Week 10 Tutor

Professor David Lambert

Introduction

The past two decades have seen a sharp increase of interest in space and historical geography within History as a discipline. In part, this represents a departure from the dominant concerns of the cultural turn, and the search for new historical materialisms. This session seeks to introduce students to a range of issues that surround ‘space’ as an historical and a geographical concept, and to situate changes in geographically-inflected historical thinking within the context of wider historiographical developments.

YouTube video link ('Ed Soja - The Postmodern City / Bonaventure Hotel')

Seminar/ Essay Questions

• In what ways have historians studied the themes of space, landscape and environment?
• Space is relational, heterogeneous and unfinished.' (Doreen Massey, For Space, 2005). Discuss.
• How does the 'spacial turn' impacted on how historians wrote (and still write) about imperialism and colonialism?
• What would it mean to think about the spatiality of your own historical interests?

Core Reading

• Massey, Doreen, For Space (London: Sage, 2005) (e-book)

• Stock, Paul (ed), The Uses of Space in Early Modern History (Palgrave, 2015) [electronic resource], pp 1-18

Further Reading

• Cresswell, Tim, Place: A Short Introduction (Hoboken: Wiley, 2013)

• Lester, A., ‘Spatial concepts and the historical geographies of British colonialism’ in Andrew Thompson (ed.), Writing Imperial Histories (Manchester, MUP, 2014): pp. 118-142 (e-book, library)

• Nieuwenhuis, Marijn and David Crouch (eds), The Question of Space: Interrogating the Spatial Turn between Disciplines (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017)

• What is the Spatial Turn? · Spatial Humanities (scholarslab.org)