Category Archives: Academia

Material Culture ‘from Below’

Posted on by
30

Mark Hailwood

I went to a conference, and all I got was this lousy blog post.

That’s right, this is one of those blog posts thought up whilst staring pensively out of a train window on a journey home from three days at a wonderfully stimulating and sociable conference – in this instance, on ‘Gender, Power and Materiality in Early Modern Europe’, at the University of Plymouth. Back in April. Of 2016. Still, better late than never.

Gloves

Gloves: they fit the conference theme

I signed up for said conference, despite my lack of familiarity with the field of early modern material culture studies, to try out a paper on the spatial division of labour in rural England, 1500-1700, based on material coming out of the Women’s Work Project. The paper went well enough, and over the course of the conference as a whole I learnt a huge amount about the material culture of the period, and about the sophisticated methodologies used by the reflective practitioners of material cultural history. It whet my appetite for the study of material culture. But it also left me hungry for more of a particular type of material culture history – one focused on the common people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In what will come as no surprise to readers of this blog, I wanted more material culture ‘from below’.

The conference offered a rich diet of papers focused on the gentry and aristocracy of early modern Europe, but was light on the material things that populated the worlds of their social inferiors. Not for the first time as a social historian I found myself experiencing ‘modernist envy’, as my mind turned to examples of research into the material culture of the working class in the industrial age – Ruth Mather on working class homes in the period 1780-1830; Julie-Marie Strange’s focus on ‘father’s chair’ as a way into the domestic relationships of the Victorian working class; Carolyn Steedman’s wonderful essay on the meanings of a rag rug.[1] And how about the insights into working class material culture to be gleaned from Lark Rise to Candleford? Continue reading →

Employability: the role of the academic tutor

Posted on by
9

Employability may be an ugly word, but it is increasingly an important part of teaching and learning at my higher education institution. In a world of tuition fees, student satisfaction scores and information gathering about leavers’ destinations, I imagine that its importance will also continue to grow. Whilst I am not a fan of any of the aforementioned trends, employability is something that I have been thinking about. If students are spending their time and resources on degree study because they think it will make them more employable, then they should be reflecting on what precisely it is they have learned that makes them distinct from people who didn’t attend university or who took a different course. They need self-awareness about their own development and the ability to articulate this to a potential employer in a meaningful way.

HEAIf you want to know more about employability then the HEA has a framework for ‘embedding’ it in your institution, but if you haven’t got time to wade your way through this, I can tell you that the sorts of provision that universities offer include: help with CVs; mock interviews; confidence building activities; work experience/placements; shadowing; help researching the job market etc.

Which leads me to wonder…what is the role of the academic tutor here? Is it our responsibility to talk about skills and ‘employability’ in our history seminars and lectures? Or is that something that is better left to the professionals in Careers Services? If tutors do have a role, what is it? Continue reading →

Understanding Sources: the source of it all

Posted on by
9

Update: links to other posts in the #histsources series:

Diaries: sources that gently bruise the consciousness
Doing history by numbers: bibliometrics and counting things
Court depositions: the stories we tell about ourselves
Churchwarden accounts: teeming with all sorts of life

Laura Sangha

Primary sources are where histories come from. The stuff left over from the past that by accident or design has survived down to this day is the lifeblood of historical study. Sources are our direct (if not always reliable) witnesses to the events, people and processes of moments now long gone. The creative and self-aware use of the complexities of evidence often produces the best histories as historians read against the grain, contextualise, and dissect the stuff of the past to extract new meanings from it.

In 2000, Ludmilla Jordanova wrote that ‘there has been a decline in (primary) source-based undergraduate teaching’, but in 2016 it certainly feels like the opposite is true.[1] Partly thanks to the internet (although printed transcriptions remain a vital resource), primary sources have never been more available or accessible for university lecturers and their students. Given that history is to some extent defined by its methodology, it doesn’t make sense not to use primary materials with undergraduates – how else to teach the dynamic relationship between the sources, the historian and their history? How else to understand the vantage points that we can and can’t find on what happened in the past? Continue reading →

On periodisation: unanswerable questions, questionable answers

Posted on by
11

Links to the other posts in the ‘On Periodisation’ series:

Laura Sangha

The many-headed monster’s mini-series ‘On Periodisation’ really struck a chord with our readers, prompting an outpouring of comments both below the line and on twitter. I have captured many of these in this Storify – thanks so much to everyone who took the time to offer their thoughts, and my apologies to anyone whose comments I missed, but it was hard to keep up!

Picture2The digested version is that comments tended to fall into three categories: those who were prompted to reflect on periodisation in relation to their own research; those who offered a transnational perspective; and those who added an interdisciplinary slant to the discussion. Whilst debates on this topic are a constant of historical research, social media has the benefit of creating a more diverse conversation which encourages broader perspectives and raises new complications. If the debate continues I intend to add to the story in due course, so please do join the conversation.

My original intention was to try to summarise these contributions in another post, but when it came to it I struggled because the responses were both (a) too various, and (b) too contingent. Thus this post instead focuses on the shared responses to periodisation, in the form of a series of questions people ask about it. Continue reading →

On periodisation: or, what’s the best way to chop history into bits?

Posted on by
17

Laura Sangha

This is the first post in our new Monster Mini-Series on periodisation. Click here for the Series introduction.

There are many different ways to divide the past up into analytical chunks, but some ways are more popular than others. In this post I offer a brief overview of some of the most common periodisations. It is of course a broad brush summary with a tendency to generalisation. Please do flesh it out with your own comments and refinements below the line – we have had a great response to the series on twitter and I will be collating many of these contributions for a later blog.

Binaries: modern / pre-modern

Starting with the simplest division: if you are short of time, the strongest chronological distinction often appears to be between the modern age, and all the stuff that happened before it. You know, when everyone was blindly superstitious, 99% percent of the population spent their lives covered in sheep poo, there was no electricity, no penicillin, no roads and subsequently a bunch of kings ordered everyone about whilst riding over-mighty dragons. Or something. Sometimes undergraduate ‘survey’ modules are organised along these chronological lines: at Exeter the ‘pre-modern’ module covers c. 500-1750; the ‘modern’ module covers 1750-present.

grail07

Pre-modernity: knights, witches, muddy peasants and that sort of thing.

Of course this rather oversimplifies things. Europe in 700 didn’t look or feel anything like Europe in 1700. The divide also massively prioritises the last 200 or so years of history and diminishes the previous 1,300. It is a useful shorthand for showing potential undergraduates the breadth of your teaching programme or identifying yourself at a multi-disciplinary event, but not much more.

The holy trinity: medieval / early modern / modern

In Europe and North America, history is often chopped into three: the medieval (c. 500-1500), the early modern (er… let’s say c. 1500-1800) and the modern (c. 1800 – present). Continue reading →

On periodisation: an introduction

Posted on by
25

Laura Sangha

This is the introductory post to our new occasional Monster Mini-Series on periodisation in history. In a series of related blogs we will be exploring historical chronologies, examining the ways in which we chop up the past into more digestible chunks. We are interested both in how we do this, but also why, and what the consequences are for both how we conceive of the past, and how this in turns effects the organisation and practice of the discipline. The other posts are:

Posts that also engage with the theme:

IMG_0204

The University of Exeter’s community day: What does early modern mean, and who is this strange horned and hoofed man?

I quite often find myself needing to explain what period of history I work on, and it isn’t always straightforward. For example, my students are often not familiar with the term ‘early modern’ and remain convinced that anything that isn’t modern is ‘medieval’. At the University of Exeter’s recent Community Day, one of the most popular questions from visitors to the ‘Centre for Early Modern Studies’ stand was: what dates / centuries / years does that refer to? (In case you are interested, the other top question was: ‘what’s the devil’ from children colouring in woodcuts of said infernal being).

This is an issue that has a bearing on the many-headed monster too. We self-identify as an early modern blog, and the Monster’s tagline is that we offer “‘the history of ‘the unruly sort of clowns’ and other early modern peculiarities”. Whilst fellow academics might have a grasp of what that means, the blog aspires to reach an audience beyond professional historians, to whom the term may appear rather opaque.

The answer to what ‘early modern’ means is, of course, 1480-1700. Or perhaps 1500-1750. Or maybe 1450-1800. Actually it really depends. Oh, and if you are outside of Europe and North America you might not recognise the term at all, being equipped with a completely different way to think about your national past. Continue reading →

Job listings for historians on jobs.ac.uk, 2013-16

Posted on by
16

Brodie Waddell

Every year, universities across Britain and beyond place hundreds of advertisements on jobs.ac.uk seeking to appoint historians to academic posts. Although accessing this data is not easy and analysing is far from straightforward, recent listings do provide some potentially useful information about the state of the academic job market for historians.

In my previous posts on jobs, I have focused primarily on the ‘supply side’ of the equation – how many people are completing PhDs each year and how that is changing. It is much more difficult to get hard data on the ‘demand side’ – i.e. jobs available – though I’ve tried various proxies such as the numbers of historians with university posts or the number of incoming history undergraduates. The cohort studies of Warwick and Cambridge PhDs allowed me to link doctorates to academic posts more directly, but that was only a small and probably unrepresentative sample.

New data and methodology

The advertisements on jobs.ac.uk allow us to get a better sense of how many jobs are actually listed in a given year. Continue reading →

History doctorates and the academic job market: 99 Warwick PhDs, 2001-2013

Posted on by
6

Brodie Waddell

My analysis of official public data suggests that the number of PhDs in history in the UK is growing significantly almost every year, whereas the number of undergraduates and university-based historians is expanding only very slowly. However, these figures are only really useful for providing a sense of changes in the relative balance between undergrads, teachers and PhDs over time. They do not provide any concrete sense of the likely destinations of successful doctoral candidates.

In September, Rachel Stone, a medievalist at KCL, put together a very useful ‘cohort study’ of the 66 people who had completed PhDs in history at Cambridge in 2005. Her headline result was that 36 of them (55%) seemed to have academic posts a decade later. She also found that modernists and men were more likely to have academic jobs than medievalists and women, though she noted that it is difficult to know which factor is the most influential as women were more likely to be medievalists. Katrina Gulliver did a similar analysis of those granted Cambridge history PhDs in 2007-8 and found that ‘fewer than 50% have a permanent academic job’ after seven years.

I did my PhD at Warwick (completed 2009, awarded 2010), so I thought it might be useful to look at some cohorts there as a comparison. However, as the Warwick History Department is much smaller than Cambridge’s History Faculty, I decided to look at a longer period, namely 2001 to 2013. Continue reading →

Students, PhDs, historians and jobs, 1994-95 to 2014-15

Posted on by
11

Brodie Waddell

In September, I posted some data on the state of the field in academic history. It wasn’t an especially rosy picture, but I followed that by trying to gather some suggestions on what could be done to improve the situation and also offered my own thoughts.

My initial post was provoked by my annoyance at how little historical data seemed to be easily available for the history profession, so I pulled figures from HESA and a variety of other sources to try to piece together a picture. A few weeks ago, the American Historical Association updated their job market statistics for US historians and HESA released their UK data for 2014-15, so it seemed only right to update my figures.

Let’s start with the American data as it is much more precisely focused on the academic job market than the UK numbers. Continue reading →

Green Paper Blues: A Shiny New Bureaucracy for University Teaching

Posted on by
4

Earlier this month the UK government published its Higher Education Green Paper which sets out its plans for universities. Here John Arnold, Professor of Medieval History at Birkbeck and friend of the Monster, offers his reaction to the new policies and their justifications. This will not be of interest to everyone, but all UK academics and those of you thinking about doctoral studies, who may have read our earlier posts on the state of the field, need to be aware of what is going on. For the uninitiated, ‘TEF’ is Teaching Excellence Framework, ‘REF’ is Research Excellence Framework, and ‘HEFCE’ is the Higher Education Funding Council for England.

Gosh, isn’t it exciting finally to see the Government’s Green Paper? Turns out some rumours were true – there will be a TEF, say bye-bye to HEFCE – and others not so much (REF will live on). There’s quite a lot of it to wade through, but – regarding TEF in particular – as one colleague said in a management meeting earlier this week, ‘it’s not actually as bad as all that’.

And of course that’s right. Who could object to ‘putting students at the heart of the system’, and who would not want us to value teaching as well as research? The starting point for TEF is a mild adjustment to something we already do, i.e. institutional audit for quality. So – nothing to worry about here, and perhaps some things to celebrate? Continue reading →