chilean academic refugees. The programme ran from 1973 to 1985 and gave grants to more than 900 Chilean scholars to continue and complete their studies in the UK. The programme saved many lives and helped to rebuild an academic community dislocated by the aftermath of the military coup, providing a source of moral and practical support for WUS award holders and their families. Support was also provided to enable students to return to Latin America and Chile to contribute to local development, when it was safe to do so.

We are very interested in receiving testimonies from both Chilean former award holders and also from British NGO workers, activists and academics who were involved with the Chilean exile experience so that this site can become an ever expanding testimony to a unique moment in recent Chilean and British history. We are linked to the Museum of Memory in Santiago, Chile. The Modern Record Centre at the University has also collected a valuable resource of documents relating to the World University Service programme which is open to scholars.

Candidates interested in applying for a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Warwick History Department must submit their preliminary application to the Department by midnight GMT on Sunday 21st September 2014. Please check the details of what is required from potential applicants.

The forthcoming Cuban Research Forum Annual Conference at Nottingham University, on the 8th to the 10th September 2014, will feature a special panel to celebrate Alistair Hennessy on the 9th September 2014 from 3:30pm to 5:30pm. Please see the full conference programme for more details of this panel and the other events of the conference.

Alistair Hennessy joined Warwick’s History Department shortly after the University’s foundation and he retired as one of the Department’s longest-serving members. He began his academic career as an historian of modern Europe, but after writing an important book on republicanism in nineteenth-century Spain, his interest in the Hispanic world broadened to encompass the history of Latin America and the Americas more generally. In the course of a dynamic and fruitful career, he made a great contribution to developing Warwick’s reputation for innovative and engaging historical studies, and to widening the scope of American Studies in the UK.

His own special contribution was to engineer the establishment of the School of Comparative American Studies (CAS), a degree course which received its first students in 1974 and continues to flourish today. CAS was his brainchild and favourite venture, reflecting his desire to challenge conventional intellectual and disciplinary boundaries. He rejected Cold War categories which portrayed the world in terms of East and West and called attention to the significance of relations between North and South; he insisted that American history and American Studies had to be more than the study of the United States; he proposed the study of the Americas as whole, comparing where possible the histories and cultures of Latin America, the United States, Canada and the Caribbean; and, last but not least, he looked to the future by launching a degree which was multi-disciplinary and bilingual, with opportunities to learn Spanish, to take courses across departments, and to spend a year studying at a university in the Americas.

Never one to rest on his laurels, Alistair subsequently developed another branch of American studies at Warwick by playing a leading part in founding the Centre for Caribbean Studies, which in turn became a prominent focus for historical and literary work on the Caribbean. The CAS degree, his book The Frontier in Latin American History, his numerous essays and articles on subjects which ranged from the histories of Cuba and Anglo-Argentine relations to Latin American intellectuals and Chicano culture, together with the Caribbean Studies book series which he created and co-edited, all stand as testimony to the intellectual vision, passion and energy for which he will be long remembered.

Overall student satisfaction for History students at Warwick University has risen to 93% in this year’s National Student Survey (NSS). The University as a whole has seen noteworthy increases in satisfaction in 5 of the 6 main category scores, including a 7% increase in satisfaction with Assessment and Feedback.

Thank you to all the students that took the time to complete the survey, giving us a clear picture of what their learning experience was like and helping us identify areas of strengths and weaknesses so that we can bring about enhancements to the student experience for current and future students.

Warwick’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Nigel Thrift said:

This success reflects our commitment to provide Warwick students with a high quality research led learning experience, that also equips them to become internationally aware and to leave Warwick inspired and equipped to take on some of our world’s greatest challenges. It also reflects Warwick’s continued reinvestment in its campus to provide the experience that our students expect.”

The NSS is an independent high profile census of nearly half a million final year students at Higher Education and Further Education institutions throughout the UK. The NSS results inform prospective applicants about the student experience at Warwick, and the feedback helps potential students with their decision about where they wish to study.

On 31 July 2014 Professor David Anderson gave a public lecture at the UK Supreme Court, in London's Parliament Square. The lecture, entitled "Empire, Lawyers, and the Rule of Law", examined the role of lawyers and legal appeals in the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya during the 1950s, using legal records, including Privy Council appeals. The lecture was at the invitation of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, to inaugurate a summer exhibit at the Supreme Court on the history of the Privy Council. The exhibition is linked to a project that has digitised the records of the Privy Council and made them available on line.

Details of the Privy Council paper can be found at http://www.privycouncilpapers.org/. The exhibit is open to the public at the Supreme Court until 24 September 2014.

Dr Camillia Cowling is one of two winners of the 2014 Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) Roberto Reis Book Prize for her book, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (North Carolina Press, 2013). This prize is awarded annually for the two best books in Brazilian Studies published in English that contribute significantly to promoting an understanding of Brazil.

The book, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro, is also one of three finalists for the prestigious Frederick Douglass Book Prize which is awarded for the most outstanding nonfiction book published in English on the subject of slavery and/or abolition and antislavery movements. The Douglass Prize Jury and Review Committee will meet in the fall to select a winner, which will be announced publicly at that time.

Please also see the list of all academic publications by the academic staff of the Warwick University History Department.
 

The Royal Historical Society has awarded its 2013 Martin Lynn Scholarship to first-year doctoral student George Roberts. This is a highly prestigious and very competitive award, open to students working in the field of African History, which will be used to support George's PhD research on the Cold War in post-independence Dar es Salaam.

George's project is supervised by Professors David Anderson and Daniel Branch. Details are contained in his e-portfolio.

The Royal Historical Society's Rees Davies Prize for 2013 has been awarded to Mara Gregory (MA in History of Medicine 2012-13) for her dissertation ‘“Beamed Directly to the Children”: School Broadcasting and Sex Education in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s’. The dissertation was supervised by Dr Mathew Thomson.

Judges’ citation: This highly accomplished thesis analyses the production, content and reception of sex education broadcasts by the BBC during the 1960s and 1970s. The author explores these programmes and the controversy they generated as a lens onto wider social debates about sexual behaviour, the ‘permissive society’ and ideas about childhood...