Warwick History Post-Doc Club
Warwick History ‘Post-Doc’ club
The Warwick History ‘Post-Doc’ club is an informal social/discussion group of former Warwick History Research Students, meeting periodically online and in-person to maintain contact and encourage mutual support for ongoing research and careers. This group is open to all, including those not pursuing post-doc projects or academic careers.
The idea is to meet up from time-to-time virtually and at occasional in-person gatherings in Warwick/London and elsewhere. The structure of the group is flexible and ad-hoc but may include formal workshop settings with occasional guest speakers in rooms on campus as well as socials in pubs or restaurants.
We hope that, as the group grows, it will evolve to reflect ideas from members, but the broad purpose is to keep in touch with each other and the department, provide mutual support in a similar way to the PGR Work-Progress Sessions and give participants an opportunity to float partly formed research ideas, as well as reflecting on the wider relevance of our historical research to contemporary society.
As times goes on we may organise workshops on engagement and impact and possibly even produce an occasional blog or newsletter. Communication will be via an opt-in Google group which may also provide a platform to float ideas between meetings.
Warwick History Post-Doc Club nominated for Research Celebration Award
We are delighted to announce that Warwick History Post-Doc Club has been nominated by a colleague as part of Warwick University Catalogue of Research Excellence, 2025 Research Celebration Awards. We were in good company with winners David Anderson, Naomi Pullin, Highly Commended, Guido van Meersbergen,and co-nominees James Poskett and Timothy Lockley,
The nomination in full:
David Fletcher and Dave Steele;
The two nominees, both recently graduated PhD students, have shown great initiative in setting up the Warwick History Post-Doc Club. The aim was (in their own words) to create “an informal social/discussion group of former Warwick History Research Students, meeting periodically, online and in-person, to maintain contact and encourage mutual support for ongoing research and careers. This group is open to all, including those not pursuing post-doc projects or academic careers.”
This initiative recognized and addressed a key gap in our provisions, enabling a fully inclusive research environment that connects our formal PhD programme with postdocs in the wider community.
Expectations were exceeded by a) the creation of the postdoc club in the first place and b) by the enthusiasm shown by the nominees in bringing people together on a regular basis. The first meeting was held on 24 January 2024 and there have since been five online meetings and an in-person social. Topics covered have ranged widely: “getting published,” “social media,” “dealing with controversy,” “post-doc applications,” and “the independent historian.” The last session was particularly interesting, as it highlighted the relatively large number of scholars who are not affiliated to institutions and therefore facing challenges, particularly of library access.
The Post-Doc Club has an ongoing agenda to foster links among PhD graduands, whether or not they enter the formal world of academia or find careers in other walks of life, using the skills and expertise gained through their PhDs. We envisage embedding the club’s members into support for existing PhD students, since they offer a diverse wealth of experience and perspectives. The club also offers the prospect of a more joined-up experience for PhD alumni when most of the university effort is directed at undergraduate alumni. The club is a leader within the Arts and Humanities community at Warwick. https://bit.ly/pdc-award
2025 Methodologies Series
Digitization & citizen science
Inviting collaborative research to transcribe handwritingOnline Meeting: Weds 22 October at 5pm
with Harry Smith and Emily Vine
of the Material Culture of Wills, 1540-1790 project at the University of Exeter
Advances in machine learning present new opportunities for historical research, allowing new forms of analysis, and enabling digitization and transcription to happen at a far greater pace than was previously possible. This is particularly true for the early modern period since earlier automatic transcription methods using optical character recognition (OCR) performed poorly when applied to manuscript sources.
The rapid improvement of handwritten text recognition (HTR) methods has, however, opened up the possibility of digitizing manuscript sources at a scale not previously possible. Any output from such models needs to be checked, and the use of volunteer labour to do so is increasingly common. In this session we discuss the use of HTR models to transcribe 25,000 wills from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as part of the Material Culture of Wills project.
This project used the HTR platform Transkribus to transcribe the contents of these wills, but has also worked with a small group expert volunteers (to produce training data) and a wider pool of volunteers through the Zooniverse platform (to check model outputs). This combination of human and algorithmic labour has proved successful in developing accurate transcriptions of our wills sample and we will discuss our approach to this task, and the lessons learnt.
All welcome (not restricted to post-docs). Zoom meeting link: https://bit.ly/POST-DOC-CLUB
Past Meetings:
Tuesday May 13 5-6.30pm
Methodologies 1
These researchers shared their varied and innovative methodologies:
Matt Cunneen discussed his quantitative macro-historical methodology for his PhD on the Macro-Historical efficacy of the American Militia. He employs Likert scales to visualise large quantities of data over time to enable him to spot trends relating to events consider less significant by other historians. Matt is a PhD Researcher at the University of Wolverhampton.
Alex Hibberts will shared his methodology about using walking as a research method to help redesign national park visitor strategy. Alex is Pearsall Fellow in Naval and Maritime History at the IHR, University of London.
Caitlin Kitchener considered how interdisciplinary approaches to historical archaeology can examine the landscapes, spaces, and material culture of radicalism. Caitlin is Lecturer in Historical Archaeology at the University of York
Nic Madge shared his methodology employed in his research into the Tambopata Rubber Syndicate, which enslaved over 700 indigenous Peruvians and Bolivians in the early 20th century. His sources include personal and diplomatic correspondence, company records, family history as well as accounts of impartial observers. Nick’s monographThe Infernal Tambopatais out for peer review for Liverpool University Press.
Thursday June 5 5-6.30pm
Methodologies 2
Mary Fraser from the University of Glasgow on analysing occupational journals.
Dave Steele of the University of Warwick on using Digital Mapping to estimate potential crowd densities and site capacity and text mining Newspaper Archives to estimate news penetration.
Rob O'Toole of the University of Warwick will share his enthusiasm for how digital technology can assist Arts Faculty researchers.
Friday 28th February Alternative Careers
Many former Warwick History PhD students find successful careers beyond the standard research and teaching pathway. At this Post-Doc-Club session, we discussed how (and perhaps why) these alternative careers have been pursued. Pierre Botcherby, Ed DeVane, Imogen Knox, Louise Morgan, Stephen Soanes, and Hannah Straw shared their experiences.
Mon 2 Dec at 5pm – The Independent Historian
Recording of the meeting: https://www.youtube.
Thurs 6 June. 5pm Zoom Session.
Social Media for Historians – Benefit or Curse?
Katrina Navickas, Professor of History, University of Hertfordshire
Elaine Chalus, Professor of History, University of Liverpool
Kerry Love, Ph.D student University of Northampton,
Stephen Basdeo, Senior Lecturer in History, Elizabeth School of London
Daniel Franke, Associate Professor of History, Richard Bland College of William and Mary, Virginia
Pierre Purseigle,Associate Professor - Reader in History, University of Warwick
They will discuss their experiences as historians who have been involved in academic controversy which has gone beyond polite disagreement.
Pierre has provided a discussion document to introduce his talk about the polarised debate surrounding ‘war culture’ in France in the 1990s:https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/controversy_war_culture
Joint Meeting with Warwick History PGR Work in Progress Group :Before, During, After: Submission, Vivas, &Post Doc Applications.
Weds. 21 February 17:00 "Turning a PhD into a monograph"
Report of Launch meeting
The first meeting of the club was held on Zoom on 24thJanuary 2024. After a brief introduction from Dave Steele about the aims of the club, each participant spent a few minutes reporting on their current activities, their experiences since completing their doctorates, and details of any publications. It became clear that, amongst this particular group, there has been a very wide range of experiences. Some participants had only recently completed, whilst others completed some years ago; some had secured permanent positions and/or been published, whilst others were finding it more of a challenge; and one participant was now returning to research after a break. After these reports there was a very lively and supportive discussion. One major theme that emerged was the issue of ‘Getting Published’ and particularly the challenge of turning a thesis into a monograph. This will, therefore, be the theme of the next meeting and we will be inviting some colleagues who have been successful in meeting this challenge. The meeting will be held on Zoom on at 17:00 on Wednesday 21stFebruary 2024.
David Fletcher
For further information email:PostDocClub@gmail.com
Contacts:
Recurring link for zoom meetings:https://bit.ly/POST-DOC-CLUB