Received from Dr. Becca Grose and Dr. Alex Traves (University of York) Key Details Date: 1st-2nd June 2023 Location: University of York Confirmed participants external to the University of York: Catherine Cubitt (UEA); Erin Dailey (Leicester), Rachel Stone (Bedfordshire & KCL) Event Abstract Kinship is often treated as a social phenomenon that binds people together permanently through the creation of mutual ties, obligations, and emotions between individuals. Over the last decades, work on family and kinship in the early Middle Ages has addressed the basis of this claim through considering two key issues: i) how new types of kinship ties emerged in the early Middle Ages; ii) how far early-medieval kinship was derived from spiritual or blood ties. However, kinship can also be used to separate as much as bring together, and kinship ties were not always as permanent as might be inferred. The moments where kinship ties were considered to cease offer us the opportunity to investigate how these conceptual differences might shape or be expressed in social behaviour. By considering the extent to which moments of imposed (or initiated) separation can be considered dissolvement of kinship ties, our workshop addresses two related issues. First, our workshop seeks to […]

by Annabel Hancock (St. John’s College, Oxford) After over a year of preparation, the conference took place on 13-14th January 2023 in the Oxford History Faculty, and it was a great success! We were thrilled to welcome five eminent keynote speakers as well as 26 speakers and 20 attendees. Attendance was truly international with speakers from the US, Taiwan, Israel, Australia, The Netherlands, and Spain, to name a few places. There were also participants from a range of career stages with a large number of postgraduate students and ECRs speaking alongside renowned professors. Programme details can be found here. The call for papers generated a much greater response than expected, from researchers at a variety of career stages and disciplines. While it led to greater organisational challenges, this led to the decision to run parallel sessions, allowing the acceptance of a greater number of papers and wider conversations. This meant we had panels which focused on trust as an emotion and experience, on trust and its relationship to power, to professions, in trade, credit, and debt relationships, and in spaces and systems. The keynote speakers acted perfectly to direct the focus of the conference and encourage wide-ranging discussions. Dr Justyna […]

by the Past & Present editorial team If you an ECR historian (or know one) hoping to apply to our IHR, London Fellowship scheme this year please note that the competition for 2023-25 has now opened. The deadline is: 28th February 2023. For the application form please see the website of our partner the IHR, London.

Received from Mónica García-Fernández & Alba Martínez (Leeds) 27th January 2023, 09:00-17:45,  University of Leeds, venue tbc (will be sent to those registered prior to the event) Full Programme Registration 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. Samuel Agamu (Royal Holloway, London and Reading) Classics and Italian Colonialism  Conference Date: 22-24 June 2023 Conference Venue: Museo delle Civiltà, Rome Organisers: Samuel Agbamu (RHUL/Reading) and Elena Giusti (Warwick) in collaboration with Gaia Delpino (Museo delle Civiltà) and Rosa Anna Di Lella (Museo delle Civiltà) Confirmed Speakers: Dechasa Abebe (Addis Ababa), Andrea Avalli (Genoa), Sergio Brillante (San Marino), Elena Cadamuro (Genoa), Filippo Carlà-Uhink (Potsdam), Omar Coloru (Bari), Uoldelul Chelati Dirar (Macerata), Anna Maria Cimino (independent), Mia Fuller (Berkeley), Cristina Lombardi Diop (Loyola), Ghirmai Negash (Ohio), Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle), Rhiannon Noel Welch (Berkeley) Keynote Speaker: Lorgia García Peña (Tufts) Call for Papers Recent years have seen an increasing awareness of the relationship between constructions of the classical tradition and colonial projects. In conjunction with this, and in the context of movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter, calls have been made to reassess the silences, ambivalences, and elisions surrounding the implications of academic institutions and disciplines in histories of the slave trade, imperialism, and colonialism. Classics, often viewed as the academic keystone of European exceptionalism and white supremacy, has been the centre of much of such recent discussions. This conference aims to advance this […]

received from Clara Dijkstra (Cambridge) This two-day, in-person symposium organised by The Wiener Holocaust Library and the University of Cambridge, taking place at the Library on the 10th-11th May 2023, will bring together early career researchers with senior academics to discuss new directions in the study of the Roma genocide. In recent years, scholars have turned their attention to the experiences of persecuted Romani individuals and families, producing research that seeks to restore the agency and the voices of Roma victims of genocide, and contest narratives of anonymous mass victimhood. This has included increased research on resistance, memory, and memorialisation, as well as an interest in the post war legacy of the Roma genocide and its links to the persistent discrimination against Roma and Sinti communities. With a focus on Romani agency and Romani voices of the past, this symposium seeks to give a platform to new research on the Romani genocide that explores the methodological approaches of gender, microhistory, oral history, and family history. Increased research on gender has begun to illuminate the sexual violence and medical experimentation faced by Romani men and women. Microhistorical studies exploring local archives have emerged as a way to tackle the ‘silences’ on the Romani […]

by Dr. Peter Hill (Northumbria) The Ottoman Political Economies workshop was held in Cambridge on the 14th and 15th October 2022. The event was hosted by CRASSH and supported, in addition, by the Past and Present Society, the Economic History Society, and the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. Ottoman Political Economies began as an online reading group in 2020, during the Covid-19 lockdowns. It was conceived as a space to bring together scholars, mainly early in their careers, interested in questions of political economy in Ottoman history – an area often dominated by cultural and intellectual approaches. We had run a successful series of online meetings, but this Cambridge workshop was the first time the group had been able to convene in person. As in most of our previous meetings, the workshop was dedicated to discussing work-in-progress by members of the group. We wanted to keep the focus on collective discussion, and so asked for short papers which were circulated in advance. The authors then presented these only briefly, in 5-10 minutes, followed by brief comments by a discussant, and the floor was then open for general discussion. We also kept notes of this discussion as a record for […]

by the Past & Present editorial team In 2021 and 2022 the Past & Present Society was pleased to sponsor a series of workshops and a conference organised by the Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe project. Through a series of blog posts co-ordinated by Dr. Elena Woodacre the project’s Principal Investigator, participants in the events reported and reflected upon them. These blog posts are listed below: Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe Workshop One: Land by Dr. Katia Wright (AGC Museum, Winchester) Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe Workshop Two: Resources by Dr. Charlotte Backerra (Göttingen) Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe Workshop Three: Affinities & Administration by Dr. Cathleen Sarti (Balliol College, Oxford) Reflections Upon the Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe Conference by Dr. Elena Woodacre (Winchester) Past & Present was pleased to support these events 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’s 2022 Supplement (No. 16) Beyond Truth: Fiction and Disinformation in Early Modern Europe, edited by Dr. Emma Claussen and Dr. Luca Zenobi (Cambridge) has been published. The volume’s abstract is as follows: “Fake news and fabrications have always both intrigued and alarmed. Over and above this ubiquity, at particular historical junctures, awareness — and wariness — of fakery have reached such prominence in public consciousness as to turn it into a cultural phenomenon in its own right. This was the case in the early modern period when, similarly to today, a combination of new technologies and new audiences (with the rise of novels and newspapers and the exponential expansion of the reading public) brought about various crises of communication as well as opportunities for some of the people who lived through them. The telling of tall tales loomed large, both in terms of sheer quantity and in the level of concern raised about them, sparking new ways of thinking about truth and the literary and critical skills required to identify it. Drawing on a series of papers first presented at a conference in 2018, this Supplement examines fiction, disinformation and […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present was delighted to learn that Dr. Koh Choon Hwee (Los Angeles, California) has received an Honourable Mention in the 2022 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians article prize for an article in any field of history by a woman scholar. The award is for her article “The Ottoman Postmaster: Contractors, Communication and Early Modern State Formation” published in Past & Present No. 251 (May 2021). The comments from the Prize Committee read as follows: “Choon Hwee Koh impressed the committee with this paper discussing outsourcing of communication networks in the early bureaucratic age. Her study speaks beyond the Ottoman empire of its focus to scholars studying state-building and control in other periods and places.” To mark the honour of Dr. Maglaque’s work being recognised in this way, and to enable the widest possible number of people to read the article our publisher Oxford University Press has made “The Ottoman Postmaster: Contractors, Communication and Early Modern State Formation” free to read for a period of three months.