News and Events
The latest news and forthcoming events in the Department of History
Forthcoming Events
Wessex Centre for History and Archaeology 2011/12 seminar series (including the WCHA 2012 day conference 'Salisbury and the new towns of Wessex'; download the booking form via the link in the right-hand side column).
Modern History seminar series 2011/12
Latest news
12 April 2012
Winchester historian on BBC 4's Making History
Dr Ryan Lavelle recently joined forces with Ann Williams, Senior Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia, in an interview with Tom Holland of BBC Radio 4's Making History. The two Anglo-Saxon specialists talked about the coronation of Edward the Confessor, which took place on 3 April 1043, for a programme that was aired on 3 April. The discussion focussed on whether Edward's coronation heralded the end of Anglo-Saxon England and the end of the importance of Winchester in the English kingdom.
Photo: Ryan Lavelle and Anne Williams being interviewed by Making History's Tom Holland in front of Winchester Cathedral.
Listen to the programme
5 April 2012
History PhD students present papers at prestigious conference
Three History PhD students recently presented papers at the prestigious Graduate Students Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide at Clark University USA. Kara Critchell, Emily Stiles and Mark Hobbs (photo), all supervised by Reader in Modern History Dr Tom Lawson, were given the opportunity to present their research on the memory of the Holocaust in the UK to fellow students and some of the most influential scholars working on Holocaust studies in the US. Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts is home to the influential Stassler Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies; the regular conference brings together graduate students studying for PhDs on the Holocaust and Genocide from across the world.
Kara Critchell commented: "The conference was a fantastic opportunity for us to present our ideas and to meet other postgraduate students and scholars. We learned so much in three days and the wonderful experiences, contacts and the friendships we have made will be invaluable in the future!"
Find out more about our research students.
29 March 2012
Two History academics awarded British Academy funding
Professor Michael Hicks, Head of History, and Dr Neil Murphy, Lecturer in Early Modern European History, have been awarded £12,500 by the British Academy in the latest Small Grant application round. Prof. Hicks received just under £10,000 for the Overland Trade Project, while Dr Murphy was awarded nearly £3000 for the project Ritual, War and Power: The Evolution of the French Ceremonial Entry, c. 1350-70.
History PhD student and TV personality Alex Langlands in new BBC programme
History PhD student and archaeologist Alex Langlands, of Victorian and Edwardian Farm fame, is one of the presenters of the brand new television series Our Food, which is currently being broadcast on BBC 2.
Find out more about Our Food
Photo: Alex Langlands dressed as an Edwardian farmer (Photo Lion TV)
18 January 2012
Book by Winchester historian selected for Choice Magazine's 2011 Outstanding Academic Titles list
Dr Ryan Lavelle's latest book, Alfred's Wars: Sources and Interpretations of Anglo-Saxon Warfare in the Viking Age (Boydell & Brewer, Warfare in History Series, 2010) has been selected by Choice review as one of its Outstanding Academic Titles for 2011. This prestigious list appears annually and reflects the very best in scholarly titles. (Photo: Dr Lavelle with Alfred's Wars)
Find out more about Dr Lavelle's Outstanding Academic Title.
10 January 2012
History Professor interviewed on BBC history programme
Professor Emeritus Barbara Yorke recently appeared in the first episode of the BBC Four programme Illuminations: The Private Lives of Medieval Kings. presented by former University of Winchester tutor and Art Historian Janina Ramirez. Prof. Yorke talked about the Anglo-Saxon King Edgar, who, although known as 'Edgar the Peaceful,' appears to have been quite the womaniser... (Photo: medieval painting of an Anglo-Saxon king on his throne)
Find out more about Illuminations: The Private Lives of Medieval Kings.
2011 News
13 Oct 2011
Head of History awarded £0.5 million in research funding by AHRC
Professor Michael Hicks, Head of the History Department, has been awarded £528,000 for the Project 'Mapping the Medieval Countryside: The Fifteenth-Century Inquisitions Post Mortem'; this three-year project completes five years of preparation.
Inquisitions post Mortems (IPMs) were records created at the death of landholders between 1236 and 1642; IPMs recorded, often in great detail, what landholders held at their death, their family circumstances, wealth, personnel of county government etc. They are a principal source for landholding and the rural economy everywhere in England.
Prof. Hicks explains: "The project involves digitising 29 enormous calendars published between 1898 and 2011 by the Public Record Office/Cambridge University, latterly with AHRC funding. These will be placed open-access on British History Online. Additionally the more fully calendared volumes from 1399 to 1447 will be enhanced and converted into a fully interactive open-access web-mounted GIS-linked database. This will make these resources much more usable by historians, archaeologists, geographers and demographers, as well as by family and local historians."
Winchester is the lead institution with Professor Hicks as Principal Investigator and two Researchers; Paul Spence, Head of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London is the Co-Investigator. Photo: Prof. Hicks (l) and Researcher Dr Matthew Holford.
Find out more about the IPMs project
29 Sept 2011
Off with their heads! Danes in Wessex Conference features recent discovery of Viking mass grave in Dorset
The Wessex Centre for History and Archaeology Autumn conference, which took place on Saturday 24 September, addressed the Scandinavian impact on Wessex. The highly successful conference included a keynote talk by Angela Boyle from Oxford Archaeology about the spectacular recently excavated Dorset Ridgeway mass burial of decapitated Vikings.
Read more about the Dorset Ridgeway mass burial.
British Academy funding for Dr Tom Lawson
30 June 2011
Dr Tom Lawson, Reader in Modern History, has been awarded a Mid Career Fellowship grant by the British Academy to devote an entire year to carrying out final research and writing a book on the relationship between British state, society and culture and the destruction of the indigenous community in Tasmania.
Dr Lawson explains: "When the British first invaded Tasmania, there was a population of up to 7000 people. The settlers launched an explicit campaign against these people in the 1820s, and subsequently sought to remove the survivors to an outlying island. In 1876 the 'last' Tasmanian died, to much fanfare in the British press. This genocide was widely discussed in British culture over the next century - it was a persistent feature of the nascent anthropological science, and laments for the lost Tasmanians were a common theme in literary and museum culture, including in children's fiction. This project aims to understand the British contribution to this destruction and asks how it has been remembered and memorialised, a history which it traces through to the present. Ultimately the project asks what this episode can tell us about the role of genocide in the history and memory of the British Empire."
The Department welcomes Dr Emiliano Perra, also a Holocaust specialist, who will be replacing Dr Lawson during his year away.
Winchester historians contribute to new BBC book
29 June 2011
Some of the UK's foremost British historians were asked by BBC History Magazine to nominate places for a new BBC book, 100 Places that made Britain. Among these were the University's early medieval historians Professor Barbara Yorke and Dr Ryan Lavelle. Professor Yorke nominated the holy island of Lindisfarne (included in the book as Lindisfarne Priory); Dr Lavelle's contribution was the less well-known and intriguingly named site of Scutchamer Knob. He explains: "I chose Scutchamer Knob in Berkshire because, as a prehistoric monument, it was an important place for the Anglo-Saxons. It was seized by the Vikings during the reign of Aethelred 'the Unready', a time of upheaval in the making of the English kingdom."
David Musgrove 2011, 100 Places that made Britain. BBC Books.
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