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Since its founding in 1921, the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) at the University of London has seen students and teachers come together, socially and intellectually, to engage in lively academic seminars. But for what purpose and with what value?
Talking History provides a defence of the seminar as a central element in historians’ teaching, research and sense of community. Covering a range of the IHR’s long-running seminar series, the book presents the seminars as a local, national and international hub for scholarship that emerges from and is sustained by the ongoing learning practices of historians as scholars and people. It bears witness to a seminar culture of evolving, multifarious synergies between teaching, researching and learning, historiography and participation – intertextual, interpersonal, intergenerational and intercultural. Viewed as such, the seminars constitute a living tradition, stimulating and incorporating dynamic change over time to contribute not just to the development of historiography but to intellectual life more generally, often in conversation with major political events and cultural phenomena.
This original and significant book delivers fresh insight into the evolution of historical research and its role in wider society today.
‘Together, the contributors to this excellent book trace the evolution of the IHR's seminars across a hundred years, describe and evoke the ‘seminar culture’ that has always been so vivid and vital part of its purpose and mission, and candidly recognize the challenges that such a ‘seminar culture’ faces today. This is a very timely and very important work.’
— David Cannadine, President of the British Academy (2017–21) and Director of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London (1998–2003)
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Introduction
David Manning -
1 A History of the History Seminar: The ‘Active Life’ of Historiography at the Institute of Historical Research
David Manning -
2 The Italy 1200–1700 Seminar
Trevor Dean and Kate Lowe -
3 The Economic and Social History of the Early Modern World Seminar
David Ormrod -
4 The British History in the Seventeenth Century Seminar
Jason Peacey -
5 The British History in the Long Eighteenth Century Seminar
Penelope J. Corfield -
6 The Low Countries History Seminar
Ulrich Tiedau -
7 The Modern French History Seminar
Pamela Pilbeam with David Manning -
8 The Imperial and World History Seminar
Sarah Stockwell -
9 The Postgraduate Seminar in Theory and Method (1986–2008)
Rohan McWilliam -
10 The Women’s History Seminar
Kelly Boyd -
11 The IHR’s Seminar Culture: Past, Present and Future — A Roundtable Discussion
David Bates, Alice Prochaska, Tim Hitchcock, Kate Wilcox, Ellen Smith and Rachel Bynoth, and Claire Langhamer -
Afterword
Natalie Thomlinson