Meeting to take place: Samuel Alexander Building, room N.1.12, University of Manchester

On: Thursday 25^th April at 4pm

We will be discussing: Sidney Mintz’s Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations (Harvard UP, 2012)

Available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-Ancient-Colonies-W-E-B-Lectures/dp/0674050126/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1365002926&sr=8-1

Scanned PDF of chapter 3 on Haiti available from Catherine Armstrong. Please email C.M.Armstrong@mmu.ac.uk

 All staff and postgrads welcome: tea/coffee and nibbles provided.

April 11th, 2013 - 09:47am

March 12th, 2013 - 12:05pm

On March 15th, Dr Catherine Armstrong will give a talk to the staff at the American Museum in Bath, giving them the historical background and informtion on debates over the places and people that they discuss with visitors. Dr Armstrong’s talk will prepare them for a new season at the museum, which reopens to visitors on March 23rd.  

For more information on the American Museum in Bath, see their website http://www.americanmuseum.org/

February 26th, 2013 - 10:46am

Citizen of the World: The Use and Abuse of Thomas Paine c.1809-2009

The bicentennial of the death of Thomas Paine in 2009 saw new attention directed towards Paine’s life and times, but his legacy has still not received the attention it deserves. Vilified by Theodore Roosevelt as a ‘filthy little atheist’, yet adopted by Ronald Reagan in his campaign to make America ‘great again’, Paine’s life and legacy have been both celebrated and dismissed by generations of politicians and presidents. An Englishman by birth, a Frenchman by decree and a citizen of the world, Paine has also been invoked, discussed and appropriated by many others, in many walks of life, across the world. This conference seeks to examine the afterlife of Paine and the ways in which he has been used and abused in the two hundred years since his death. The conference aims to be interdisciplinary and international in approach, and we invite individual papers and panel proposals from established academics, early-career researches, postgraduates, public historians, and museums and heritage professionals.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following issues:

 Paine in biography

 Paine’s political legacy on the Left and Right

 Paine in memory and commemoration

 Paine in public history, heritage and education

 Paine as world citizen

 Paine beyond America, Britain and France

 Paine, religion and ‘free-thought’

Papers should be 20 minutes in length, and the deadline for proposals is 14th June 2013. Please send a 200 word abstract of your paper, together with a one-page CV, to Sam Edwards at s.ed...@mmu.ac.uk or to Marcus Morris at marc...@mmu.ac.uk Successful papers/proposals will be informed by 1st July.

The conference will be hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University at the People’s History Museum in Manchester on Thursday 28th to Saturday 30th November 2013.

February 26th, 2013 - 09:02am

On Thursday 28th February Prof. Ellen Garvey of New Jersey City University will be talking about her book, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (OUP, 2012) http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/?view=usa&ci=9780199927692 

The talk will start at 4pm in GM 238.

February 20th, 2013 - 08:25am

Today, Marcus Collins of Loughborough University will a seminar paper to the department on ‘Permissiveness on Trial: The Rolling Stones and The Redlands Affair’. HIs paper will start at 4 pm in GM 303.

For more information on Dr Collins, please see his staff page at Loughborough http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/phir/staff/marcus-collins.html

February 20th, 2013 - 08:06am

Congratulations go to Dr Catherine Armstrong, Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy, who has recently been elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

You can find out more about Dr Armstrong and her research interests by visiting her staff page http://www2.hlss.mmu.ac.uk/history-economic-history/academic-staff/?profileID=54

January 29th, 2013 - 08:58am

In the last decade or so, the Jewish relationship with modern visual culture has been the subject of renewed investigation, with a number of pioneering works reimagining and re-exploring the parameters of this relationship, in both its positive and negative aspects. Scholarly approaches are no longer limited to somewhat flat interpretations of “Jewish art”, for example. Instead, contemporary scholarship incorporates a multi-disciplinary approach that considers Jews and modern visual culture within a broader intellectual framework. In moving beyond the bounds aesthetic appreciation, contemporary scholarship incorporates approaches to material culture, political history, the role of memory and memorialisation, as well as exploring how the visual challenged and altered notions of Jewishness in the modern period.

In building on these developments, this conference will provide a forum for further exploration of the relationship between Jews and modern visual culture. Its remit is intended as broad enough to encompass all national contexts, with a flexible chronology.

Keynote speakers

- Michael Berkowitz, University College London, London.

- David Shneer, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA.

- Carol Zemel, York University, Toronto, Canada.

Proposals are welcomed, but by no means limited to, the following areas of study:

- Jewish representation and self-representation in film

- Jews and photography

- Jews and (Jewish) art

- Caricature, cartoons and antisemitism

- Jews and other forms of representational art (sculpture, etc)

- Visual culture and politics

- Visual representation and the Holocaust

Deadline for paper and panel proposals: 31 March 2013

- Proposals of c.300 words for individual papers (20 minutes) should be forwarded to s.jo…@mmu.ac.uk, along with a short biography

- Proposals for themed panels are also welcome

- The final programme will be confirmed on 31 April 2013

- Delegates will be required to submit a written version of their papers by 14 August 2013, in order that responders/chairs will have an opportunity to compile comments

Supported by:

- The Institute of Humanities and Social Research, Manchester Metropolitan University: http://www.hssr.mmu.ac.uk/

- The Manchester Jewish Museum: http://www.manchesterjewishmuseum.com/

- Visit Manchester: http://www.visitmanchester.com/

January 29th, 2013 - 08:58am

Dr Catherine Armstrong is co-organising  a study day on ‘Text and Image in the City’ as part of the Book History Research Network’s series of events. The study day will be held at the University of Leicester on May 31st.

Papers are invited for this interdisciplinary Study Day from postgraduates, independent researchers and established scholars working on medieval to modern Britain or Europe. Topics might include but are not limited to:

• Intersections between urban cultural history and the history of books/prints/manuscripts/images
• How the culture of text or image has contributed to – and/or been shaped by – its primarily urban setting
• Urban texts and images: their creation, production, distribution and consumption/reception
• Popular print culture and ‘street literature’ (ballads, chapbooks, broadsides etc.)
• How texts and images disseminated urban ideas and culture into rural hinterlands
• Reading the ‘word city’ through newspapers, maps, posters, timetables and ephemeral texts/images
• Representations of urban space or modernity in text or image; urban ‘renaissance(s)’
• Radical, innovative and subversive uses of urban texts and images

More information can be found here:

http://www.bookhistory.org.uk/book-history-research-network/events

January 29th, 2013 - 08:55am

In the last decade or so, the Jewish relationship with modern visual culture has been the subject of renewed investigation, with a number of pioneering works reimagining and re-exploring the parameters of this relationship, in both its positive and negative aspects. Scholarly approaches are no longer limited to somewhat flat interpretations of “Jewish art”, for example. Instead, contemporary scholarship incorporates a multi-disciplinary approach that considers Jews and modern visual culture within a broader intellectual framework. In moving beyond the bounds aesthetic appreciation, contemporary scholarship incorporates approaches to material culture, political history, the role of memory and memorialisation, as well as exploring how the visual challenged and altered notions of Jewishness in the modern period.

In building on these developments, this conference will provide a forum for further exploration of the relationship between Jews and modern visual culture. Its remit is intended as broad enough to encompass all national contexts, with a flexible chronology.

Keynote speakers

- Michael Berkowitz, University College London, London.

- David Shneer, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA.

- Carol Zemel, York University, Toronto, Canada.

Proposals are welcomed, but by no means limited to, the following areas of study:

- Jewish representation and self-representation in film

- Jews and photography

- Jews and (Jewish) art

- Caricature, cartoons and antisemitism

- Jews and other forms of representational art (sculpture, etc)

- Visual culture and politics

- Visual representation and the Holocaust

Deadline for paper and panel proposals: 31 March 2013

- Proposals of c.300 words for individual papers (20 minutes) should be forwarded to s.jo...@mmu.ac.uk, along with a short biography

- Proposals for themed panels are also welcome

- The final programme will be confirmed on 31 April 2013

- Delegates will be required to submit a written version of their papers by 14 August 2013, in order that responders/chairs will have an opportunity to compile comments

Supported by:

- The Institute of Humanities and Social Research, Manchester Metropolitan University: http://www.hssr.mmu.ac.uk/

- The Manchester Jewish Museum: http://www.manchesterjewishmuseum.com/

- Visit Manchester: http://www.visitmanchester.com/

January 9th, 2013 - 08:55am