Received from Michelle Pfeffer (University of Oxford) Event takes place online:  3rd September 2021, 14:00-17:45 (BST) This year sees the 50th anniversary of Sir Keith Thomas’s masterpiece, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), one of the most significant British historical monographs of the last century. This short conference will celebrate and reflect on Thomas’s achievement as well as publicise new interdisciplinary work on the history of magic and religion. How to Register The event will be live streamed from All Souls College, Oxford. Due to a limit on numbers as a result of the pandemic, only a small audience will be invited to attend the conference in-person. Please register here to receive a link to the live stream. Registrations close 2 September 2021, 15:00 (BST). Organised by Michelle Pfeffer (Magdalen College, University of Oxford), Jan Machielsen (Cardiff University), and Robin Briggs (All Souls College, University of Oxford) Conference Schedule 14:00-15:30 Session 1: The Decline of Magic Today Chair: Sir Noel Malcolm Panellists: Robin Briggs, Chris Gosden, Michelle Pfeffer, Will Pooley, Laura Sangha, David Zeitlyn Registrants will be sent the written papers for this roundtable a week in advance of the conference. 16:00-17:30 Session 2: The Legacy of Religion and […]

by Hannah Lyons, Dr. Tomás Irish and Dr. Simon John (Swansea University) On 28 and 29 June, Swansea University hosted researchers from around the world at this online workshop. Attendees discussed the history of statues and memorials, but also posed questions about what the events of 2020 might tell us about the future. The workshop was originally scheduled for June 2020, but was postponed in light of the repercussions of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was in that month of June that protesters toppled the statue of the slavetrader Edward Colston from its plinth in Bristol. In the wake of that event, debates about controversial statues became front-page news around the world. Twelve months on, the debates uncovered by those developments in the summer of 2020 featured at the heart of this workshop. The two days of discussion and debate were informed by several linked questions. What socio-political motives underpin cultural responses to monuments? How have monuments shaped how people understand the past? How do monuments interact with the urban setting in which they stand? How do the meanings of monuments develop over time and how are they mediated? How have monuments been used to enforce political […]

by the Past & Present editorial team

by the Past & Present editorial team 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.

Received from Dr. John Gallagher and Dr. Purba Hossain (University of Leeds) Roundtable: New Histories of Language will take place on Wednesday 14th July 2021 between 15:00 and 17:00 online via Zoom. About the event This roundtable brings together scholars working on a variety of periods and geographical areas but with a shared interest in histories of language, to discuss new developments and directions in the field. It explores questions such as: how have historians approached themes like multilingualism, language mediation and language learning? What are the linkages between language and power, language and colonialism, or language and nationalism? How has the study of language histories changed over the years? Supported by the Past and Present Society, and hosted by Dr John Gallagher and Dr Purba Hossain (University of Leeds), our speakers include Prof. Ardis Butterfield (Yale University), Dr Paul Cohen (University of Toronto), Dr Margaret Kelleher (University College Dublin), Dr Rachel Leow (University of Cambridge) and Dr Farina Mir (University of Michigan). Link to Registration A version of the poster with a live registration hyperlink can also be dowloaded here. Past & Present is pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed […]

Received from Dr. Simon John (Swansea University) Contested Histories: Creating and Critiquing Public Monuments and Memorials in a New Age of Iconoclasm is a workshop which will be hosted by the Swansea University Conflict, Reconstruction and Memory (CRAM) Research Group on 28th and 29th June 2021, online via Zoom Overview This event, organised by Swansea University’s Conflict, Reconstruction and Memory Research Group, will explore debates surrounding the cultural and political uses of monuments, reflecting upon their role in the memorialisation and imagining of the past. It takes a broad view of ‘monuments’, considering artefacts such as war memorials, cenotaphs and public statuary as well as urban sites damaged through war, or locations hallowed through their connection to pivotal events in the past. Initially planned for summer 2020 but postponed due to COVID-19, the workshop draws inspiration from contemporary debates energised by movements such as ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, Decolonizing the University, and campaigns against Confederate monuments in the USA. This event aims to contribute to these dialogues by fostering academic critiques of past uses of monuments and statues, whilst simultaneously engaging with present-day issues. Attendees will hear from academic speakers as well as practitioners who are (or have been) involved in […]

by Dr. David Chan Smith (Wilfrid Laurier University) There is in an old British entrepreneurial tradition for those keen to escape regulation: find an ancient liberty, preferably an island (or an abandoned Maunsell Fort in the North Sea), and declare it free. Richard Score seized the opportunity in 1716 when he leased the island of Lundy and claimed that it was beyond British taxes and duties ‘like the Isles of Man, Guernsey etc’. Stretching just three miles long in the Bristol Channel, Lundy was ideally poised to serve the bustling smuggling economy on the coasts of southern Wales and southwest England. Score knew this business well because he had been a Customs officer in Penzance. He had succumbed, as contemporaries often said, to the ‘temptation’ of smuggling. During this period of high duties fortunes were made on islands such as Jersey and Guernsey that served as entrepots in the running trade. And now Score had his very own – at least for a time. His story is part of the long history of tax havens and hidden economies, spaces and structures that continue to shape the global economy. Through the lens of early modern smuggling, my research explores the offshore […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present sponsored the creation of six blog posts by postgraduate students, which documented and critically engaged with the Past & Present supported workshop series hosted by Dr. David Geiringer (QMUL) and Dr. Helen McCarthy (Cambridge) under the title ‘Rethinking Britain in the 1990s: Towards a new research agenda’. The series ran between January and March 2021, bringing together contemporary historians from a range of career stages to map existing work and stimulate new thinking on a decade which, from the perspective of our present times, looks very unfamiliar indeed. Blog Posts When Was the Nineties? by Matt Beebee (University of Exeter) The Political Narratives of Britian in the Nineties by Alfie Steer (Hertford College, Oxford)  Cultural Narratives of the Nineties by Jessica White (University of Manchester) Global Narratives of Britian in the Nineties by Christopher Day (University of Westminster) Digital Narratives of the Nineties by David Dahlborn (St. John’s College, Cambridge) What is the Archive of the Nineties by Amy Gower (University of Reading) The blogs above are presented in chronological order from the earliest event, to the latest in the series. Past & Present was pleased to support these events […]

Received from Shyam Sridar (Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford)  States, local jurisdictions and borderlands in Europe and the Americas, c.1713-1914 is a free to attend international conference on the processes of state building in the 18th and 19th centuries. It will take place online via Zoom on the 1st and 2nd June 2021 Event Overview “States, local jurisdictions and borderlands in Europe and the Americas, c.1713-1914” is an international conference organised by Luis Gabriel Galán-Guerrero and Shyam Sridar (University of Oxford) with the support of the Past & Present Society and the Latin American Centre, University of Oxford. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, populations and settlers in Europe and the Americas set up a wide range of public offices, administrative bodies and corporations that asserted their own jurisdictions within monarchies and republics. In recent years, more nuanced interpretations on the process of state formation have highlighted the process of negotiation within republics and ‘composite monarchies’, and acknowledged the importance of corporations, legal pluralism, overlapping jurisdictions, local elites and borderlands in the functioning of the state. This conference extends these existing lines of enquiry into the nature of states and aims to establish connections and comparisons on the processes […]

by the Past & Present editorial team We were delighted to hear that Dr. Antoine Acker (University of Zurich) has been awarded the 2021 Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Prize by the Brazilian section of the Latin American Studies Association for his article “A Different Story in the Anthropocene: Brazil’s Post-Colonial Quest for Oil (1930–1975)” which appeared in Past & Present No. 249 (November 2020). In recognition of this acheivement and so as to enable as many people as possible to read Dr. Acker’s award winning scholarship our publisher Oxford University Press have made “A Different Story in the Anthropocene: Brazil’s Post-Colonial Quest for Oil (1930–1975)” free to read for the next few months.