Embedded Files
Volume 1 | Issue 4 - Leaders
Article by Laura King, Suzannah Rockett and Jack Rhoden.
This academic year has witnessed an exciting new addition to the Department of History’s events programme here in Sheffield. Over the last few years, postgraduates have founded, organised and made a success of discussion groups relating to medieval, early modern, international and modern European history. The Modern European History Group was founded in October by three PhD students – Jack Rhoden, Suzannah Rockett and Laura King – filling a gap within the current offering of groups, to the interest of many staff and students at all levels.
The aim of the group is to allow discussion of a whole range of issues, ideas and concepts within modern European history, and this has so far taken the form of papers, from our own academics, research students, and speakers from further afield, as well as less formal roundtable sessions. The aim of the group is to allow those involved in history at all levels to participate, and we hope this will continue into the coming semester and beyond. Most undergraduate students are not encouraged nearly enough to attend events like these, and we hope that the less formal and friendlier aspect of MEHG will encourage students to come along (if this doesn’t appeal, we do also provide jaffa cakes…).
Last semester’s events included papers from those at all levels of academia. Professor Katrina Honeyman launched the group with a paper entitled ‘Off the parish? Poor children, apprenticeship and gender in early industrial England’, in which she introduced her recent research into the construction of gender for apprentices in factories in England. This fascinating topic led to discussion of the nature of gender itself and the accepted definition of childhood in the early industrial period. Dr Adrian Bingham also touched upon the subject of gender in a much more modern context in December, in his paper about sex surveys in post-war Britain. In the paper itself, and in the discussion afterwards, the importance of the press in the construction of moral standards in modern Britain became clear.
Crossing the Channel, Dr Sophie Watt from the Department of French tackled questions of race, citizenship and the proposed Jewish homeland in relation to the French Madagascar plan of 1937, whilst Jack Rhoden took a step back to the nineteenth century in a discussion on depictions of Napoleon III in the paper ‘Caricature as Palimpsest: Louis Napoleon as Caricature’, which brought to light some of the more hidden meanings to be found in political satire.
Last semester’s programme also included two exciting ‘roundtables’ on gender and culture respectively. These all pervasive historical concepts were interrogated, with fruitful comparisons drawn regarding their definition and use across time and place. These discussions allowed those struggling with the concepts to raise issues, and those more comfortable with them to challenge and reassess their own assumptions. More will follow in the next semester, including a roundtable on ‘nationalism’.
The semester has hence been a successful start to MEHG, and we hope to continue this in the coming months, which will see papers from Professor Mary Fulbrook, speaking on violence and dictatorship in twentieth-century Germany (11th February), Professor Paul Furlong, with a paper on the ideas of the Italian writer and philosopher Julius Evola (25th February) and Professor Stefan Berger and Dr Tim Baycroft on the nation and nationalism (18th March). After Easter, the programme features Professor Penny Summerfield on popular memory and the Second World War (22nd April), Dr Miriam Dobson, who will be speaking about ritual murder in Soviet Russia (6th May) and Professors John Tosh and Mary Vincent, who will discuss the theme of paternalism in the different contexts of nineteenth-century Britain and Franco’s Spain (20th May), with more roundtables and papers yet to be announced. So we encourage you to come along. It’s a chance to see some highly regarded academics, to meet others interested in similar topics and you might even enjoy it!
You can find our programme of events at http://www.shef.ac.uk/history/about/events, or email Jack, Suzannah and Laura at mehg@sheffield.ac.uk for more information or to be added to our mailing list.
Report abuse