by Dr. Nathan Cardon (University of Birmingham) and Dr. Paul Lawrie (York University) On Thursday, 25 April 2024, thanks to the generosity of the Past and Present Society, historians gathered at the University of Birmingham for a one-day workshop to discuss how we might translate new historical work on the intersections of race, technology, and temporality to a wider audience with science and technology museums as sites of intervention. In recent years, the extension of racial exclusion to new technologies has made headlines around the world. It is clear that new technologies rather than disrupting racial biases have continued them: whether that it is in face- and voice recognition software, generative AI replicating racist stereotypes to new technologies of surveillance and social media’s metastasizing the networks and discourse of white supremacy. As sociologist Ruha Benjamin has made clear, current forms of online technology and software not only reproduce anti-Black racism but are products of it, leading her to claim we live in a period of a ‘New Jim Code’.1 What is striking about many of these conversations is the lack of historical questions. Historians seem to be absent from a seat at the table thus exacerbating notions of technology as […]

by Dr. Matilda Greig (National Army Museum, London) Humanitarianism and the military should no longer be seen as parallel but separate subjects, and our understanding of both ‘military humanitarianism’ and its chronology need to significantly expand. Rather than seeing it as post-Cold War phenomenon, could we trace the roots of military–humanitarian interaction back to the early nineteenth century, or beyond? This was the central provocation behind the call for contributions for an edited volume, issued in early 2023 by Margot Tudor and Brian Drohan, which was tested on 15th and 16th January 2024 in discussions at a workshop at City, University of London, where contributors to the volume shared the findings from their first drafts. Present to ponder over these questions was a room full of international historians, political scientists, representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, myself as an over-eager literary historian, and the most superior conference pastries I’ve ever encountered. Broadening the definition of military humanitarianism beyond simply military interventions motivated or justified by humanitarian ideals, the editors had challenged us also to think about the many points of connection between the armed forces and humanitarian organisations, and the influence of humanitarian ideals upon military identities […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present was pleased to learn that Dr. Jessica O’Leary (Australian Catholic University) has recently been awarded two prizes for her Open Access article “The Uprooting of Indigenous Women’s Horticultural Practices in Brazil, 1500–1650” which was published in Past & Present No. 262 (February 2024). Dr. O’Leary was awarded the biennial Philippa Maddern ECR Publication Prize by the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (ANZAMEMS). As ANZAMEMS explain: “The Philippa Maddern ECR Publication Prize is awarded to an Early Career Researcher (ECR) for the best article-length scholarly work in any discipline/topic falling within the scope of medieval and early modern studies, published within the below date range.” More recently Dr. O’Leary was awarded the Australian Women’s History Network’s Mary Bennett Prize. This prize is awarded “to the best article or chapter bearing the hallmarks of advanced historical scholarship and contribution to the academic field of women’s history”. The award is only made in years when a piece of scholarship is deemed to have reached the levels of quality and significance required to obtain it. When awarded the prize consists of an award of two hundred Australian Dollars and […]

Received from Dr. Nathasja Roggo-van Luijn (Johannes Gutenberg- Universität Mainz) Epistemology of Ancient Embryology Conference Dates: 1st – 3rd July 2024 Location: Department of Classics, University of Cambridge/and online Event website Overview This conference will explore the various epistemological practices and strategies used in ancient Graeco-Roman embryology. An embryo can turn into a fully-fledged human being, but it is unclear how exactly that happens, as the inner workings of a pregnant female body cannot directly be observed. What methods did ancient thinkers use to circumvent this problem and nevertheless say something about the formation of embryos? What strategies did they employ to come up with theories, corroborate general principles, adapt theories from predecessors, and communicate their own theories to their audiences? Strategies which were employed include dissection, vivisection, empirical observation of the pregnant female body, studying miscarriages, talking to women and midwives, comparisons with artefacts or plants, inferences from the pregnancy of animals, and connecting it to cosmological views by principle of ‘microcosm-macrocosm’. The conference will focus on the Graeco-Roman world, inviting experts on a range of thinkers (the ‘Presocratics’, the Hippocratic Corpus, Aristotle, Hellenistic doctors, the Stoics, Galen, Middle- and Neoplatonism), but will also include a comparative panel on […]

Via the Royal Historical Society View the original post on the Royal Historical Society Website RHS Masters’ Scholarships provide financial support to students from groups currently underrepresented in academic History. Each Scholarship is worth £5,000. The next round of applications, for students studying for a Masters’ degree in History from September 2024 is now open. Further information on how to apply are available below. Applications may be made via the Society’s applications. This year the Society seeks to award eight scholarships to students who will begin a Masters’ degree in History (full or part-time) at a UK university from the start of the next academic year. The Society thanks the Past & Present Society and the Scouloudi Foundation for their generous support of this year’s awards. The programme, established in 2022, seeks to actively address underrepresentation within the discipline, and enable Black and Asian students, along with those of other minorities, to consider academic research in History. By supporting Masters’ students the programme focuses on a key early stage in the academic training of future researchers. With these Scholarships, we seek to support students who are without the financial means to study for a Masters’ in History. By doing so, we hope to improve the […]

Received from Dr. Peter Agócs (University College London) The UCL Department of Greek and Latin, the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology at the University of Birmingham, Palladion/Graecoaegyptiaca and the Ourania Network are organising a conference entitled ‘Cosmic Magic. Astronomy, Astrology and Graeco-Aegyptian Cultural Interactions’. For the programme, please see here. The conference, which is fully hybrid, will take place on June 3rd and 4th, 2024 in the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies’ G11 Common Ground Seminar Room (UCL Wilkins Building, South Wing), and on Zoom. Anyone interested is cordially invited. If you plan to attend, please register via the Eventbrite page. If you wish to attend in person, please write an email to p.agocs@ucl.ac.uk. Any questions you may have can also be addressed to this email. The society of Egypt in the Hellenistic and Roman periods was a unique and fascinating melting-pot of Egyptian, Near Eastern and Greek influences. The astronomy and astrology of the period is an exciting area in which to study this rich cultural hybridity. Cosmology was an area where science, religion and magic met and cross-fertilized in a culture where the boundaries between these areas were differently defined. This international project, conceived and run […]

Received from Joey Crozier (Aberystwyth University) Key Details Communication and Exchange in the Early Modern c. 1500-1850 Date: 30th-31st May 2024 Location: Aberystwyth (Main Hall, International Politics Building, Main Campus, University of Aberystwyth) Programme Event Poster Registration (free) 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 Grace Stafford (University of Vienna) I first became interested in practices of veiling and head-covering during my PhD, when I stumbled across one of the single most beautiful portraits to survive from antiquity (in my opinion at least!). It is a marble bust of a woman, rendered with such sensitivity and plasticity that seems almost impossible for stone. She gazes just past us with heavily lidded eyes, her face calm, and her voluminous hairstyle enveloped by a delicate cover that creases and bunches with spectacular realism. She was made around 400 CE, probably somewhere near the east Roman capital of Constantinople, and represents a woman from a prominent family, or at least one rich enough to have a portrait like this carved. She is truly a triumph of late antique artistry, sitting right at the end of a 1000-year tradition of ancient portrait sculpture. What really attracted my attention though, was the way in which she was described in the catalogue of Roman portraits in which I found her. After a long and detailed description typical of such books, the final paragraph turned to the issue of her covered hair. It stated directly that this garment was not simply […]

by Dr. Laura Flannigan (St. John’s, University of Oxford) The early modern period witnessed unprecedented levels of litigation. Indeed, the size of surviving archive of court rolls, pleadings, and depositions marks out the contours of a ‘legal revolution’ in the centuries up to c.1600, observable across much of the Western world. This trend, scholars have assumed, was preconditioned by population recovery following the Black Death, by rising literacy and document ownership, and by the centralisation of judicial systems under various monarchical regimes. Frequent litigation would seem to imply widespread knowledge of its norms and procedures among litigants – enough to drive them to seek out law courts and legal authorities more regularly. But what did (and what could) this knowledge consist of, how was it acquired and disseminated, who by, and how coherently or accurately? These were some of the questions that formed the genesis of this one-day workshop on ‘Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modernity’ at St John’s College, Oxford, with contributors exploring English and trans-Atlantic contexts for answers. One distinction that emerged early in the day’s discussions was that between the knowledge of litigants and that of the lawyers who advised them. The former is typically […]

Received from Dr. Naomi Lloyd-Jones (Durham University) Dates: 23rd – 24th July 2024 Times: 09:00-17:00 Location: Collingwood College Penthouse Conference Suite, Durham University and online Download Programme Conference Event Listing on the Durham University Website Join us for two days of stimulating discussion about the place of politics and the meaning of the political in modern Scotland, a period of massive political, constitutional, economic, environmental, religious and social change in Scotland, the UK and the empire. The conference features 40 paper presentations, a keynote on ‘Where did the nineteenth century go?’ and a roundtable on ‘The future of Scottish political history?’. Registration is now open. The conference is free to attend, and hybrid. Registration is currently open and will close for in-person attendance on 4 July and for online attendance on 18 July. We are also holding pre-conference workshop on publishing in academic journals, in conjunction with Edinburgh University Press (taking place 14:30-16:00 on 22nd July 2024, also at Durham University). It is aimed at PGRs and ECRs, but all are welcome. It is free and hybrid; register on the via the booking website by 18 July. Registration (free) This event is supported by: Lverhulme Trust, Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies, The History of Parliament […]