by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present is delighted to learn that Prof. Alan S. Ross (University of Vienna) has been awarded the 2022 American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS) James L. Clifford Prize for his article “The Animal Body as Medium: Taxidermy and European Expansion, 1775-1865” (Open Access) published in Past & Present No. 249 (November 2020). In awarding the prize the ASECS praised Prof. Ross’s work stating: “In a rich and wide-ranging essay, Professor Alan S. Ross applies insights from iconology, history of science, and art history to a highly original study of taxidermized animals. Demonstrating the deep entanglement of taxidermy with European allegorical traditions and colonial ventures, Ross explores the evolution of taxidermy and the ways it mirrored global interactions and interconnections. He shows how the taxidermic preservation and public display by Europeans of animals from faraway lands served as records of and justifications for imperialist expansion. Drawing on a prodigious quantity of research and using the key example of primates presented first at the London natural history cabinet of Ashton Lever and later at the Natural History Museum of Vienna, Ross provides a delightfully interdisciplinary analysis that draws in and surprises readers. […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present was delighted to learnt that Dr. Tamara Fernando (Institute of Historical Research, University of London) has been awarded the 2021 Alice Hamilton Prize by the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH). Dr. Tamara Fernando is a current Past & Present IHR Postdoctoral Fellow (2021-23). The award is for Dr. Fernando’s article “Seeing Like the Sea: A Multispecies History of the Ceylon Pearl Fishery, 1800-1925” (Past & Present, No. 254). Awarded annually, the Alice Hamilton Prize is given by the ASEH to what is considered the “best article” that has not been published in the journal Environmental History. Congradulations to Dr. Fernando on their research being recognised in this manner. If you would like to read Dr. Fernando’s prize winning research you can do so (Open Access) on the website of our publisher Oxford University Press.

by the Past & Present Society, Royal History Society and British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Fellowships and fundraising The Royal Historical Society (RHS), British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) and the Past and Present Society (P&P) are offering funding towards three short-term fellowships (minimum 3 months) at higher education institutions in the UK, European Union or elsewhere in continental Europe to provide a place of academic refuge for three scholars from Ukraine. The RHS and BASEES are also fundraising to provide additional fellowships. About the fellowship scheme Each grant is worth £5,000 (€6,000) to the Fellow and must be matched by equivalent funds AND/ OR in-kind assistance from the host institution (for example, travel, accommodation, meals, office space and IT support, plus insurance) of a financial sum equivalent to the £5,000 (€6,000) grant for a minimum duration of three months, to begin as soon as possible. To best support Ukrainian scholars at risk, we also welcome applications from host institutions willing to offer more than match-funding, whether as a financial sum or in-kind assistance. Two grants will be reserved for Ukrainian scholars displaced by the Russian invasion who are undertaking historical research in the broadest sense. One grant will be for any displaced Ukrainian scholar in the field of Slavonic […]

by the Past & Present editorial team To honour Sir John Elliott for his service to the Past and Present Society and journal over the course of seven decades our publisher Oxford University Press has very kindly agreed to make his articles for Past & Present free to read for a limited time period. The Sir John Elliot Tribute Virtual Issue can be accessed here. The editorial board’s memorial for Sir John can be read here.

Received from Dr. Georgios Giannakopoulos (King’s College London) Two day, hybrid format conference taking place King’s College London, 12:45-18:30 (BST) 28th April 2022 and 11:00-18:30 (BST) 29th April 2022. About this event The year 2022 marks the centenary of the end of Greek-Turkish war of 1919-1922. This war was one of the final conflicts of a decade-long series of wars to which historians have referred to as the ‘Greater War’ decade. The Greek-Turkish war coincided with the end of the many conflicts and diplomatic or political processes that transformed eastern Europe and Russia as well as the near and middle East. It also marked an acute humanitarian crisis following the dislocation of minority populations across the Aegean Sea – one of the largest single population transfers of the Greater War decade. Using the Greek-Turkish conflict as a starting point, this international conference brings together scholars working in various historical subfields to reflect on the wider context of nationalist agitations, state-building processes, imperial transformations and socio-economic upheavals across lands and seas in flux from Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, European and Asian Russia to the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. The event is hybrid, and the time zone is BST For […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past and Present is deeply saddened by the death of Sir John Elliott, aged 91, on 10 March 2022. An outstanding historian of early modern Spain and its empire, his contributions to scholarship have been profound and far-reaching. John was an active member of the Editorial Board of the journal for many years from his election in 1958, and after his retirement continued to attend the summer board meeting and to engage actively with P&P’s work with unfailing interest, wisdom and acuity. He was also the President of the Past and Present Society. We lament his passing and mourn his loss. He will be greatly missed by all who knew him. We make his articles in Past and Present freely available to all readers as a tribute to him. An obituary will appear in the journal in due course.

Received from Prof. Giuseppe Marcocci (Exeter College, University of Oxford) and Dr. Yonatan Glazer-Eytan (Magdalene College, University of Cambridge) Unsettling Objects: The Forgotten Archives of Material Culture in the Early Modern World is taking place on 18th March 2022. The one day conference will take place at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. With the programme running between 09:00 and 18:00 in the College’s Forum Upper Hall. For a list of participants in the event, and the programme of panels for the day, please see the programme here. To attend register please contact the organisers Prof. Giuseppe Marcocci and Dr. Yonatan Glazer-Eytan via e-mail (limited spaces available). Past & Present is pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present is delighted to see that “The Social Networks of South Asian Migrants in the Sheffield Area During the Early Twentieth Century” by Dr. David Holland, which appeared in Past & Present No. 236 (August 2017) has been selected as part of our publisher Oxford University Press’ “The History of Global Migration” Virtual Issue. Dr. Holland’s article and all of the contents of the Virtual Issue are currently free to read.

by Dr. Brodie Waddell (Birkbeck, University of London) In 1612, the Overseers of the Poor for Finchingfield in Essex spent just over £37 on payments to the parish’s poorest residents and related expenses. However, by the early 1650s they were spending over £100 every year and by the late 1690s average disbursements were over £200 annually. The payments kept rising in the decades to come, regularly exceeding £300 in the 1740s and hitting £543 in 1758.[1] Nearly half a century later, in response to a national survey into ‘the Expense and Maintenance of the Poor in England’, Finchingfield’s overseers reported that they spent £1,626 on ‘the whole Expenditure on Account of the Poor, in the Year ending Easter 1803’.[2] The story told by these figures is, in some ways, simple and well-known. Under the so-called ‘Old Poor Law’ governed English welfare provision from 1598 to 1834, parishes across England raised money through local taxes to offer relief to ‘their’ poor. The amount they raised and distributed varied hugely across different regions and could also occasionally rise or fall suddenly from year to year, but over these two centuries parishes undoubtedly spent larger and larger sums. Finchingfield’s growing expenditures were only […]

by Dr. Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira (Singapore Management University) Back in 2012, during a break in my first year of graduate school, I found myself in my father’s travel agency in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. I remember stressing out over a thesis topic. I was planning to write about the creation of old cities in nineteenth-century France (the historical districts we know today as vieux Lyon, vieux Marseille, etc.) but was worried that the topic was overcrowded. I browsed through the bookshelf in his office as I vented (Figure 1), tracing my fingers over the spines of management tracts and history books (he’s always been a businessman with a humanist bent). One book in particular caught my attention: Peter Hoffman’s Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight, a popular biography of the Brazilian aviator published by an accomplished science writer in 2003. “This might be a fun read,” I thought to myself as I pocketed the book. A year later I was back at Princeton. I had just completed my general exams and anxiety levels concerning the thesis had reached new heights since, well, I now had to start working on it. I was certain about abandoning […]