by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present Editorial Board member Dr. Renaud Morieux (Jesus College, Cambridge) has a book The Society of Prisoners Anglo-French Wars and Incarceration in the Eighteenth Century forthcoming in the Past & Present Book Series (published with Oxford University Press Academic). The cover has now been released and can be viewed here.
by the Past & Present editorial team
Received from Dr. Shanti Graheli Past & Present is pleased to be one of the sponsors of “Best Sellers in the Pre-Industrial Age” at the University of Glasgow 22nd-24th May 2019. The organisers have now released the full programme for the event and it can be downloaded here. The outline of the event below is taken from the call for papers: Bestsellers, TV series, spin-offs, fan fiction, are all deeply embedded in our perception of literary consumer culture today. Yet the notion of a bestseller with spin-offs is a very old one indeed. The consolidation of the printing press in the Renaissance led to the first major re-assessment of the book as an object of ‘mass’ consumption. Lower production costs, paired with a rise of literacy levels, brought more books to an ever-growing reading public. Printers and publishers devised marketing strategies to meet demand, such as serialisation and branding, the creation of abridgements and illustrated editions, spin-offs and games inspired by the most successful texts. Foreign and ancient texts were re-packaged in translation or alongside new commentaries. Bestsellers catered for all types of readers, or indeed users, with oral transmission playing an important part in the dissemination of texts. While […]
by Dr. Katherine Foxhall (Royal Historical Society) The Royal Historical Society, together with the Past and Present Society, is delighted to announce the appointment of Shahmima Akhtar to the two-year post of Past and Present Fellowship in Race, Ethnicity & Equality in History. The post will be held jointly at the Royal Historical Society and the Institute for Historical Research. Time will be divided evenly between research, writing, engagement, organisational work and event management to advance the work of the RHS Race, Ethnicity & Equality Working Group (REEWG); and development of Ms. Akhtar’s academic research and career as a historian. Shahmima joins us from the Department of History, University of Birmingham, where she has recently submitted her AHRC/Midlands3Cities-funded PhD thesis entitled “‘A Public Display of Its Own Capabilities and Resources’: A Cultural History of Irish Identity on Display, 1851-2015.” She is currently working with the curatorial team at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery to develop a display on Birmingham and the British Empire from a decolonising standpoint. In creating this Fellowship, the Royal Historical Society and IHR are grateful for the financial support of the Past and Present Society. Explaining why the Past & Present Society are funding this position, […]
by the Past & Present editorial team We were delighted to hear that Prof. Michelle Tusan (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) has won the 2019 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Article Prize, for an article that she published in Past & Present. The winning article “Genocide, Famine And Refugees On Film: Humanitarianism And The First World War” appeared in Past & Present No. 237 which was published in November 2017. To recognise this achievement and enable even more people to read Prof. Tusan’s prize winning scholarship, our publisher Oxford University Press Academic has decided to make “Genocide, Famine And Refugees On Film: Humanitarianism And The First World War” free to access online for a limited time period.
by the Past & Present editorial team We were pleased to hear from Prof. Jan Rüger (Birkbeck College, London) that Prof. Chris Wickham, former Editor, Chair, and current Editorial Board Member of Past & Present, is to give the 2019 Eric Hobsbawm Memorial Lecture. The lecture entitled “How did feudalism work? The economic logic of medieval societies” will take place on the evening of 14th May between 18-21:00 in Birkbeck College’s Clore lecture theatre (B01). Birkbeck further advise that: Eric Hobsbawm was not very interested in medieval history, but he did edit and comment on Marx’s own thoughts on how ‘feudal’ economies worked. How do these stand up today? Do we have now to assume that medieval economies simply worked like capitalist ones in their basic rhythms, only less well? This lecture will look at alternative ways of understanding the economic logic which prevailed in the medieval period, and how its dynamic may have worked as well, on the basis of recent work on the Mediterranean, north-west Europe, and further afield. Chris Wickham was Chichele Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford from 2005 to 2016. Before that, and after, he taught at the University of Birmingham. He […]
