Department News
History lecturer becomes external examiner
Head of History, Dr Hugo Frey, has been appointed external examiner for the BA (Hons) History programme at The American College of Greece - DEREE in Athens. The appointment is for 4 years and is under the auspices of the Open University Validation Services.
Hugo said:
I am delighted to accept this international external examinership and I am looking forward to learning more about the staff and students in Athens."
More information about the American College of Greece can be found on its website: www.acg.edu
History department signs fourth international exchange agreement
Following the signing of exchange agreements with the University of Eastern Finland (Joensuu), the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, and the Franklin and Marshall College in the US, the History Department is delighted to announce that it has agreed a further staff and student exchange programme with the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg in Germany. The exchange, supported by the Erasmus scheme which funds international study opportunities withinthe European Union, will commence in academic year 2012-13.
The association will allow Chichester students to study at this leading European university for either one or two semesters, during which they will take the English Language Programme (http://www.phil1.uni-wuerzburg.de/fakultaet/english_language_program/) possibly supplemented by other modules taught in English. The University of Chichester also looks forward to welcoming students from Würzburg to its West Sussex campus, where they will also be able to take classes in the Departments of English and Theology.
Dr Amanda Richardson, who co-ordinated the agreement, said “Würzburg is a fantastic and historic city. It is central to a wide area, with Frankfurt and Nuremburg just over an hour away by train, Munich and the Rheinland each only a couple of hours away, and Northern Germany also reachable in just a few hours via high-speed train links. The university, whose staff are very friendly and welcoming, already enjoys Erasmus partnerships with 400 universities worldwide, so international students are extremely well taken care of (see http://www.international.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/)”.
For further information email: I.Jones@chi.ac.uk
History Department Guest Lecture
Alwyn Turner, presents: 'The 1970s: A Revolutionary Decade'.
5th October 2011, at 6.30 pm: Room: Cloisters.
Alwyn Turner is the author of several best-selling history books and is an authority on contemporary popular cultural history. Among others he has brought out: Crisis what Crisis? Britain in the 1970s? (Aarum, 2009); Rejoice Rejoice: Britain in the 1980s (Aarum: 2010); and The Man Who Invented the Daleks: The Strange Worlds of Terry Nation (Aarum 2011).
Winner of the Peter Howard Award 2011
The Department of History is pleased to announce that David Hollinrake is the winner of the Peter Howard Prize this year. The prize is awarded annually to the student (or students) awarded the best grade of the year cohort for their c.10,000-word final year dissertation, and is announced at Graduation. The subject of David’s study, and those of past winners, are listed below, demonstrating the wide range of historical themes very successfully tackled by our students. Our warm congratulations go to David, and remain with Tim, Claire, Lauren and Max.
2011 - David Hollinrake: The role of John Locke in the lead up to the Glorious Revolution of 1688
(supervisor: Dr Mark Bryant)
2010 - Tim Brinded: The socio-cultural meaning of giants in late-medieval England
(supervisor: Dr Amanda Richardson)
2009 - Claire Cheesman: Holocaust historiography and the specificity debate
(supervisor: Dr Hugo Frey)
Lauren Hadwick: Cultural constructions of the Second World War in museums
(supervisor: Dr Amanda Richardson)
Max Ringhoffer: The idea of the state in 19th-century political thought: Marx and his critics
(supervisor: Dr Hugo Frey)
2010 History students celebrate their achievement
Peter Howard studied with us as a mature student from 2001-6 after a lifelong career in journalism. This included working as a press officer for the Ministry of Defence from 1975-85, and from 1987-95 he was Editor of Jane’s Defence Weekly (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article1475173.ece). Throughout his time with us, he was popular with staff and with his fellow students, who he inspired through his life experiences and his enthusiasm for history. Peter continues to inspire their successors through the prize, instituted with the support of his wife Jane, and of former colleagues, after his untimely death aged 69 in 2007.
___________________________________________________________________________________
History Lecturer on Location with the BBC in the West Country
Dr Amanda Richardson, Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern history was recently interviewed on location in Gloucestershire, for an episode of the forthcoming programme Routes of Britain (working title), to be presented by Griff Rhys Jones (BBC 1, Spring 2012). The episode will follow the same route as Elizabeth I in her 1574 progress through the West Country, and the focus of the interview was how and why the landscape might have changed (or otherwise) since Elizabeth’s visit.
Dr Amanda Richardson was contacted by Griff’s company Modern TV, on the strength of her publications on the medieval and early modern English landscape.
Above: Dr Amanda Richardson and Griff Rhys Jones
Dr Amanda Richardson said:
This was the first time I had appeared on TV, and everything I had heard about the experience was true. There’s lots of hanging around, and everything is filmed not only more than once – but also back to front. We did the interview before the scene where Griff and I ‘arrived’ at the site (about five times!) in a chauffeur-driven 1964 Rolls Royce, and were afterwards filmed in the back of the rolls en route to it. He was really knowledgeable about Elizabeth and royal progresses in general, and had obviously done loads of research. The episode is only one in the series, which will see Griff being driven around many of the most notable historic routeways in the country, so there should be something in it for everyone.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Dr Sue Morgan will feature in the final part of a BBC 2 documentary series
Dr Sue Morgan, Reader in Gender History, will feature on The Age of the Do-Gooders at 9pm on Monday 13 December, where the pleasures and perils of booze and sex are the focus for the final episode of Ian Hislop's series about Victorian reformers, campaigners and philanthropists.
Drawing on Sue's specialism in 19th and early 20th century gender history, she will be talking about how the Victorian imagination was challenged, appalled and intrigued by prostitution, as well as how the Contagious Diseases Act worked.
The TV appearance will mark the conclusion of a busy year for Sue – in May, she published her sixth book, a major edited collection entitled Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800-1940 (Routledge), which was an international collaboration of British, US and Canadian scholars.
It was the publication of this book that led Wingspan Production to approach Sue to advise on the documentary. The series has examined a number of influential Victorian reformers and their attitudes to child welfare, sex and drink, re-evaluating their legacy for the 21st century. Sue's pioneering work on late-Victorian campaigns around prostitution and male sexuality, particularly the flurry of Church and State interventions on the subject during the 1880s and 1890s, formed the basis of the final programme in which Sue will appear.
Sue said: “It was a pleasure to be involved in this series as an advisor and as a talking head. My greatest delight was that a woman reformer, Ellice Hopkins, who led a huge populist movement on ‘social purity' in the 1880s, and who I had rescued from complete obscurity as a PhD student at the University of Bristol in the early 1990s, gets some major air-time in the final programme, where Ian Hislop reads from Hopkins's best-selling 1883 essay True Manliness. That was the most exciting and moving moment for me in the whole thing.”
__________________________________________________________________________
History Lecturer Gains Major Academic Accolade
Dr Amanda Richardson, Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval and Early Modern History, has recently been elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA). The Society dates back at least 300 years and its interests are inclusive of all aspects of the material past. Its principal objectives are to foster public understanding of the heritage, to engage in the formulation of public policy on the care of our historic environment, and to support research and communicate its results.
The Society of Antiquaries Library, Burlington House, Piccadilly
The Society’s 2,700 Fellows include many distinguished archaeologists and art and architectural historians, who must be ‘excelling in the knowledge of the antiquities and history of this and other nations’. Thus Dr Richardson’s election to this prestigious body is a great accolade for the research ethic of the University of Chichester.
See: www.sal.org.uk/ Also see: www.sal.org.uk/newsandevents/
Queenship, Lordship and the Landscape:
the estates of the queens of England c. 1236-1503
Dr Amanda Richardson (History) has been awarded a university Research Incentive Fund for research connected with her forthcoming book, Queenship, Lordship and the Landscape: the estates of the queens of England c. 1236-1503, to be published by Manchester University Press (MUP Gender in History Series). Amanda commented “I am really grateful to the Pro Vice-Chancellor, the Head of the Research and Employer Engagement Office (REEO) and the Deputy Deans for granting the money for my stay at the National Archives. It will help immensely towards producing what will be the first-ever study of late-medieval English queens as landholders, facilitating an analysis of gender, status and lordship in the later Middle Ages. Of course, the research will enhance and inform my teaching here at Chichester, not least in the Level 3 module ‘Kingship, Queenship and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Europe”.
Three History students study at the University of Joensuu, eastern Finland
Three History students, Richard Fear, Caroline Horstead and Louisa Richardson, studied at the University of Joensuu, eastern Finland, under the Erasmus Scheme in semester one. In early October 2009 I took the opportunity to visit them, and found they were enjoying their experience immensely, despite a temperature of minus seven which progressed to about – 20 by the end of their visit! Respite from the weather could be taken in the University’s many saunas, one of which I visited with some of the History staff. Luckily the students weren’t invited, although the (probably unwelcome) off chance of seeing one’s lecturers naked is just one difference between the student experience in Finland and over here!
Joensuu is a university town which is spacious and well laid out, making it easy to find your way around, even in the snow, and most people (even the bus drivers!) speak English. Finland is not cheap to live in, but the students found ways to save money, like having the ‘incredibly good value’ lunches in the campus restaurant – and the university even distributes free bread to students each week! Most of them have hired bikes for a moderate fee, allowing them to visit the many new friends they have made from all over Europe, who they meet at the ‘endless numbers’ of clubs, meetings and parties publicised by Joensuu University’s student union. Louisa said ‘we have had such fun sharing each other’s cultures!’
But university life is not all fun, wherever the location. When I saw them Richard, Caroline, and Louisa were awaiting their first assignment marks and were all convinced they would fail. Of course they passed with flying colours, and continued to get good marks during their stay. As Caroline remarked, the Finnish university ethos, which sounds laid back compared with our own, takes some getting used to. The idea is that students are entirely responsible for their own studies. Lecture clashes are treated as an unavoidable fact, so there is no register to sign, and they can leave a class early or arrive late depending on other commitments. They can attend any lectures they like, even those that are not in their subject area, so that they can experience what other disciplines have to offer.
This was a very successful exchange, and we are proud of the way our students took up the challenge of studying so far from home. According to Louisa ‘life in Finland was a breath of fresh air – invigorating! There is the beauty of lakes and trees everywhere you turn, as well as the Finns’ definitive culture. Studying there offered me a new perspective on the world.’ Highlights included ice-swimming, white water rafting and learning to play the Kantele, as well as the many group excursions, formal and informal. These included hiking in Koli national park, trips to Tallinn (Estonia) and St Petersburg, and a survival course in Lapland where the students learned to build igloos, went on reindeer sleigh-rides and swam in the Arctic Sea. I leave the last word to Caroline, who called the experience ‘truly inspirational and exhilarating. The people, the scenery, and the different cultures made this an opportunity of a lifetime, with all the wide prospects that that can encompass!’
Dr Amanda Richardson (History)
Religion, Belief and Selfhood
Sue Morgan (Reader in Gender History) led and chaired a conference strand of 28 papers on ‘Religion, Belief and Selfhood’ at an international women’s history conference at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford, in September 2009. The conference also provided the location for the second international gathering of scholars from the UK, US and Canada on Sue’s latest book – Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800-1940 – which is due out with Routledge in May 2010. Contributors to the collection met for the first time in New York at the American Historical Association in January 2009 and there are plans to collaborate further on funding for similar projects in the future.
Associate lecturer gains national recognition for locally born anti-apartheid activist
Associate Lecturer David Rang, a post graduate researcher in gender history, has successfully lobbied the prestigious Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) to include an entry for Midhurst born anti-apartheid activist Helen Joseph.
Public lecture on representation of immigration and anti-racism in French comic strips
As part of West Sussex County Council Black History Month Dr Hugo Frey, Subject Leader in History at the University of Chichester, will present a lecture on the representation of immigration and anti-racism in French comic strips.
The lecture will take place at 5.30pm on Wednesday 29 October in Room E124 at the University’s Bishop Otter campus in College Lane, Chichester. The lecture is free to attend and everyone is welcome.
Displays researched and designed by History students
Permanent museum displays researched and designed by two History Work Placement students, Rachel Hilton and Judy Carbone, on the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) respectively, have recently been unveiled at Tangmere Aviation Museum.
Judy commented that she was ‘really pleased with the results’, adding that ‘as a learning experience it was really valuable to me to understand what goes on in the background of designing museum displays’. Results like these are far from unusual and the Work Placements module remains a popular choice among Level 2 students, especially those wishing to expand their understanding of heritage and public history.
Exhibition Movie
Tangmere Museum Website
http://www.tangmere-museum.org.uk
Recent Work Placements
History Work Placement Level 2 Module
History department signs second Erasmus exchange agreement
Following the signing of an exchange agreement with the University of Joensuu in Finland earlier this year, the History department at the University of Chichester is delighted to announce that it has agreed a second staff and student Erasmus agreement with the Cultural Studies department at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
History department signs exchange agreement with University of Joensuu, Finland
The University of Chichester History department has opened up an exciting new European project. From the next academic year, it will collaborate in a student exchange and research partnership with the University of Joensuu in Finland.
History graduate publishes research in The Antiquaries Journal
Head of History, Dr Hugo Frey is delighted to announce that a graduate of the department has brought their final year dissertation to the attention of the wider scholarly community. Deborah Lush, BA (Hons) History graduate, writing with Dr Jonathan Woolfson, has recently published a research paper in the prestigious Antiquaries Journal.
History Department welcomes Professor Fabrice Leroy from University of Louisiana
The History team are delighted to welcome Professor Fabrice Leroy from the University of Louisiana to Chichester where he will present a guest lecture to staff and students on Friday 19 October at 12.00 midday in Cloisters, on the Bishop Otter Campus.
Professor Leroy is a well known specialist in contemporary French cultural history and he will speak on the work of the satirical cartoonist Pierre La Police. La Police is a notorious artist whose illustrations make fun of almost every taboo in contemporary French society.
History at the University – Top in the Country
Chichester continues to rank highly in the National Student Survey which rates student satisfaction with their University Courses. For the third year since the survey was launched Chichester can be proud of its success. The aim of the survey is to gather feedback on the quality of students' courses in order to contribute to public accountability as well as to help inform the choices of future applicants to higher education.