The Director of Graduate Studies is pleased to announce that the Department will be offering a number of full-time doctoral studentships and MA bursaries to outstanding candidates applying for Autumn 2015-16 admission. The awards will be available to both Home-EU and overseas applicants applying to study full-time. In order to be considered, candidates need to have submitted an online University admission application by 12 January 2015.

Further details of both types of award can be found at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/applying/pgadmissions/pgfunding

An exciting new arts project has been created by The University of Warwick. ‘Growing Well: a recent history of growing your own’ by PhD student Sophie Greenway will go up on display at University Hospital in Coventry at the end of November as part of an ongoing partnership with the Hospital’s Healing Arts Programme.

‘Growing Well’ tells the story of food growing in Coventry over the twentieth century, including ‘Dig for Victory’ during the Second World War, an experimental housing project that was to include organic growing on site, an attempt to repackage allotments as leisure gardens, and the establishment of the famous organic gardens at Ryton, now called Garden Organic. Visitors can also learn what UHCW is doing to promote healthy eating and the outdoors, including the Hospital’s award-winning Jubilee Nature Reserve.

On Tuesday 25^th November between 10am and 1pm there will be an event held in University Hospital’s Outpatients department to celebrate the new exhibit and promote growing and eating well in Coventry and Warwickshire. To find out more and add your own memories to the project visit www.growingwelluhcw.wordpress.com.

 
Editors Notes:

Sophie Greenway is a PhD student at the Centre for the History of Medicine, and has also worked as a history teacher and museum curator. Sophie’s project, entitled ‘Growing well: Dirt, health and the home gardener in Britain 1900-1970’ explores links between the environment and health in the context of domestic vegetable growing. She investigates the historical reasons why some people prefer to buy polished carrots, whilst others regard the muddy ones from a local veg box as more healthy.

The Healing Arts Programme at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust compliments patient care and welfare through a diverse range of activities, including visual and performing arts. The programme is funded by UHCW Charity and helps soften the hospital with quirky art exhibitions, creative workshops in ward dayrooms and music. For more information visit www.uhcwcharity.org/art.

Sophie can be contacted in the following ways:

email: s.a.greenway@warwick.ac.uk
twitter: SophieGreenway1
web: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/chm/outreach/uhcw/growwell/

The Warwick University History Department is currently recruiting two full-time research fellows for the Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award project ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’, a collaborative project between Professor Hilary Marland of the Warwick History Department and Dr Catherine Cox of University College Dublin:

• A full-time Research Fellow is sought for 2 years commencing 1 December 2014. The postholder will be based at Warwick in Year 1 and in Dublin in Year 2.
• A full-time Research Fellow is sought for 3 years commencing 1 January 2015. The postholder will be based at Warwick and will make research visits to Ireland.

The closing date for applications is 15th October 2014.

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...

 
The European History Research Centre (EHRC) has been established by the Department of History to encourage inter-disciplinary research and collaboration at the University of Warwick. It sees its scope in broad terms, ranging across at least the last fifteen centuries and taking a very wide view of the borders of Europe and European connections and influence. Its central intellectual principle is that encouraging people to think outside their natural disciplinary and period comfort zones pays dividends in terms of intellectual advances, innovative research, funding applications, and wider impact.

The Centre’s first formal conference, Napoleon’s Last Stand: 100 Days in 100 Objects, was held on July 1^st 2014 and exemplifies the Centre’s aspirations. There were twenty-six papers in the course of the day, from specialists in French, English, Italian and German studies; historians, political scientists, and musicologists; contributors from North America, France, Italy, Belgium, Ireland, Spain and from all over Britain; and with discussions of everything from military planning and organisation, domestic diaries and letters, women pamphleteers in Belgium, romantic poetry and painting, millenarian prophecy, Egyptian national anxieties, popular catechisms in Germany, local elections and national plebiscites in France, the battle of Waterloo, and English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Russian caricature. Moreover, the day concluded with a concert of English, French and German songs relating to the 100 Days and the battle of Waterloo, and a performance of scenes from a play written by a British soldier in captivity in France during the 100 days. Cross-national, interdisciplinary, innovative, and bringing together a wide audience of scholars, the event was an auspicious start to the Centre’s activities. The papers from the conference will form the basis for the web-exhibition that will be launched in January 2015and will trace the events of the 100 days and worldwide reactions to them over the subsequent six months.

For more details of the European History Research Centre and its activities, please see the EHRC website.
 

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.