History News

Dr Roberta Bivins of the Centre for the History of Medicine and the History Department will be the keynote speaker, presenting at the 2014 Annual NHS Research and Development Forum, to be held in Birmingham on the 9th and 10th June 2014. Dr Bivins' presentation is titled, "Multi-Faceted Problems: Trans-Disciplinary Solutions?", and the forum programme is available online at http://www.rdforum.nhs.uk/forumevents/2014flyer.pdf.

Professor Hilary Marland, of the Centre for the History of Medicine, Department of History, has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award worth just over £1 million to research health in prisons.

‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’ will undertake innovative research into topics that resonate with current concerns in the prison service, including the very high incidence of mental health problems amongst prisoners, the health of women in prison, and responses to addiction and HIV/AIDS. The project will seek to answer pressing questions, such as who advocates for prisoners’ health, to what extent are prisoners deemed entitled to health care, how do debates on human rights influence the provision of medical care for prisoners, and to what extent are prison doctors constrained by dual loyalty to the prison service and to prisoners themselves, their patients?

The project will engage with policy makers and prison reform organisations, and result in several public outreach projects, including a theatrical performance and commissioned artwork. Dr Catherine Cox, of Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland at University College Dublin, and Professor Virginia Berridge, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, will be collaborating on the project.

Funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, ‘Africa’s Sons Under Arms’ (ASUA) is an ambitious 39-month research project that will start in October 2014. It uses the British West India Regiment (WIR) to explore the relationships between the arming of people of African descent and the changing nature of racial thought from the late 18th to early 20th centuries. It comprises three interrelated components that examine WIR soldiers from different perspectives: as objects of medical scrutiny during their time in the Caribbean; as figures of public interest who served within the wider British army; and as participants in organised sport watched by local and visiting spectators. The first two components have associated PhD students.

ASUA is a collaboration based on well-established relationships between the three main investigators (David Lambert, Tim Lockley and Phil Hatfield) and the two partner research institutions (Warwick's Department of History and the British Library), and drawing on the scholarly and outreach expertise of both.

New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice

University of Warwick
Saturday 31st May 2014

In recent years jazz studies has attempted to move beyond the canonical view of jazz as a narrative of great performers within an American context, becoming more interdisciplinary and international in its approach. This one-day conference will bring together Warwick, Midlands and National speakers to discuss current research in jazz, share ideas about methodologies for future study, and explore the link between academics and the practice of jazz in the wider community.

Speakers: Tony Whyton, Catherine Tackley, Andrew Hodgetts, Roger Magraw, Katherine Williams, Adrian Litvinoff, Simon Barber and Sam Fieldhouse (from the National Jazz Archive)

Organisers: Roger Fagge and Nicolas Pillai

Further information and Booking Form: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/jazz

Professor David Anderson will present his paper, Military Madness? Co-Option, Coercion, and Counter-Insurgency in the (Re)Making of Kenya, 2008-2014, at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) seminar:

Revisiting the Politics of State Survival: Violence, Legitimacy and Governance in the Greater Horn of Africa
Thursday, 8 May 2014
2.00pm-7.30pm
Pavilion Room, St Antony’s College, Oxford

 
Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968, co-edited by Dr Benjamin Smith and Dr Paul Gillingham, has been published by Duke University Press.

In 1910 Mexicans rebelled against an imperfect dictatorship; after 1940 they ended up with what some called the perfect dictatorship. A single party ruled Mexico for over seventy years, holding elections and talking about revolution while overseeing one of the world's most inequitable economies. The contributors to this groundbreaking collection revise earlier interpretations, arguing that state power was not based exclusively on hegemony, corporatism, or violence. Force was real, but it was also exercised by the ruled. It went hand-in-hand with consent, produced by resource regulation, political pragmatism, local autonomies and a popular veto. The result was a dictablanda: a soft authoritarian regime.

This deliberately heterodox volume brings together social historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists to offer a radical new understanding of the emergence and persistence of the modern Mexican state. It also proposes bold, multidisciplinary approaches to critical problems in contemporary politics. With its blend of contested elections, authoritarianism, and resistance, Mexico foreshadowed the hybrid regimes that have spread across much of the globe. Dictablanda suggests how they may endure.

Please also see the Academic Publications section of the website for details of all academic publications by the staff of the Warwick History Department.

After many years of valued service, Professor David Hardiman and Professor Carolyn Steedman retired on 31st December 2013 and each is now an Emeritus Professor of the Department. For more details of former staff, please see the list of the Department's emeritus and other former staff and the list of emeritus staff academic publications.
 

Emeritus Professor Steedman and Emeritus Professor Hardiman at their retirement dinner

Professor David Anderson presents his latest reseach on the Cold War in Africa at a guest lecture at Aberystwyth University on 12th March 2014, entitled "Cold War Counter-Insurgencies and White Supremacy in Africa, 1961-1989". A videocast of the lecture is now available on the Aberystwyth University website.