Received from Dr. Henry Miller (Northumbria University)

by The Margins to the Centre 2025 Organising Team

The Margins to Centre Conference 2025 was an undergraduate-organised conference which took place on the 24th of April 2025 at the University of York. This conference was organised with the primary goal being to provide an academic space to aid in amplifying the voices of marginalised communities throughout history. In addition to this, the conference aspired to enrich the field of historical studies by creating an inclusive, reflective, and interdisciplinary space for academics, students and scholars through curating discussions that bridge traditional scholarship with fresh perspectives. In doing so, we aimed to highlight the contributions of marginalised groups and to critique the lasting influence of dominant narratives and cultural memory which dominate countless academic fields.

Attendees pre-event, photograph by Bardia Bahrami, all rights reserved 2025

The conference was organised around the focal theme of ‘Belonging’. Our organising committee opted to split the conference into four main segments, each of which engaged with significant issues or topics related to the field of historical studies which we felt connected back to our theme of ‘Belonging’. The segments were as follows: Gender and Identity in Historical Perspectives, Marginalisation and Power: Dynamics of Exclusion and Resistance, Reassessing Marginalised and Underutilised Sources, and Colonialism and the Construction of ‘the Other.’ We also were fortunate enough to welcome Hifsa Haroon-Iqbal (OBE DL MPhil) who delivered a very personal insight into her experience as a British Muslim in contemporary Britain. Discussions to arrive at these topics took place over several weeks to ensure that this conference could accommodate for a wide range of conversations, in line with our driving intention of inclusivity.

Conference Committee presenting, photograph by Bardia Bahrami, all rights reserved 2025

Furthermore, the undergraduate-led structure of the conference provides a unique and valuable platform for junior scholars to gain invaluable experience, contributing and shaping the development of academic discourse. With reflection, we believe our undergraduate team offered nothing but strength to the planning and running of the conference as we could really offer a space in which all strata of academics would feel welcomed, from fellow undergraduate students to senior professors and advocates. The team is made up of undergraduate students with a passion for diversifying the formal academic space who seek to gain greater participation within the wider field and hope to bring a wide range of speakers to York, whom our attendees can learn from in an intimate and engaging setting.

However, we wholeheartedly extend our thanks to Prof. Simon Ditchfield and Dr. Lucy Sackville from the department. Their advice was integral in our understanding and experience of organising this event and their support was vital in its resounding success. Ultimately, the Margins to Centre Conference 2025 strove to create a space that not only celebrates diversity in scholarship but also actively reshapes the field to include a broader spectrum of experiences and contributions, past and present.

As this is an undergraduate-led event, we have approached undergraduate and postgraduate speakers to support the event and to present dissertation work, or other individual research they have not had the opportunity to pursue within their modules. We believe that by framing the event in this way it gives greater opportunity for undergraduates who are keen to progress in academia and pursue a PhD are given the opportunity to engage with and learn from leading academics within the field. By bringing together senior researchers with those at the beginning of their academic careers, we hope to nurture valuable connections between these groups and hold a space for productive conversations to take place.

Attendee views conference research poster display, photograph by Bardia Bahrami, all rights reserved 2025

A standout speaker within this category was our very own team member Stella Kindred who delivered a talk entitled ‘English Anchorites and their Communities in the High Middle Ages.’ The discussion of female rebellion through the harnessing of religious power in England following the Norman Conquest brought an energy and excitement to the commencement of the conference which only continued throughout the day. Following Stella, Professor Helen Smith delved into the world of Early Modern book printing and explored women’s centrality to the book trade. Rounding out our opening section we welcomed final year student Holly Tilling who delivered an excerpt of her dissertation research, providing a though-provoking and detailed insight into the ‘Textual Interactions between the querelle des femmes and Early Modern Female-Authored Heroidean Complaint.’

During our breaks the buzz of conversation in the air was a huge encouragement to the team that things were going smoothly. We would also like to extend our thanks to the people who contributed tri-folds of their research for people to read and discuss during these breaks. It was amazing for us to offer another way for people to present and share their work, without the additional pressure of presenting. These would not have been possible without the support of Past and Present, whose generous grant allowed us to provide these materials to students free of charge and created a space for fruitful scholarly conversation without an additional financial burden.

Attendee in front of part of the conference research poster display, photograph by Bardia Bahrami, all rights reserved 2025

Following this break Dr Emilie Murphy delved into the mobility of Early Modern Catholic Convents abroad and discussed the prevalence of translation and transmission of language and culture following the condemnation of Roman Catholicism in England. We also heard from Professor Indrajit Roy from the Politics department who offered a fresh perspective on the Global Politics of Hope and explored how imaginations of democratic renewal are becoming a focal point for struggles against autocracies and authoritarianism.

We next welcomed Professor Sara de Jong who presented her powerful work ‘We Are Here, Because You Were There: Afghan Interpreters in the UK.’ Organiser Kasey stated ‘Candidly, I was not too familiar with Sara’s work prior to the conference, but now having listened to her speak I am proud that we had such an integral woman of investigating marginalised perspectives included in the event.’ Predominantly, her talk included a video of Afghan Interpreters talking of their own experiences, which I felt was ingenious to discuss this topic. Having been able to hear from first hand experiences, Sara achieved exactly what we sought for the conference to achieve. The video shared experiences of Afghan interpreters who were employed by the British Army in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2021, and who then resettled to the UK in 2021. This invited vital discussions from the audience, asking Sara of her experiences in researching for this collaborative project, and even questioning her on current world events. Her work remains relevant to understanding how communities communicate and co-exist today, which only came from engaging with these marginalised perspectives. One of the only quarms of our organisation of the event is that we could not allow more time to discuss this thought-provoking project.

Profs. Sara de Jong and Indrajit Roy participating in a panel discussion, photograph by Bardia Bahrami, all rights reserved 2025

Following Sara de Jong we welcomed our keynote speaker Hifsa Haroon Iqbal (OBE DL MPhil) to the stage. Hifsa’s talk ‘Belonging in Modern Britain’ offered crucial insight into what it means to embrace your national identity and heritage. These insights and discussions are ever relevant to contemporary British society, and we feel privileged to have been able to listen to Hifsa at this event. Hifsa allowed us to listen to her story and shared her perspectives which are too often not openly discussed. Without the funding of Past & Present, we would not have been able to accept her contribution, and as such the conference would have been limited in achieving our goal of exploring marginalised histories. Amongst the academics included in the conference, predominantly our theme of ‘Belonging’ was discussed with relation to historical events. Whilst we as historians value how the past can inform the present and future, we felt it was equally important to highlight that these themes are equally felt in societies and communities today. Therefore, it was through the inclusion of Hifsa that we were able to achieve this goal and recognise the cruciality of identity and inclusion in the formations of communities in the present.

Hifsa Haroon Iqbal (OBE DL MPhil) delivering conference Keynote, photograph by Bardia Bahrami, all rights reserved 2025

Following Hifsa’s insightful personal account welcomed Dr Pragya Vohra to discuss the Coppergate Women, a figure especially pertinent to York’s history. Here she set osteological studies alongside the historical context of the period and theories of migration, in an attempt to try to understand how this individual lived and what that life might tell us about the society of which she was a part. Dr Shazia Jagot introduced the medieval scientific astrolabe into an entirely new context as she explored how this object, which fascinated the fourteenth-century English writer Geoffrey Chaucer, can connect contemporary and medieval Britain with al-Andalus, Cairo, and Baghdad.

To round off the conference, Dr Purba Hossain brought attention to the Untold Story of Bibee Zuhoorun. Zuhoorun was a female labourer who migrated from eastern India to Mauritius in the 1830s. As the earliest voice of female indentured labourers, Zuhoorun’s presence in the colonial archive offers a rare insight into early indenture migration, painting a story of deception, ill-treatment and injustice. Dr Hossain’s use of Zuhoorun’s testimony provided valuable understanding of the themes of difference and belonging on the colonial plantation. Closing the conference we welcomed third-year students Eloise Gibson and Libby Foxwell to present a piece they had written for our internal historical magazine, The Young Historian, entitled ‘A Western Phenomenon?: A Study of Witchcraft in Colonial Africa.’ This presentation aimed to recentre African witchcraft and its place in colonial history, due to its understudied position in western history.

Group photograph of the Conference Organising Committee, photograph by Bardia Bahrami, all rights reserved 2025

Overall, we were hugely proud of how the conference ran and the extensive discussions and conversations which took place throughout the day; however, time management certainly became the trickiest point to manage. We endeavoured to include as many perspectives as we possibly could. It was hugely significant for us as a committee that we offered a breadth of historical perspectives, time and events in order to discuss as many marginalised histories as we could. However, with this meant we had to be especially strict on timings, which became increasingly difficult when we were then able to listen to the talks and become engulfed in the interesting topics at hand. The panel formation of the talks hugely benefited the event, and arguably produced some of the best, and most engaging moments. Of course, with our intention of this conference, we wanted to ensure that the audience could leave feeling as if they had truly gained perspectives on topics and experiences, they would have been otherwise unfamiliar with. We are incredibly pleased with the outcomes of this conference and the space we created for such free-flowing and inclusive discussion. The future of interdisciplinary research and re-centring of marginalised histories is bright, and we are immensely proud to have contributed in some small way to this vitally important and growing field.

by Dr Mariana Bodnaruk (Masaryk University Brno), Dr Stephan Bruhn (German Historical Institute London), and Dr Michael Eber (University of Cologne)

On 22–23 May, the German Historical Institute in London hosted a conference titled ‘Trans Sainthood in Translation, ca. 400–1500’. Seventeen presenters from eight countries covered the translations and artistic depictions of the lives of the so-called monachoparthenoi. According to their legends, these saints were assigned female gender at birth but lived as monks in male monasteries. While most of their vitae originated in the Greek-speaking regions of the Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean, versions of their stories appear to have circulated in almost every Late Antique and Medieval Christian community. The conference focused on the five monachoparthenoi who received full-length biographies in both Greek and Latin (Eugenia*us, Euphrosyne*Smaragdus, Marina*us, Pelagia*us and Theodora*us), but papers also covered these vitae as they appear in Syriac, Coptic, Ge’ez, Church Slavonic, Old English, Old French, Middle High German and Old Norse. Visual depictions and relics from Constantinople, Cyprus, Palestine, the Balkans, Rome and Iberia were also explored (the programme is available here).

Although the stories were literary constructions written mainly by monastic authors, they had an original historical core and a long oral tradition. Evidence of historical gender-crossing is reflected in other sources from the Middle Ages and early modern times, such as monastic anecdotes, hagiographic iconography, and church and state laws. These narratives and images furnished models that shaped the gender subjectivities of their readers and viewers. While the stories of our five saints are fictional, they were not created or read as such in the Middle Ages and beyond. In their late antique contexts of production, as well as in their later translations and reception by Christian audiences across the broader Mediterranean and Europe, these texts were perceived as recounting “true” stories. Transgender saints were not only “real” to believers; they also received embodiment and possessed materiality through icons, shrines, and especially relics, such as those of Pelagia*us and Eugenia*us, the earliest and most popular of this group. It is this transmateriality of the gender-crossing saints, and the hopes the faithful connected with them as intercessors, that the conference participants discussed.

Some researchers have taken the ubiquity of these trans masculine saints as a sign of their insignificance. Until very recently, those few who had studied them did so almost exclusively within the limiting and pathologising framework of ‘transvestism’ or ‘cross-dressing’. By contrast, over the course of two days of lively discussion, a wide range of approaches to these saints emerged (which cannot be easily summarised here). While many authors, translators, scribes and artists working with these saints were keen to impose cisness and erase trans readings — by changing pronouns, erasing masculine names from manuscripts or depicting saints as nuns rather than monks — this erasure was never fully successful. Even in the most transphobic rewritings and depictions, our presenters usually found some evidence of slippage, suggesting that the authors and artists were, on some level, aware that treating these saints as ‘actually women the whole time’ simply does not work. Additionally, from Ethiopia to Italy to Iceland, we found many traditions that treated the saints’ monastic trans masculinity as a matter of fact rather than something that needed to be explained away.

It was not lost on any of us that this conference took place only a month after the Equality and Human Rights Commission had issued some guidance that essentially comes down to segregating trans people from public life: According to the guidance, it can supposedly be lawful to exclude trans people from all single-sex facilities. This meant that, at a conference covering a millennium of continuous presence of trans monks in ‘single sex facilities’ – i.e. monasteries –, many of our presenters could not be sure that there was any bathroom that they were technically allowed to use. While our small conference certainly doesn’t have the same reach as the EHRC, not to mention the global network of transphobic activists, we still hope that it has contributed to a counter-narrative that aids the fight for trans rights.

This conference was co-sponsored by the Past & Present Society, the Hagiography Society, the German Historical Institute, and the German Research Foundation (DFG).

by the Past & Present editorial team

Three of the 2023-25 Past and Present postdoctoral fellows Drs. Lamin Manneh, Ana Struillou and Malika Zehni (Institute of Historical Research, London) have edited a virtual issue of the journal on the subject of Immobility.

In their introduction they explain that:

“Increasingly, since the early years of the twenty-first century, some have questioned the relevance of historians’ ‘fetishization of mobility’ in an era of closing borders. This has led to greater attention being placed on systems of ‘regulation and intervention’ that shape global migration. Shifting away from the narratives centred on movement and fluidity, we argue that immobility is not a mere lack of movement: it is about the power relations and barriers that enforce, experience, and resist stillness. By delving into the archives of Past and Present, we aim to construct a conversation around the processes of enforcing, experiencing, and challenging immobility. We have found that immobility shapes the experiences of both the historical actors found in the journal and the historians and scholars who write these histories.”

Outlining the basis of their interest in the topic and why this should be a matter of interest to historians working in the contemporary moment.

Thanks to our publisher Oxford University Press all non-Open Access articles in the virtual issue are currently free to read.

If you are interested in previous virtual issues of Past & Present the full archive is avaliable here.

Past & Present logo, 2017 all rights reserved

by Kate Shore (Lincoln College, University of Oxford) and Dr. Fred Smith (Balliol College, University of Oxford)

Ultimately, what the workshop really highlighted is that, despite its location on the geographical periphery, England was an important part of European conversations about religious change. By changing our frame of reference and looking at the English Reformation through European eyes, we can not only gain a new understanding of the English Reformation itself – its significance, idiosyncrasies and legacy– but also encourage historians to think more carefully about the ways in which religious ideas propagate, interact and merge.

Past & Present was 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.

Past & Present logo, 2017 all rights reserved