The British Academy/Wolfson Fellowships Awards will be providing funding to Dr James Poskett, Associate Professor in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Warwick.

Through his research, Dr Poskett will be working on a project titled ‘The Scientific Revolution as Global History, 1200-1800’. He hopes this will provide a major reassessment of the concept of the ‘scientific revolution’. In doing so, the project will build on Dr Poskett’s recent book ‘Horizons: A Global History of Science’.

Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick are delighted to be partnering with the Pod on a new collaborative research project: ‘Using Film to Affect Change: Mental Health, Social Advocacy and the Moving Image’.

New Material Musings blog article for May - this month Dr Micaela Canopli's explores the "Use and Reuse of Antiquities: the Marble Frieze Calendar on the "Little Metropolis" in Athens". You can read it here.

11am to 5pm - Queen's Beacon on the Hill by Cryfield Village.

'The woods, the woods' explores what the forest stands for in Shakespeare’s works: how has our presentation of them evolved and what do they represent,liberate and constrict. It looks at social breakdown and symbolism, as well as directorial approaches towards the tricky and increasingly avoided task of creative the greenwood on stage.

Location: The Glade by Cryfield Cottages. The installation will be visible from the Queen's Jubilee Beacon on Windmill Hill.

Third year Film Studies student and investigative journalist Fran Hughes reports from the screening of Lyra (2022) at Coventry Cathedral, about the murdered Northern Irish journalist Lyra McKee. The film was accompanied by a panel chaired by Professor Helen Wheatley (Director of Film and Television Studies) with Lyra's sister Nichola McKee-Corner and brother in law John Corner, the film's producer, Jackie Doyle, the Rev Dr Alex Wimberley (leader of the Corrymeela Community) and Professor Michele Aaron. Fran attended the screening as a recent recipient of the Centre for Investigative Journalism's Lyra McKee Bursary Scheme, and writes about the experience of watching the film and meeting Lyra's family

Horizons: A Global History of Science (Penguin, 2022) by Dr James Poskett has been shortlisted for the 2023 British Society for the History of Science Hughes Prize.

 The Hughes Prize "is awarded every two years to the best book in the history of science (broadly construed) published in English which is accessible to a wide audience of non-specialists.”

100% of our research is "world-leading" or "internationally excellent"

Huge congratulations to Theresa Spielmann on her viva which she passed with no corrections! Her MA dissertation has turned out so exceptional that it was upgraded to MPhil. And additional congratulations on her co-edited collection that she published with her collective: ‘The 2051 Munich Climate Change Conference’ https://www.transcript-publishing.com/978-3-8376-6384-6/the-2051-munich-climate-conference/

The SMLC will be taking part in The Big Read on Sunday 2 April, an event designed for young people aged 3 to 11 to celebrate reading, writing and storytelling.

Colleagues will be running an interactive multi-lingual Harry Potter session for children aged 8+, and for younger children there will be story readings in French, German and Spanish. Everyone is also welcome to taste different languages and cultures through fun quizzes on the day or the simple online story title reading activitiesLink opens in a new window.

The School for Cross-faculty Studies is excited to announce the agreement of a partnership with the Institute for Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA) for all of our undergraduate courses in Global Sustainable Development. IEMA is the global professional body for individuals and organisations working, studying or interested in the environment and sustainability.​ With over 18,500 members worldwide, IEMA is the professional organisation at the centre of the sustainability agenda, connecting business and individuals across industries, sectors and borders and we look forward to a developing this partnership further in the coming years.

Accreditation means that, throughout their period of registration on any of our BASc undergraduate courses in Global Sustainable Development, students are entitled to free student membership of the Institute and, upon successful completion of their course, they qualify for GradIEMA status. Graduate membership is a launchpad for future leaders within environment and sustainability and offers a range of benefits to support graduates throughout their career. Accreditation by IEMA, therefore, confirms that our ground-breaking courses in GSD offer students a professionally recognised level of knowledge, skills and tools for working in sustainability practice.

We are extremely proud of Dr Bryan Brazeau (Liberal Arts) and Dr Gioia Panzarella (Global Sustainable Development) for winning the 2022 Warwick Awards for Personal Tutoring Excellence (WAPTE)! The WAPTE Team received more nominations than ever before this year from both students and staff, so it is a real testament to their commitments to personal tutoring to be acknowledged at this level.

Read more.

On Saturday the 20th of May, we brought together at the University of Warwick an international group of scholars working on various themes relating to themes of post-war return. The desired outcome was to initiate a discussion between scholars across disciplines, geographies, and periods, thinking about the subjective dimensions of homecoming. This is significant as this field has long been dominated by normative and prescriptive social science analysis. We were particularly interested how literary theory and criticism might fertilise detailed historical analysis, and specific examples from the past might enrich and nuance broader theorisation.

Our keynote speaker Kate McLaughlin from the University of Oxford got us going with a fascinating, challenging and provocative talk on the ‘silent’ veteran, using the particular example of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Her remarkable interweaving of philosophical theory, in particular drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, and close literary analysis, was remarkably applicable to historical analysis. Through the speech she made the figure of the ‘silent veteran’, a problematic in all our studies, a fruitful field of analysis. The importance of ‘listening’ to the silences was particularly resonant and significant to all the presenter’s studies.

The first session ‘What home? Disrupted Homecomings’ spoke very closely to some of the key themes of the conference. All three papers stressed different dimensions of the problematic of ‘home’: what constitutes home in the post-war, across time and place, and for different individuals. Professor Taylor Soja’s discussion of a British officer, dragged backward and forward across the Empire in the ‘Small Wars’ of the late-Victorian era, complicated how ‘home’ for many could be the Front itself, but also how this would change over one’s life. On the other side of the colonial divide, Rose Miyonga gave an account of the inability of many Kenyan men and women to come home, even 60 years after the Mau Mau conflict. Due to close ancestral ties to their land, which was taken by the colonial government, people continue to feel discombobulated so long afterwards. War however can also provide a tool for making one’s idea of home much more secure, as Amy Carney elucidated. In studying a German-born Jewish soldier in the American Army, she revealed that the war itself crystallised his identity as an American, which became, undisputedly, home.

Our next panel considered how women specifically experienced, and are represented in accounts of, post-war homecoming. Alison Fell gave a remarkable account of what place combatant women came to have in post-war memory and myth-making. Due to women’s personification as the nation, tied closely to traditional ideas of motherhood, the image of homecoming was the putting down of the rifle, used to protect the home, and the taking up once again of mothering roles. In a different register, Marcin Filipowicz analysed contemporary Czech literature to illustrate how women’s homecomings disrupt easy theorisations of good and evil in post-war contexts. His powerful rendition of a scene of violent homecoming of a female holocaust survivor, with real bearing on how we consider post-war homecoming, precisely indicated the value of an interdisciplinary approach to this subject.

The third and largest panel of the day considered the broad question of the politics of homecoming, and especially how veterans made claims on the state. Robin Bates introduced to the conference a theme which would come up repeatedly, the battle for veteran’s rights, in his case, Union veterans of the American Civil War. His conception of the struggle for veteran’s rights contrasted the very different idea of the veteran in contemporary Russia. Elena Racheva shared how since the fall of the Soviet Union the state has weaponised veterans for their own ends, slowly incorporating the wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan as part of a glorious struggle in the defence of Russia. The instrumentalisation of veteran’s status was similarly demonstrated in Drew Flanagan’s discussion of French far-right activist François de la Rocque, who used his status of front-line soldier to resist allegations of collaboration. The final speaker of the panel, Susan Carruthers, spoke to a very different way post-war homecoming was framed by the state - through the British offering of ‘demob’ suits to returning servicemen. Hereby they were to be re-civilianised, although multiple groups (i.e women) were excluded.

Ably chaired by Holly Furneaux, our fourth panel brought the focus specifically on disability-centric histories of Homecoming. Nick Bailey spoke to a specific institution that mediated disabled homecomings, the British Corps of Commissionaires, with strong disciplinary overtones. This genealogy of veteran’s rights was continued by Michael Robinson, who discussed debates about provisions for veterans across Canada, Britain and Australia in the 1920s and 1930s, with a special focus on ‘invisible disabilities’. The different treatment in different countries was also reflected in Sofya Anisimova’s excellent reflection on disabled Imperial Russian officer veterans. Here too was remarkable picture of fluctuation over time, and the political uses of disability by the veterans themselves.

The final panel tied together many of the themes of the conference, discussing how veterans produce narratives that reflect on their homecoming. Chloe Storer spoke on reticence in her own oral histories with British Afghan veterans, linking back to the notions of silence considered in the keynote speech. Eamonn O’Keeffe spoke by contrast on a very talkative veteran, Shadrick Byfield, who leveraged his literacy and experiences with members of the elite to survive in Victorian Britain. The final speaker of our conference Dimo Georgiev showed how the staid, jargonistic, novels of Bulgarian International Brigadiers became standard reading in socialist Bulgaria, omitting the difficult realities of homecoming.

Altogether, the conference met the objectives we set wholeheartedly. This panoply of scholars has a real contribution to make to the study of the post-war, and to that end we seek to keep the momentum going with an edited collection. Such an opportunity is available with Routledge’s Warwick Series in the Humanities, which we hope to take advantage of in the coming months.

Dr. Heidi Ashton's research for the performing arts union, Equity, into how freelance workers are impacted by the UK benefits system is featured in The Guardian, 26th May 2023.

“A Long Way to a New Cosmology: Theories of Tides in Pre-Modern Thought”. This project offers the first comprehensive study of pre-modern engagement with the relatively neglected yet highly problematic natural phenomenon of tides. It argues that the flow and ebb effect was an essential component of cosmological discussions in premodern Europe and attracted the attention of all major scholars whom we currently associate with the so-called Scientific Revolution.

The competition amongst prominent thinkers involved in the study of astronomy and mathematics left its mark on a considerable number of works on tides, while the contesting solutions were believed to constitute a valid argument in favor of the respective cosmological theories. This also implies that the issue of determining the flow and ebb of water formed part of a larger discourse that went beyond strict mathematization of natural knowledge and reflected, on a more general level, a peculiar understanding of the cosmos and all it contains. Furthermore, the project makes an addition to a field of study that has been burgeoning in past years considering the current climate crisis. Several studies have recently devoted attention to pre-modern reflections on nature, especially with regard to various types of calamities. Despite not being considered a disaster because of their recurring and predictable character, tides were nonetheless seen as potentially devastating if not controlled and properly understood. Although inevitably put in relation with a discourse of the Flood, tidal accounts were largely devoid of metaphysical features, instead seeking out plausible mechanistic interpretations of the motion of water. At the same time, contrary to what has been suggested in scholarship, establishing the origin of tides was never regarded as a mere physico-mathematical exercise, but generally presented a matter of environmental concern. Thus, this project provides a synthetic account of pre-modern discourses of tides in their cosmological and environmental dimensions.

He will start on 1 July 2023, right after his stay at I Tatti where he is an Andrew W Mellon Fellow, and it will run for 24 months.

EMECC is happy to host Visiting Professor Dena Goodman (University of Michigan) in June 2023.

Professor Dena Goodman is Lila Miller Collegiate Professor of History and Women’s Studies (emerita) at the University of Michigan and co-director of ‘The Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project’. She is a cultural historian of eighteenth-century France, with particular interests in women and gender, material culture, writing and sociability. Her current project involves a family history during the French Revolution. It explores Enlightenment legacies in the domains of science and technology, intellectual sociability and state service. During her visit, she will work with cultural historians and literary scholars interested in conceptualising the links between sociability and political change

Events surrounding her visit include

A lecture, ‘Peace Dividends: Why French Scientists Travelled to Britain during the Peace of Amiens (1802-1803) and What They Brought Home’ (tba)

A keynote address for a conference on sociability: ‘Exploring the Political Implications of the Family/Friendship Binary for the History of Sociability, 1750-1850’ (June 9)

A meeting with PGRs and Postgraduates - open to all Humanities departments (tba)

A meeting with IAS Fellows (tba)

If you would like to meet with Professor Goodman to discuss research, please feel free to contact Charles.Walton@warwick.ac.uk.

As you may be aware, the Global History and Culture Centre has run a series of blog posts showcasing postgraduate research in global history. You can find the posts here. Following the success of previous paid initiative, we would like to issue another call for contributions. Each successful applicant will be paid a maximum of £250 for their contribution (based on a short-term appointment via Unitemps) upon the publication of a short blog entry, to be written by you, about a topic of your choice. This might be related to your research, or something tangentially connected to your research, or a reworked part of an essay you have already submitted, but it might also review a relevant book or feature an interview. The choice is yours, but you need to make a case to us why this is a suitable piece to publish on our GHCC blog. If you can explain in which way your proposed piece is global, this will count in your favour, but we accept a broad interpretation of what constitutes ‘the global’. The piece should be short (c. 1,000 words) and should have some images, a short blurb and a brief bio statement attached. Please submit your applications no later than Monday 27 February 2023.

An application form can be found here, please submit it to Amy.Evans@warwick.ac.uk

Report about the interdisciplinary workshop Models in/of Security, hosted at CIM on the 18^th of April, bringing together a group of scholars interested in exploring and understanding the interface between modelling practices and security practices.