Received from Clara Dijkstra (Christ’s College, Cambridge) Date: 10th-11th May 2023 Location: The Wiener Holocaust Library, London (WC1B 5DP) Co-convenors: Dr Barbara Warnock, The Wiener Holocaust Library, Clara Dijkstra, The Wiener Holocaust Library and University of Cambridge, Dr Celia Donert, University of Cambridge This two-day, in-person symposium, organised by The Wiener Holocaust Library and the University of Cambridge, will be held at the Library 10 – 11 May 2023. It will bring together early career researchers and senior academics to discuss new directions in the study of the Roma genocide. Day 1 10:00 – 11:30: Panel 1, Microhistory (1) Chair: Celia Donert Grégoire Cousin: ‘The fate of the Roma deported to Suha-Balca farm: writing a collective history of the victims’ Anna Míšková: “The Return Unwanted’, the story of one family against the background of Nazi persecution in the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’ Paula Simon: ‘A mosaic of sources: Writing a microhistory of the Samudaripen in Niš, Serbia’ 11:45 – 13:15: Panel 2, Microhistory (2) Chair: Barbara Warnock Petre Matei: ‘Roma women’s petitions to rescue their deported families: A case study from Romania’ Michala Lônčíková: “Detention Camp for Gypsies’ in Dubnica nad Váhom in the Romani testimonies from the compensation files of Slovakia’ Laura Stoebener: ‘Thirteen Dossiers: Survivors […]

Overview Dates and Times: 12:30 27th June 2023 – 19:00 28th June 2023 (UK time) Location: University of Glasgow / Online This workshop, focusing on Indigenous histories of enslavement and displacement, is one of the first of its kind in the UK, and it aims to bring Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous histories to greater attention of students and researchers and highlight the ways in which these histories have traditionally been sublimated by the majority of historical subdisciplines. This workshop speaks to urgent questions about the exclusion of Indigenous peoples and perspectives from mainstream academic scholarship and aims to promote Indigenous histories in the UK, to address the afterlives of Indigenous enslavement and ongoing process of settler colonialism, and to consider the legacies of these histories in the UK today. We seek to make space for researchers – especially researchers who are Indigenous from postcolonial and contemporary settler states – to discuss the histories and legacies created by forced migrations and the critical fissures created by colonial pasts and presents. This space is intended to bring together historians and interdisciplinary scholars of Indigenous histories, broadly defined, from around the world, and for it to be the start of an ongoing conversation about Indigenous […]

received from Dr. Guillemette Crouzet (European University Institute) and Dr. Eva Miller (University College London) Dates: 25th – 26th May 2023 Times: 10:00 – 18:15 (25th May) 9:30 – 18:30 (26th May) Location: Occulus 0.04, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL Programme (html) Programme (pdf.) Registration Registration is required for attendance at the conference. There is a small conference fee of £5. The conference will be in person only. The final panel discussion, ‘Whose Heritage?’ is open to all and does not require registration. Overview Since Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 with a cadre of scientific experts, the Middle East has been framed as the cradle of the world past: the place where civilization began, burgeoning with antiquities, where ancient history was visible in the landscape—or could be made so through the right kind of labour. This framing continues to affect heritage politics and international relations in the region. This conference explores how historical consciousness about the Middle East was reshaped in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and new senses of its ancient past forged through excavation and exegesis of traces of ancient civilisations. How did the emerging disciplines of archaeology and ancient history shape the modern region? How […]

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 […]