Author Archives: Brodie Waddell

About Brodie Waddell

Brodie is a Lecturer in Early Modern History at Birkbeck, University of London.

Historians, PhDs, and Jobs in 2023

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Brodie Waddell

Amid yet another year of university strikes in the UK, the Higher Education Statistics Agency has released the latest data on staff and degrees granted. A couple of years ago, I used this data to try to get a sense of the job market for historians, so it seems like a good time to use the new figures to provide an update.

First, let’s take a look at what’s happening in the USA, where they are able to provide a more rigorous view of the job market because the American Historical Association tracks job advertisements and provides an annual report. In previous years, the AHA reports had been published with a Chart of Doom which showed the catastrophic collapse of job openings relative to degrees granted:

Advertised job openings and new history PhDs awarded

Advertised job openings and new history PhDs awarded: AHA Jobs Report 2021.

In their most recent report, from August 2022, they decided not to publish the Chart of Doom and instead have presented the information about job openings over a more short-term timescale, with more details about the types of jobs advertised. This is very useful information, though it does elide the massive drop in jobs that happened just before the chart starts in 2016-17. In the most recent year, 2021-22, they show ‘academic job listings did indeed rebound to levels above those seen immediately before the pandemic. This increase is not, however, a sign of renewed vitality but a partial return to the steady but dismal state of faculty job availability in the late 2010s.’ Continue reading →

England’s Quarter Sessions Records Online and in Print

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Brodie Waddell

If you’re interested in the history of crime, poverty or daily life in England anytime between the late sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, you will find a huge amount of material in the records of the so-called ‘quarter sessions’. These were quarterly meetings of the Justices of the Peace for each county, where they dealt with a wide variety of criminal, civil and administrative matters. You’ll find in them depositions (witness statements), indictments, petitions, presentments, orders, and much else besides.

The point of this post is not to attempt to provide an introduction to these records. For that read Charmian Mansell and Mark Hailwood’s brief online introduction to the courts, or Henry French’s chapter on ‘Legal and Judicial Sources’, or almost any of the editorial introductions to the volumes below. Instead I’ll simply say that they’re great for anyone doing historical research on this period and, even better, many of them are available in printed editions and/or online. Reading the original manuscripts is very difficult if you don’t already have experience with this, though there are plenty of online palaeography resources that can help. And even if you could read the originals, it might be difficult or impossible to get to the archives where they are stored.

Photograph of a petition about an alehouse in 1610 in the Worcestershire quarter sessions records (left) and transcription of the manuscript (right). Image courtesy of Worcestershire Archives and Archaeology Service, Ref.110 BA1/1/7/84. Transcription from ‘Worcestershire Quarter Sessions: 1610’, in Petitions to the Worcestershire Quarter Sessions, 1592-1797, ed. Brodie Waddell, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/petitions/worcs-quarter-sessions/1610.

Therefore, in an attempt to get more people using these wonderful records, I’ve put together a list of places where you can find them. Continue reading →

How are we going to teach in Autumn 2020? A survey of UK historians

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Brodie Waddell

It has been clear for several months now that start of the new academic year is going to be very different to any we’ve been through before. The Covid-19 pandemic means that there will be huge changes in all areas of academic life, but perhaps the most visible change will be in teaching, where ‘remote’ teaching online will much more common. Where face-to-face teaching is happening, it will have to be ‘socially distant’, in smaller groups and possibly with masks or other protective equipment.

However, one thing that is far from clear is the planned balance between these two modes. Unlike many North American universities, virtually no UK university has publicly announced that they will be ‘online only’ in Autumn. Instead, almost all of them have made vague announcements about ‘blended’, ‘hybrid’ or ‘mixed’ modes, which will include both online and face-to-face teaching in varying proportions.

In order to get a firmer sense of where we stand, I’ve done a quick informal survey of scholars based in 26 different UK history departments, asking them what proportion of teaching they are planning to conduct face-to-face. This included Oxford and Cambridge, five London universities, a bunch of provincial pre-1992 universities, and a smaller number of post-1992 institutions. I have not named any of the individuals or institutions because none of these plans have been publicly announced, and anonymity allowed them to give more candid answers.

Unsurprisingly, there were a wide range of answers, many of which cannot be easily quantified. Nevertheless, one common response stands out… Continue reading →

Teaching Microhistory: small things, big questions and a global pandemic

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Brodie Waddell

Over ten weeks in April, May and June this year, as a pandemic raged across the world and most of us found ourselves confined mostly to our homes, I taught one of my favourite modules. It’s called ‘To See the World in a Grain of Sand: Reading and Writing Microhistories’, and it’s open to most of the MA students in my department at Birkbeck.

microhistories-promo-slide

There’s no obvious reason why about twenty postgrads would sign up to do an optional module focused on theories and methodologies, especially as most of them were living in locked-down London, one of the hardest hit cities in the world. But they did, and I’m glad they did. Continue reading →

Visualising the early modern state

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Brodie Waddell

What did the state look like in early modern England? There are, of course, many different ways you might answer this question. The most famous is Hobbes’s Leviathan, in which the king literally embodies his subjects. Or, if one wanted to be a bit more realistic, an image of a court sitting might give you an idea of what the state looked like to someone formally facing its majestic authority. Or, as Jonah Miller has recently argued, perhaps the most realistic image of all would be a picture of a local constable, for these were the representatives of the state who ordinary people most often encountered in their daily lives.

Leviathan-Chancery-Bellman

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651); Benjamin Ferrers, The Court of Chancery (c.1725); Thomas Dekker, The Belman of London (1608)

However, I’d like to offer a rather more practical, and much less aesthetically pleasing, answer. In one of the first sessions of my ‘Crime, Poverty and Protest’ module at Birkbeck, I try to give students an idea of what the court system – and in fact ‘the state’ more generally – looked like in the early modern period. So, I created a sort of tabular diagram in which I attempted to include on a single page all the most important components of this system that a student might need to know about. Here is the result as pdf and full-size jpg …Waddell (2019) Scheme of courts, 1550-1750

I then released the image to the #twitterstorians of the world to tell me what I’d missed and what I’d gotten wrong. Pleasingly, I had plenty of responses. You can go to the tweet itself to read them all, but I’ll try to summarise them below… Continue reading →

A Seven-Year Old Monster

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Today the Many-Headed Monster celebrates its seventh birthday. Katherine Foxhall of the Royal Historical Society recently asked us if we’d like to reflect on our experience as blogging historians. You can read the results on the RHS blog, or just read on …

How and why did you get started back in 2012?

It started with a conversation in a very dingy Cambridge flat – quite possibly over a few beers – between Mark and Brodie, about some of the interesting stuff that was turning up on other history blogs of the time: Sharon Howard’s Early Modern Notes as well as those by Gavin Robinson and Christopher Thompson which have sadly since disappeared. We chose our name ‘The Many-Headed Monster’, because we thought it captured the fact that we’d have a ‘history from below‘ angle, and that it would be multi-authored. It’s not easy to remember exactly how we justified taking on this new project right about the same time we were starting new jobs, but it was partly because we liked the possibility of an outlet for ideas and research finds that were not ‘big’ enough for articles, but which suited the blog format perfectly.

What are the advantages of running a blog collaboratively?

Continue reading →

Another Page in the Life of Joseph Bufton: Some Verses of My Owne Making

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[In our mini-series ‘A Page in the Life’, each post briefly introduces a new writer and a page from their manuscript. In this post, Brodie Waddell explores the wider implications of a rather clumsy poem about the cloth industry written by a seventeenth-century tradesman.]

The Essex town of Coggeshall was not known for literary genius. It inspired no Hamlet nor Paradise Lost nor even a Pilgrim’s Progress. Its only published authors were two clergymen who spent a few years there in the 1640s.

However, in the late seventeenth century, it was home to a tradesman named Joseph Bufton, who filled up notebook after notebook with a diverse array of writings. He devoted a great many pages to chronicling his local community and the state of the nation as a whole, a practice which I discussed in an earlier post.

But he also filled many volumes with other sorts of writing, including devotional texts, financial accounts and even a bit of poetry. I’ve just published a new article in the Journal of Social History that looks at what Bufton and others like him can tell us about literacy, work and social identity in early modern England, so I thought I would mark the occasion by offering another page from his notebooks that illuminates some of these themes. Continue reading →

Why do a PhD in History? A look at the data

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Brodie Waddell

Hundreds of people complete a doctorate in History each year at UK universities, a process with huge implications for the strength and sustainably of academic history as a discipline. This figure has been rising gradually but fairly consistently over the past couple decades, from around 250 in the late 1990s, to around 550 in the late 2000s, to a peak of more than 750 in 2016.

PhDs granted in History, 1995-96 to 2017-18

In previous posts, I’ve discussed the job market for History PhDs using various measures including staff/PhD ratios, cohort studies and job listing data. None of the numbers present an especially rosy picture for newly completed PhDs searching for an academic post.

However, in response to each of these posts, readers have rightly asked about the motives of those pursuing doctorates. It is obvious that not all of those 700 or more new PhDs want to become lecturers, so the job market is thus presumably less disastrous than the headline figures imply. But the problem is that it is difficult to know whether this proportion is substantial or negligible.

Thankfully, Andy Burn not only brought it to my attention that there is a UK-wide survey of current PhD students about this, but also very generously turned the raw data into something useable for me. This is the ‘Postgraduate Research Experience Survey’ (PRES) and it asks all sorts of questions, including two about motivations. The highest recent response rate was in the 2017 survey and that’s what I’ve used here, though the proportions were similar in the 2018 survey.

So, what are the results for History? Continue reading →

Against the Long Eighteenth Century

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This post speaks to the themes of our ‘On Periodisation’ series. The other posts are:

Brodie Waddell

The idea of a ‘long eighteenth century’ in British history has only been around for a few decades, but it has proved powerful. It is regularly used in teaching and in research publications. It even has a popular seminar at the Institute of Historical Research.

This post is an attempt to offer a case against the ‘long’ eighteenth century as a period of study. For reasons that will soon be obvious, it should not be taken too seriously, but I hope it will still offer some food for thought. I hope it will also contribute to the wider conversation about historical periodisation that we’ve been having on this blog.

My argument today is two-fold:

  • First, the long eighteenth century is too long.
  • Second, the long eighteenth century is too short.

Let me explain… Continue reading →

Historians, PhDs and jobs, 1995/96 to 2017/18

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Brodie Waddell

This is the time of year when many people are applying for PhDs or academic jobs and discussions of the current job market inevitably arise. A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of posts on job listings, doctoral cohorts and staff/student numbers, trying to provide some data to help inform these conversations, but I think it is time for an update. How have things changed since then?

The American Historical Association publishes its notorious chart of doom each year, showing the terrible ratio of new PhDs to advertised jobs, and its most recent version leaves little room for optimism.

Fig 5

AHA Jobs Report 2019

In the UK, we lack a consistent, accessible annual list of academic history jobs. Although nearly all such posts are advertised on jobs.ac.uk, there is no easy way to turn these adverts into an annual figure except by manually monitoring and recording. So, instead, I’ve taken to focusing on the only reliable data that is publicly available: staff and student numbers. Continue reading →