Spring 2020 Round Up

Staff News

Dr Claudia Kreklau and Dr Malcolm Petrie were shortlisted for the Teaching Award of Academic Mentorshop 2020 awarded by the St Andrews Students’ Association.

Dr Sandra Toffolo won a fellowship at ‘Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies’.

Dr Milinda Banerjee has accepted an invitation to be Associate Editor for the journal Political Theology.

Dr Rory Cox was appointed Secretary of the International Ethics section of the International Studies Association. Founded in September 1993, the International Ethics Section of the International Studies Association seeks to encourage scholarship and discussion in the field of ethics and international affairs.

Of potential use for staff and students: Dr Konrad Lawson has created several primary source guides for use by students in lockdown, compiling a collection of open access online resources, mostly in English, related to three themes in East Asian history: History of Taiwan, Modern History of Korea, and Missionary Perspectives on China.

Staff Activity

On 9 March Dr Chandrika Kaul participated in a discussion on ‘A Right to a Free Press?’ organised by the Forum for Philosophy, LSE.

On 4 April Dr Rory Cox contributed to The Times article ‘Coronavirus: Call to trust in Jesus is dangerous, says academic. On 8 April he was quoted in the article ‘Tanzania’s Leader Urges People to Worship in Throngs Against Coronavirus’ in The Wall Street Journal.

On 27 April Dr Justine Firnhaber-Baker presented an online lecture ‘The Jacquerie Revolt of 1358’ for the Middle Ages for Educators website.

On 4-5 June the School of History held four online sessions for its spring Research Day(s). On Thursday morning Prof Aileen Fyfe and Dr Rose Harris-Birtill (School of English, and also Editorial Officer at Open Library of Humanities) offered a session on “Open access publishing: are we ready?” and introduced the Open Library of Humanities. In the afternoon short research talks were offered by Dr Sarah Easterby-Smith, Dr Raluca Roman, Dr Bill Jenkins, and Prof Michael Brown. These continued in the two Friday sessions with short talks by Dr Montserrat Lopez-Jerez, Dr Milinda Bannerjee, Dr Anna Kelley, Prof Richard Whatmore, Dr Rosalind Parr, Prof Andrew Peacock, Dr Huw Halstead, and Dr Tanya Lawrence.

Publications

Banerjee, Milinda and Kerstin von Lingen. ‘Law, Empire, and Global Intellectual History: An Introdution’. Modern Intellectual History 17, no. 2 (June 2020): 467-70.

Banerjee, Milinda. ’Sovereignty as a Motor of Global Conceptual Travel: Sanskritic Equivalents of “Law” in Bengali Discursive Production’. Modern Intellectual History 17, no. 2 (June 2020): 487-506.

Connolly, Margaret. ‘John Shirley and John Gower’. In John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, edited by Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R.F. Yeager, 155-66. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2020.

Connolly, Margaret. ‘Reading Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’. In Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in England, edited by Marleen Cré, Diana Denissen and Denis Renevey, 131-156. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020.

Conte, Emanuele. ‘Roman Public Law in the Twelfth Century: Politics, Jurisprudence, and Reverence for Antiquity’. In Empire and Legal Thought: Ideas and Institutions from Antiquity to Modernity, edited by Edward Cavanagh, 189-212. Leiden: Brill, 2020.

Dawson, Tom, Joanna Hambly, Alice Kelley, William Lees, and Sarah Miller. ‘Coastal heritage, global climate change, public engagement, and citizen science’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America 117, no. 15 (April 2020): 8280-8286.

der Weduwen, Arthur and Andrew Pettegree. ‘How Dutch “Mad Men” of the 17^th century created the advertising industry’, The Conversation. 15 April 2020.

Easterby-Smith, Sarah. ‘Botany as Useful Knowledge: French Global Plant Collecting at the End of the Old Regime’. In Re-Inventing the Economic History of Industrialisation, edited by Kristine Bruland, Anne Gerritsen, Pat Hudson, and Giorgio Riello, pp. 276-89. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020.

Fyfe, Aileen and Anna Gielas. ‘Introduction: Editorship and the editing of scientific journals, 1750-1950’, Centaurus (E-pub ahead of print- 8 June 2020).

Gielas, Anna. ‘Turning tradition into an instrument of research: The editorship of William Nicholson’, Centaurus 16 (May 2020).

Graham, Elinor and Joanna Hambly. ‘A Tale of Two Fishing Boat Graveyards’, The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology  49, no. 1 (April 2020): 107-141.

Houston, Rab. ‘Material Culture and Social Practice: Archaeology and History in Understanding Europe’s “Celtic Fringe”’, European Review (E-pub ahead of print- March 2020).

Humfress, Caroline. ‘”Cherchez la femme!” Heresy and Law in Antiquity’, The Church and the Law 56 (June 2020): 36-59.

Jenkins, Bill. ‘Commercial scientific journals and their editors in Edinburgh, 1819-1832’, Centaurus (May 2020).

Kamusella, Tomasz. ‘Dreaming of Tannu-Tuva: Soviet Precursors to Russia’s hybrid warfare’. New Eastern Europe. 20 March 2020.

Kamusella, Tomasz. ‘New Illiberalism and the Old Hungarian Alphabet’. New Eastern Europe. 30 April 2020.

Kemp, Graeme. ‘Off to the Bar Chart Race(s): The Largest Print Centres Through Time (1450-165)’. Visualising History. 18 March 2020.

Marinov, Aleksander G. ‘Images of Roma through the Language of Bulgarian State Archives’, Social Inclusion 8, no. 2 (2020): 296-303.

Marushiakova, Elena and Veselin Popov. ‘Gypsy Policy and Roma Activism: From the Interwar Period to Current Policies and Challenges’,  Social Inclusion 8, no. 2 (2020): 260-264.

Marushiakova, Elena and Veselin Popov. ‘”Letter to Stalin”: Roma Activism vs. Gypsy Nomadism in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe before WWII’,  Social Inclusion 8, no. 2 (2020): 265-276.

Marushiakova, Elena and Veselin Popov. ‘Roma Identities in Eastern Europe: Ethnicity vs Nationality’. In Ciganos: Olhares e perspectivas, edited by Lopes Goldfarb, Maria Patricia, Marcos Toyansk, and Luciana de Oliveira Chianca, 39-64. Joao Pessoa: UPFB, 2020.

Mason, Roger. ‘1603: Multiple Monarchy and Scottish Identity’, History (E-pub ahead of print- 17 June 2020).

Murdoch, Steve and Kathrin Margarete Gertrud Zickermann. ‘”Providing for widows and orphans is pleasing to Almighty God”: Scottish Widows of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648)’, History Scotland (April 2020): 28-32.

Roman, Raluca Bianca. ‘From Christian Mission to Transnational Connections: Religious and Social Mobilisation among Roma in Finland’, Social Inclusion 8, no. 2 (2020): 367-376.

Rose, Jacqueline. ‘A Godly Law? Bulstrode Whitelocke, Puritanism and the Common Law in Seventeenth-Century England’, The Church and the Law 56 (June 2020): 273-287.

White, Sarah. ‘The Procedure and Practice of Witness Testimony in English Ecclesiastical Courts, c. 1193-1300’, The Church and the Law 56 (June 2020): 114-130.

Zahova, Sofiya. ‘”Improving Our Way of Life Is Largely in Our Own Hands”: Inclusion according to the Romani Newspaper of Interwar Yugoslavia’, Social Inclusion 8, no. 2 (2020): 286-295.

Postgraduate Spotlight: Per Rolandsson

Per Rolandsson is a third-year PhD student in Modern History, specializing in the intellectual and cultural history of the interwar period.

Per hails from Umeå, a Dundee-sized city located around 630 kilometres north of Stockholm, Sweden. He believes that this grants him a special affinity to Dundonians, or really any person from a peripheral city with circa 100 000 inhabitants (although this is not a very deeply held conviction, nor is it borne out of any real experience). Regardless, since first moving to St Andrews in 2015 for his MLitt in Intellectual History, Per has come to greatly appreciate the east coast of Scotland since first moving to St Andrews in 2015 for his MLitt in intellectual history. His postgraduate studies at St Andrews coincided with an increasing interest in the theory and philosophy of history: in particular, the intersection of intellectual conceptions of historical consciousness, its impact on political theory and the aesthetic dimension of historical writing. These research interests culminated in a dissertation on the historiographical concept of ‘the masses’ in early 20^th-century Germany. Per’s initial plan was to spend only one year living in Scotland. Proving that the ‘schemes o’Mice an’ Men’ often have little bearing on reality, he applied for and received an AHRC DTP fellowship in 2017, effectively moving back to Scotland one year after the completion of the MLitt.

Supervised by professors Caroline Humfress and Riccardo Bavaj, Per is currently in the third year of his PhD. His research explores the link between interwar German modernism and news media. Although plenty of ink has been spilled over the influence that the emergence of mass media had upon the modernist movements of the 20^th century, Per’s research diverges from the norm in its singular focus on news consumption and production. A broad survey of modernist writing — journalistic, essayistic, and philosophical — discloses modernism’s entanglement with both the production of news items, but also the discursive premise upon which news media was understood. The thesis put forth is that during the interwar-period, news media was thought to inaugurate a new sensation of time. This novel experience of time was predicated on the language of modernism. Moreover, our contemporary understanding of news media derives to a large extent from this modernist imaginary. In fact, the politically tumultuous years of 2017-2020 concurrent with Per’s research project have provided him with ample evidence that the current discourse surrounding news circulation is still rooted in modernism. Whenever a news item is framed as a historical event and is taken to have the potential for instantaneous mass mobilization, the language of interwar modernism is present.

In his spare time, Per enjoys hiking, cooking and reading. He is particularly fond of essayistic writing and social critiques. He has in the past contributed to the online populist political journal The New Pretender and hopes to one day resuscitate his own essay writing habit. It is unlikely to materialize in the near future due to the time-consuming nature of thesis writing, but Per is convinced that it is important to maintain a certain degree of aspirational self-delusion.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Per has returned to his native Umeå. As libraries remain partially open in Sweden, he will continue his research there, whilst enjoying a summer with plenty of midnight sunlight. If the pandemic situation permits, he will spend his fourth year at the University of Tallinn, participating in the ERC-funded project ‘Between the Times: Embattled Temporalities in Interwar-Europe’. Per is preparing for the research visit this summer by conducting a small book circle amongst friends on Baltic literature.

Publication Spotlight: Riches and Reform by Dr Bess Rhodes

Dr Bess Rhodes is a researcher with the Open Virtual Worlds team at the University of St Andrews. Here she writes about her new monograph Riches and Reform: Ecclesiastical Wealth in St Andrews, c. 1520-1580, available from Brill.

Photo Credit: Smart History

In June 1559 St Andrews witnessed a revolution. Inspired by the preaching of John Knox, discontented local residents joined with armed Protestant activists to purge the city of ‘all monuments of idolatry’. Religious images were burnt, altars smashed, and mass books destroyed. The upheavals were so drastic the ‘doctors’ of the university were shocked into silence, becoming ‘as dumb as their idols who were burnt in their presence’.

With astonishing speed St Andrews was transformed from Scotland’s Catholic religious capital (once praised as the second Rome) into a proudly Protestant community. In 1561 local officials boasted that St Andrews was ‘long’ reformed, and noted the prevalence of ‘sincere preaching’ and the abolition of ‘all public idolatry’. Not long after, in 1564, the St Andrews Kirk Session claimed that ‘a perfect reformed kirk’ had been ‘seen within this city by the space of five years’.

For a brief period it seemed as though St Andrews might become an ideal Protestant city and an example to the rest of Scotland. Yet the dream did not last long. As the elders of the kirk session were boasting of the perfection of their church, the Earl of Moray was already remarking on St Andrews’ ‘poverty and decay’. By 1593 the provost and bailies of St Andrews were regretting ‘the miserable estate and poverty whereunto the said burgh is presently reduced’, and complaining that ‘their whole common works, such as their pier and shore, their ports and causeways’ with which the ‘city of old was decorated, are altogether become ruinous and decayed’.

In St Andrews religious change was accompanied by economic crisis. Before the disturbances of 1559, St Andrews was Scotland’s fifth richest urban centre. Yet unlike other major east coast burghs (such as Dundee or Perth) its wealth was only partly built on trade. Instead, St Andrews profited from its role as the administrative heart of Catholicism in Scotland.

Praised as ‘chief and mother city of the realm’, pre-Reformation St Andrews was home to the kingdom’s most important cathedral and the seat of the country’s first archbishop. Its busy church courts brought a stream of litigants to the city, travelling ‘for to seek law’. Meanwhile scholars old and young came to the university to pursue ‘divine and human learning’.

For much of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries St Andrews seemed to be thriving, and the city saw an expansion in religious foundations. In the 150 years before the Reformation three new university colleges and two new friaries were established in St Andrews. Existing religious organisations also underwent development, with the parish church of Holy Trinity being completely rebuilt and major construction work taking place at the Cathedral (including the heightening and remodelling of the wall which still surrounds the Cathedral precinct).

This ecclesiastical building boom was funded by revenues drawn from across eastern Scotland. St Andrews’ religious institutions had estates spreading from Aberdeenshire down to the border with England. Major foundations such as the Cathedral, the Collegiate Church of St Mary on the Rock, and the university colleges of St Salvator, St Leonard, and St Mary profited from teinds (or tithes) diverted from more than fifty parishes in lowland Scotland. The Cathedral alone received more than 600 tonnes of grain a year, much of which was then processed at the abbey mills, including at a new watermill down by St Andrews Harbour (built by the Cathedral around 1518).

The financial arrangements of Scotland’s pre-Reformation Church have often been criticised. Yet they made a place like St Andrews possible, sustaining not merely major religious foundations, but supporting a wider service economy within the city. The system may have been flawed, but it was functioning, until torn apart by the upheavals of 1559.

When the Reformers embarked on their programme of religious transformation, many hoped that the wealth of the Catholic Church would be directed to worthy causes, ‘to hospitals, schools, and other Godly uses’. The reality proved less satisfactory. In the aftermath of 1559 the crown, local nobles, former churchmen, and the burgh council all carved up religious assets. Robert Pont, who briefly served as minister of St Andrews, later claimed that ‘from the year of our Lord 1560… the greatest study of all men of power of this land… has been… to spoil the kirk of Christ of its patrimony.’ Yet it was not just the powerful who contributed to the collapse of St Andrews’s religious economy. The post-Reformation period saw non-payment of rents and teinds on an unprecedented scale. With the archbishop gone, and the administrative structures of the Catholic Church abolished or disintegrating, even organisations which survived 1559 faced huge problems enforcing payment. Some, like St Salvator’s College, became caught up in litigation lasting decades; others resignedly concluded with the masters of St Leonard’s College that there was no point suing for non-payment as the ‘cost would over-gang the profit’.

The factors which undermined St Andrews’ religious economy were varied, but together they brought about one of the largest redistributions of property in St Andrews’ history. While certain individuals managed to ‘reap some earthly commodity’, as a community St Andrews became significantly poorer. Deprived of the wealth and protection of the Catholic hierarchy the city went into decline. By the seventeenth century visitors no longer marvelled at St Andrews’ splendour, but deemed the burgh ‘proud in the ruins of her former magnificence’.

Black Lives Matter and History at St Andrews: A US Historian Reflects on Race

Blog post written by Dr Emma Hart. Dr Hart has been at St Andrews since 2001 and is a historian of early America and the Atlantic world from 1500-1800.

Signs gathered at Holyrood after the Black Lives Matter protest in Edinburgh on June 7th 2020. Photo: Emily Betz

As a historian of the United States and its British colonial antecedents, I am technically among the better qualified members of the St Andrews history department to give readers some background to the protests against George Floyd’s murder by police, which started in the USA and have now spread around the world.

Indeed, from a scholarly perspective I can tell you in great detail how today’s police violence against African-Americans can be traced directly back to the eighteenth century. When White colonists became American citizens in 1783 they quickly got to work establishing an ‘internal police’ that was mostly designed to subjugate enslaved Africans. I can describe to you the many, many ways – visible and intentionally obscured – in which racism has been perpetuated by American institutions across the centuries. From eighteenth century laws making it difficult for African-Americans to own property and to trade, or even to get an education, to twentieth century housing policies that both devalued Black property and made it harder for Black people to get a mortgage.

But let’s not stop at the borders of the USA. I should also point out that it was Britain’s enthusiastic involvement in the slave trade that begun all this in the first place. That a statue memorializing slave trader Edward Colston still stood in the heart of Bristol until June 7^th 2020 is a good measure of how unsuccessful our own nation has been at dealing with these uncomfortable truths. After all, we only have to watch David Olusoga’s latest BBC “House Through Time” series, which focuses on a home in Bristol’s Guinea Street, while reflecting on the fate of twentieth century Black British immigrants to join the dots. In 1718 this house was built and lived in by slave traders and was home to Thomas, an enslaved person bought from Africa against his will and forced to work in domestic slavery. In other words, Bristol’s status as a historic port city makes it, like Glasgow, a place where the vast wealth accumulated by slave traders and traders in slave-made commodities is plain to see in the cityscape. Despite the contributions of Black people to the British economy and society from at least the 1500s onwards, the Windrush scandal has witnessed the UK government destroy the lives of many Black Britons by taking away their right to work, to healthcare, and to citizenship. How can we claim that the 300 years between these episodes constitute an end to racism?

Ultimately, such information is an essential part of educating ourselves – especially if we are White – about the deep roots of today’s protests.  It can give us a clue as to why we are still facing these issues in 2020, 401 long years since the first enslaved Africans went ashore in the English colony of Virginia. They are still with us because racism is still everywhere.  It has proven itself extremely tenacious in the face of centuries of heroic abolitionists, civil rights campaigners, America’s first Black President, and numerous talented British politicians of colour such as Diane Abbott and David Lammy. While we should celebrate their achievements, any such celebrations must be placed against the recognition that the struggle still continues, and it does so because White ruling elites are brilliant at holding onto their power.

Essential though this knowledge is, it is no longer enough just to know it.  After all, Black people have known it for centuries already. At the same time, White people mostly chose to deny the validity of the Black experience and even Black history while denying their own privilege. Much like the ‘thoughts and prayers’ that are offered in the wake of another gun massacre in the United States, accumulating an understanding of racism’s tenacious character is ultimately an empty gesture.

The action that we take needs to be far more substantial. With our White students, we need to educate ourselves about the discrimination based on race that is part of pretty much every time and place, and every field of interaction, in the past. But we must also acknowledge that these are merely our first steps on a long and winding road towards a less racist society.

To progress further down this road we have a lot of work to do, both individually and as part of the larger institutions and structures to which we belong. Here I speak as a White person, because we are the ones that need to do the work, not our (not nearly numerous enough) colleagues of colour who have already spent most of their lives dealing with racism on a regular basis. What should we do? This is a substantial list and you may not feel able to act on every point (I have certainly not managed it) but we can make a start:

1. We can educate ourselves. We need to read as much as we can about recent and contemporary Black experience as told by Black writers. The first Black Professor of History in the UK – Olivette Otele of Bristol University – has a good starting list for you here. If you tweet, search under #BlackintheIvory and follow as many BAME people as you can. If you have colleagues of colour, listen to their experiences when they share them but do not ask them to do the work of educating you.

2. We can lobby our institution to offer more than warm words about racism. We need St Andrews to meaningfully follow through on the Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion agenda that has recently been put in motion. This means insisting that course content embodies these values and is delivered by a racially diverse faculty to a racially diverse student body. We are a very long way from achieving this, but we must not throw our hands up or make excuses.

3. We can get comfortable with the fact that becoming an anti-racist is an ongoing journey.

4.  We can support the work of anti-racist organizations with donations or, if you have time, volunteering.

5. If you are a witness to racism, call it out.  But if you can’t, don’t beat yourself up about it, but take the opportunity to work out how you will do better next time. Look for racism too – you will not often notice it as a White person but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

I will sign off with the words of Ibram X. Kendri from his recent book How to be an Anti-Racist – ‘To be an antiracist is a radical choice in the face of…history, requiring a radical reorientation of our consciousness’.

Autumn & Winter 2019-20 Roundup

September 2019- March 2020

Staff News

Congratulations to Professor Rab Houston, winner of a ‘StAnd Engaged’ Public Engagement Award for Innovation for his project, ‘Promoting Mental Health Through the Lessons of History’. These prizes are awarded annually by the Public Engagement with Research (PER) team, with a judging panel consisting of both internal and external experts. The judges commended Rab’s project for its clear link between research and engagement, for its targeting of a variety of audiences including prisoners and mental health experts and for its innovative forms of dissemination.

Additionally, Professor Houston’s photo exhibition on criminal insanity in Victorian England at the National Records of Scotland received mentions in the ‘Encounters’ section of the August issue of the BBC History Magazine, as well as the Scotsman, Daily Mail, The Press and Journal, The Courier and others.

Many congratulations also to Dr Claudia Kreklau for winning the Richard Sussman Prize in the History of Science 2019 for her article ‘Travel, Technology, Theory: The Aesthetics of Ichthyology during the Second Scientific Revolution’ (German Studies Review, 2018). The prize is awarded by the Goethe Society of North America and was announced at the German Studies Association 43^rdAnnual Meeting in Portland, Oregon.

Congratulations to Professor John Hudson for being elected a Member of the Academia Europaea.

Staff Activity

On 19-22 September, 2019, Dr Montserrat Lopez Jerez gave two papers at the WINIR (World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research) 2019 conference in Lund, Sweden. Her papers were entitled ‘The roots of the East Asian miracle: the role of colonialism and extraction’ and ‘The economic phoenix of Asia: growth and shrinking in Vietnam’ (co-authored with Martin Andersson).

On 2 October Dr Lina Weber presented a paper at the Institute for Historical Research in London in their ‘History of Political Ideas/Early Career Seminar’ series, entitled ‘Britannia enslaved. National debt, foreign investors, and anticipated crisis in the eighteenth century’. On 24 October, she gave a presentation at the ‘Séminaire franco-britannique d’histoire’ in Paris, entitled ‘Political economy after Enlightenment. The case of Dugald Stewart’.

On 2 October Dr Chandrika Kaul was on the panel of BBC Scotland’s Debate Night. On 5-6 October she organised an international conference in St Andrews to mark the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Ghandi entitled ‘M.K. Gandhi and the Media‘.

On 25 October, Professor John Hudson spoke to the annual conference of the Sheriffs of Tayside, Central Region and Fife, with a paper entitled ‘Children and Law: Thoughts from the Middle Ages’.

On 26-27 October Dr Milinda Banerjee presented a paper entitled ‘Political Theology and Global Intellectual History: The Dialectics of Sovereignty and Democracy’ at the conference ‘Deprovincializing Political Theology: Postcolonial and Comparative Approaches’, at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich.

On 30 October Dr Chandrika Kaul delivered a public lecture as part of the Black History Month & CRER Scotland programme on ‘The Mahatma and the Media’ at Longmore House, Edinburgh.

On 8 November Dr Jacqueline Rose gave a lecture entitled ‘In search of common ground? Negotiating conformity and authority in the Tudor and Stuart Church’ at Westminster Abbey. She also gave a paper on ‘Civil religion and the Anglo-Saxon church’ to a conference on ‘Civil Religion from Antiquity to the Enlightenment‘ at Newcastle University of 24 October, and one entitled ‘Governing relationships: Councils, counsel, and the early modern polity’ at the conference ‘Transformations of the State in Ireland, c. 1600-c. 1900‘ at Hertford College, Oxford, on 25 September.

On 17 November Dr Chandrika Kaul was a contributor to the documentary Gandhi, de l’homme à l’icône, produced by Temps Noir, written by M. Kamdar and M. Damoisel and directed by  M. Damoisel.

On 20 November Dr Aleksandar Marinov took part in a podcast hosted by BBC’s The Next Episode entitled ‘Bring Gypsy, Traveller and Roma at Uni’.

On 29 November Professor Richard Whatmore gave a Max Weber Lecture at the European University Institute entitled ‘The End of Enlightenment and After’.

On 23-24 November Dr Sarah Easterby-Smith engaged in two public engagement events for Book Week Scotland entitled ‘Talking Archives’ and ‘Conversations with an Eighteenth-Century Scottish Gardener’. Then on 5 December she spoke on the topic of ‘History and the Herbarium’ at a workshop entitled ‘Powerful Stuff: Colonial Objects in a Decolonising World’ at the University of Edinburgh.

On 11 November Dr Konrad Lawson gave a talk at the workshop ‘Digital History: New Approaches in Historical Research’. On 6 December he gave an ‘Approaches to Spatial History’ workshop at the University of St Andrews.

On 4-5 December Dr Milinda Banerjee gave a talk entitled ‘The Refugee Political: Intellectual Histories of Postcolonial West Bengal’ at Osnabrück University (Germany). Afterwards he participated in a discussion on ‘Subaltern Knowledge at a Western Academy’.

On 14 January, 2020, Dr Aleksandar Marinov gave a talk for the National Assembly for Wales’ Holocaust Memorial Event on remembering the Roma Holocaust.

On 14 February Dr Rory Cox gave a paper entitled ‘Waterboarding as Torture- Why Studying History is Important to Terrorism Studies’ to the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, Postgraduate Workshop.

On 19 February Dr Raluca Roman gave a talk entitled ‘For faith and country? Narratives of national belonging within Roma-led and Roma-focused publications in interwar Romania and Finland‘ at the Modern International History Group, University of Sheffield.

On 9 March Dr Chandrika Kaul participated in a discussion on ‘A Right to a Free Press?’ organised by the Forum for Philosophy, LSE.

Recent Publications

Banerjee, Milinda. ‘Indianized Renditions of Jean Bodin in Global Intellectual History’. In Engaging Transculturality: Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies, edited by Laila Abu-Er-Rub, Christiane Brosius, Sebastian Meurer, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos and Susan Richter, 155-169. Abingdon, NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2019.

Beach, Alison and Isabelle Cochelin, eds. The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West: Origins to the Eleventh Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Beach, Alison, Shannong Li and Samuel Sutherland, eds. Monastic Experience in Twelfth-Century Germany: The Chronicle of Petershausen in Translation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020.

Bellis, Richard. ‘”As to the plan of this work…we think Dr. Baillie has done wrong”: changing the study of disease through epistemic genre in Georgian Britain’, The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science (2019). Advanced online publication.

Cox, Rory. ‘Religion and the Hundred Years War’. In The Hundred Years War Revisited: Problems in Focus, edited by Anne Curry, 85-110. London: Macmillan Red Globe, 2019.

der Weduwen, Arthur. ‘Boek van het Jaar. Vierhonderd jaar Nederlandse kranten. De Courante uyt Italien en Tijdinghen uyt verscheyde quartieren (1618)’, Jaarboek van het Nederlands Genootschap van Bibliofielen 26, no. 1 (2019): 27-57.

———–. ‘Booksellers, newspaper advertisements and a national market for print in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic’, in S. Graheli (ed.), Buying and Selling. The Business of Books in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2019): 420-447.

———– and Andrew Pettegree. The Dutch Republic and the Birth of Modern Advertising. Leiden: Brill, 2020.

Easterby-Smith, Sarah. ‘Recalcitrant Seeds: Material Culture and the Global History of Science’, Past and Present 242, Suppl. 14 (2019): 215-242.

Firnhaber-Baker, Justine. ‘Seigneurial Violence in Medieval Europe’. In The Cambridge World History of Violence. AD 500-AD 1500, edited by Richard W. Kaeuper and Harriet Zurndorfer, 248-66. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Fischer, Conan. ‘Germany, Versailles, and the Limits of Nationhood’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 30,no. 2 (2019): 398-420.

Frank, Sarah. ‘Meet the new empire, same as the old empire’: Visions and realities of French imperial policy in 1944’. In Reading the Postwar Future: Textual Turning Points from 1944, edited by Kirrily Freeman and John Munro, 79-95. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.

Fyfe, Aileen,  Flaminio Squazzoni, Didier Torny and Pierpaolo Dondio. ‘Managing the Growth of Peer Review at the Royal Society Journals, 1865-1965’, Science, Technology,  Human Values (2019): 1-25.

———–. ‘What the history of copyright in academic publishing tells us about Open Research’. LSE Impact Blog. 13 June 2019.

———–. ‘Scientific Publishing’. In Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (eds.), Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose.Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019.

Greenwood, Tim. ‘Armenian Space in Late Antiquity’. In Historiography and Space in Late Antiquity, edited by Peter van Nuffelen, 57-85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

———–. ‘Historical Tradition, Memory and Law in Vaspurakan in the era of Gagik Arcruni’, in E Vardanyan & Z Pogossian (eds.), The Church of the Holy Cross of Ałt‘amar: Politics, Art, Spirituality in the Kingdom of Vaspurakan. Armenian Texts and Studies, vol. 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2019): 27-48.

Halstead, Huw. ‘Reclaiming the land: belonging, landscape, and in situ displacement on the plain of Karditsa (Greece)’ History and Anthropology (2019).

Hart, Emma. ‘America has a unique 300 year old view of free trade—UK must recognise this to strike a deal’, The Conversation, 27 January 2020.

———–. Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Hill, Felicity. ‘General excommunications of unknown malefactors: conscience, community and investigations in England, c. 1150-1350’, in Studies in Church History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Hillenbrand, Carole. ‘Saladin’s “Spin Doctors”: Prothero Lecture’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 29 (Dec 2019): 65-77.

Houston, Rab. ‘Asylums: the historical perspective before, during, and after’, The Lancet Psychiatry (Dec 2019). Advanced online publication.

———–. ‘”The hard rind of legal history”: F. W. Maitland and the writing of early modern British social history’, in Michael Lobban (ed.), Law and Litigants in Early Modern English Society: Essays in memory of Christopher W. Brooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019): 58-78.

———–. ‘Material Culture and Social Practice: Archaeology and History in Understanding Europe’s “Celtic Fringe”’. European Review. Published online by Cambridge University Press. 23 March 2020.

Humfress, Caroline. ‘”Cherchez la femme!” Heresy and law in late antiquity’, in Studies in Church History 55. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Kamusella, Tomasz. ‘Antisemitism in Poland: Each Pole is a Jew (Too)’.  Wachtyrz.eu (blog). 28 October 2019.

———–. ‘Banishing Yiddish: On Tacit Antisemitism in Academia’. New Eastern Europe. 5 July 2019.

———–. ‘Belarusian Culture: Still a Terra Incognita: Review of Alhierd Bacharevič’s Maje Dzievianostyja (My 1990s)’. New Eastern Europe. 5 June 2019.

———–. ‘Between Politics and Objectivity: The Non-Remembrance of of the 1989 Ethnic Cleansing of Turks in Communist Bulgaria’, Journal of Genocide Research (14 Feb 2020). Online publication.

———–. ‘Between Silesiophobia and Polonophobia’. Wachtyrz.eu. 18 November 2019.

———–. ‘Bolgarija: oživitev nenavadnega kulta osebnosti’. Razpotja: revija humanistov Goriške 10 , no. 33 (2019): 52-56.

———–. ‘Dreaming of Tannu-Tuva: Soviet Precursors to Russia’s hybrid warfare’. New Eastern Europe. 20 March 2020.

———–. ‘Eighty years later: Under the map of Europe’. New Eastern Europe. 12 July 2019.

———–. ‘Hanging Portraits of “Traitors”: The Radicalization of the Polish Ethnolinguistic Nationalism’.  Wachtyrz.eu. 25 October 2019.

———–. ‘Is hot air mightier than states?’ New Eastern Europe. 12 December 2020.

———–. ‘Krupp in Greifswald: On the perils of forgetting about the Holocaust’. New Eastern Europe. 18 June 2019.

———–. ‘Mickiewicz and the Holocaust: An Alternative History’. Wachtyrz.eu. 11 November 2019.

———–. ‘The New Polish Cyrillic in Independent Belarus’ Colloquia Humanistica 8 (2019): 80-112.

———–. ‘Nobles and Serfs: The United Arab Emirates and Poland-Lithuania compared and why sunshine and newspapers don’t mix’, New Eastern Europe, 2 March 2020.

———–. ‘North Macedonia—A Surprise’. Wachtyrz.eu. 19 November 2019.

———–. ‘Polonia in Israel’. New Eastern Europe. 23 August 2019.

———–. ‘Polonization Is Back: Law and Justice in Katowice After 2018’. Wachtyrz.eu. 5 July 2019.

———–. ‘The Russian Okrainy and the Polish Kresy: objectivity and historiography.’ Global Intellectual History 4, no. 4 (2019): 347-368.

———–. ‘What’s next after Ukraine’s new language law?’ Harvard Ukrainian Studies. 17 July 2019.

———–. ‘Xenophobia and anti-Semitism in the Concept of Polish Literature’.  Wachtyrz.eu. 7 November 2019.

Kaul, Chandrika.  ‘Blighty Laughs its Way to Victory: A Video Interview with Chandrika Kaul’, Service Newspapers of World War Two. [Online]. Marlborough, UK: Adam Matthew, 2019.

———–. ‘”The Meek Ass between Two Burdens?” The BBC and India During the Second World War’. In Allied Communication to the Public During the Second World War, edited by Simon Eliot and Marc Wiggam, 203-22. New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

Lopez Jerez, Montserrat. ‘Colonial and Indigenous Institutions in the Fiscal Development of French Indochina’. In Fiscal Capacity and the Colonial State in Asia and Africa, 1850-1960, edited by Equot Frankema and Anne Booth, 110-136. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019.

———–. ‘The rural transformation of the two rice bowls of Vietnam: the making of a new Asian miracle economy?’, in Innovation and Development (March 2019).

Kemp, Graeme. ‘Off to the Bar Chart Race(s): The Largest Print Centres Through Time (1450-165)’. Visualising History. 18 March 2020.

Marinov, Aleksandar G. Inward Looking: The Impact of Migration on Romanipe from the Romani Perspective. New York: Berghahn, 2019.

———–. ‘The Rise of Protestantism and its Role within Roma Communities in Bulgaria Between the World Wars’. In  Between the Worlds: People, Spaces and Rituals, edited by Magdalena Slavkova, Mila Maeva, Rachko Popov, Yelis Erolova, 202-234. Sofia: Paradigma Publishing House, 2019.

Marushiakova, Elena and Veselin Popov. ‘Between Two Epochs: Gypsy/Roma Movement in the Soviet Union and in the Post-Soviet Space’. In Between the Worlds: People, Spaces and Rituals, edited by Magdalena Slavkova, Mila Maeva, Rachko Popov, Yelis Erolova, 360-385. Sofia: Paradigma Publishing House, 2019.

McHaffie, Matthew. ‘The “Just Judgment” in Western France (c.1000-c.1150): Judicial Practice and the Sacred‘, French History 33, no. 1 (2019): 1-23.

Mitchell, Gillian. ‘The Impact of Social Class on Parental Responses to Popular Music in Britain, c. 1955-1975’. In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class, edited by Ian Peddie, 35-58. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

Müller, Frank. ‘”Man heiratet für sich und nicht für die anderen.” Alexander van Hessen, Julie von Hauke und die Überwindung eines Skandals’. In Die Battenbergs: Eine europäische Familie, edited by Joachim Horn and Alexander Jehn, 93-109. Wiesbaden: Waldemar Kramer/Verlagshaus Römerberg, 2019.

Murdoch, Steve. ‘”It started off in Fife, it ended up in tears”: Scotland and the Thirty Years’ War’, History Scotland 2, vol. 20 (2020): 24-29.

———–. ‘Neutrality at Sea: Scandinavian responses to “Great Power” Maritime Warfare, 1651-1713’, in J. D. Davies, A. James, & G. Rommelse (eds.), Ideologies of Western Naval Power, c. 1500-1815 (New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2019): 244-261.

Nethercott, Frances. Writing History in Later Imperial Russia: Scholarshop and the Literary Canon. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Palmer, James. ‘The making of a world historical moment: the Battle of Tours (732/3) in the nineteenth century’,  Postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 10, no. 2 (2019): 206-218.

Peacock, Andrew. Islam, Literature and Society in Mongol Anatolia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

———–. ‘Politics, religion and the occult in the works of Kamal al-Dun, a vizier, ‘alim and author in thirteenth-century Syria’. In Syria in Crusader Times: Conflict and Coexistence, edited by Carole Hillenbrand. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

———– and Ismail Hakki Kadi. Ottoman-Southeast Asian Relations: Sources from the Ottoman Archives. Leiden: Brill, 2019.

Robinson, Majied. Marriage in the Tribe of Muhammad: A Statistical Study of Early Arabic Geneaological Literature. Berlin, De Gruyter, 2019.

Roman, Raluca Bianca. ‘Roman Identities, Territoriality, and the Process of Classification’. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 25, no. 2 (2019): 231-239.

Rose, Jacqueline, ‘Bulstrode Whitelocke and the limits of puritan politics in Restoration England’, in Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris, and John Marshall, eds., Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Mark Goldie. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2019.

Stella, Attilio. ‘The Summa Feudorum of MS Parm. 1227: a work by Iacobus Aurelianus (1250ca.)?’, Reti Medievali–Rivista 20, no. 2 (September 2019).

Stewart, Angus. ‘Hülegü: the new Constantine?’. In Syria in Crusader Times: Conflict and Co-existence, edited by Carole Hillenbrand, 321-35. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

Stevenson, Katie. ‘Heraldry, Heralds and Chaucer’. In I. Johnson (ed.), Geoffrey Chaucer in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019: 286-292.

Weber, Lina. ‘From Economic Reform to Political Revolution: The Language fo Dutch Patriotism’. In Languages of Reform in the Eighteenth Century: When Europe Lost Its Fear of Change, edited by Susan Richter, Thomas Maissen, and Manuela Albertone. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2019.

Whatmore, Richard. ‘Anarchists and Terrorists at Geneva and Waterford in the 1780s.’ Voltaire Foundation. 11 April 2019.

Whatmore, Richard. ‘David Armitage’s Civil Wars: A History in Ideas: enlightenment and after’. Global Intellectual History 4, no. 3 (2019): 330-333.

———–. ‘Luxury and decadence’. In Decadence and Decay: From ancient Rome to the present, edited by Kurt Almqvist and Mattias Hessérus, 37-48. Stockholm: Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, 2019.

———–. Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.

White, Sarah. ‘Thomas Wolf c. Richard de Abingdon, 1293-1295: a case study of legal argument’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (2019).

Postgraduate Spotlight: Daniel Leaver

Daniel Leaver is a second year PhD student. His research focuses on the politics of North Sea oil in post-war Britain.

Originally from the great city of Newcastle upon Tyne just south of the border, I first came to St Andrews as an undergraduate in 2010, graduating in Modern History in 2014. A two-year venture into the real world convinced me it was not a place I wanted to spend much time, and I therefore returned to St Andrews for an MLitt in Scottish Historical Studies in 2016. Following this I began a PhD in 2018, working under the supervision of Dr Malcolm Petrie and generously funded by the Strathmartine Trust for Scottish History.

My doctoral studies examine the politics of North Sea oil in Britain during the sixties and seventies. As my PhD has progressed, I have increasingly realised that there are many important debates about this generally unloved period of post-war history where the topic can act as a fascinating case study.  For example, interest in the potential riches of the North Sea during Harold Wilson’s 1964-70 government is, I believe, an under-appreciated element in that government’s interest in new technologies and the modernisation of British industry. I am currently researching the extent to which Edward Heath’s government realised that North Sea oil offered a potential solution to the ‘energy crisis’ of the early seventies, particularly within the context of prolonged industrial disputes with the National Union of Mineworkers. And while the familiar issue of oil invigorating the cause of Scottish nationalism during the 1970s is an important element of the subject, my thesis is an opportunity to consider the extent to which the arrival of oil played a role in the other great constitutional change of the decade, namely Britain’s entry into the European Community. The ultimate aim is to try and provide a new perspective on a period of political, constitutional, and industrial change which puts the arrival of a new, indigenous source of energy at its centre.

Something I have relished about the St Andrews PhD experience is the opportunity to build a rounded academic CV and to engage in collaborative work. I am a PG Teaching Assistant on the MO2008: Scotland, Britain and Empire module offered by the School, something I thoroughly enjoy and would encourage all new PhD students to involve themselves in if they can. I am also a Research Assistant on the Bibliography for British and Irish History project with fellow PhD student Chelsea Reutcke, and last August co-organised a successful one-day conference on the theme of ‘Ideology and Identity in Post-War Scotland’ with Sarah Leith. This year I am the intern for the Institute of Scottish Historical Research, the main duty of which is organising our ever-popular annual Reading Weekend at the Burn, Edzell.

Away from my work I play for the University Pool and Cue Sports club and have served as Men’s Captain this year. My ‘career’ highlight thus far has been representing Scotland at last year’s Student Home Internationals in Dublin. The trip, of course, included an historical morning before the flight home visiting the General Post Office museum! In the summer months I can regularly be found (much to my supervisor’s disapproval) enjoying a round of golf on the Links. Sadly, sharing a flat with a scratch handicapper has not led to any magical improvements in my game. When not working, or on the table or the golf course, I can usually be found at home cooking or in one of St Andrews’ many pubs, following the highs and (mostly) lows of Newcastle United.

Publication Spotlight: Marriage in the Tribe of Muhammad: A Statistical Study of Early Arabic Genealogical Literature

Blog written by Dr Majied Robinson

The first problem you face when studying the life of Muhammad is the lack of contemporary evidence. There is the Qur’an, and possibly a political agreement he made with the tribes of Medina, but aside from that no written sources whatsoever. What we do have however are thousands and thousands of stories about his life written centuries later.

The discipline of early Islamic history has (thankfully) moved on from either believing or disbelieving this material in its entirety. These days, academic historians sift through these stories looking for oddities, connections, and patterns, some of which may tell us something about the period in which they were composed.

One such process is undertaken in my book Marriage in the Tribe of Muhammad. The focus here is the Nasab Quraysh (tr: The Genealogy of the Quraysh), a book that stabilised into a written format at some point in the 830s CE. It purports to record the child-bearing marriages of Muhammad’s tribe of the Quraysh, and over the course of some 400 pages details hundreds of these relationships, linking together nearly 3,000 named men, women, and children.

I began my research with the idea that some sort of statistical analysis of these relationships would be useful. At this early stage, my assumption was that the book was of late composition and the pattern of relationships recorded would reveal the author’s context of 9^th century Medina. What I found, however, was something startlingly different: the patterns I was uncovering were clearly correlated to events occurring during the life of Muhammad and the first Muslims, and in some instances went against later orthodoxies of Islamic origins. I eventually concluded that these records were not a later imagining of the past – they were the actual marriage records of people living at the time of Muhammad.

Key to this study was the concubine, the nameless, non-Arab slave woman who is referred to only as umm walad (tr: mother of a child) in the text. By structuring the data generationally and tracking the occurrences of slave mothers over time, I was able to show that the concubine was completely absent before the time of Muhammad yet when with the arrival of Islam we find that more and more children are being born of these slave women. This gets to the point in the middle of the 8^th century that they eventually account for the majority of children born amongst members of this tribe, and they remained the predominant form of elite marriage right into the 20^th century.

On one level this is understandable: the time of Muhammad coincided with the Islamic conquests which brought with them enormous numbers of slaves as booty. We would expect this to change marriage behaviour. But this finding is based on a source that is of late composition using novel statistical methodologies. By proving the early provenance of the data and the efficacy of the methodology we are now able to read not just this source in a new fashion but apply our findings to other Islamic historical sources that use genealogical literary forms. It also allows us to look within the Nasab Quraysh at marriages between men and free Arab women. I discuss some of the directions that this could take us in the later chapters of the book.

Postgraduate Spotlight: Lauren Holmes

Lauren Holmes is a first year doctoral student of Modern History and Art History. Her research focuses on modernism and the cultural history of migrant artists in twentieth century Britain.

Growing up in London, Lauren spent her teenage years lurking in art galleries and reading about the lives of others through her never-ending book collection. She became increasingly intrigued by the history of the spaces around us as result of volunteer work at William Morris’ Red House in South East London and a summer spent in employment at Buckingham Palace. Her desire to pursue these interests in more depth gradually became clear. She made the decision to move to St Andrews for her undergraduate degree in Modern History and quickly returned for her Masters having fallen in love with our little seaside town.

During her time as an undergraduate, she grew steadily more interested in both German and British social and cultural history. She sees spatial history as a means of interpreting this. Her masters studies led to a dissertation on the artistic culture of ‘alien’ internment camps in Britain. This project was the catalyst for a newfound curiosity about these lost figures of British art and the place they found within their new environment following their release.

Lauren is currently approaching the end of the first year of her doctoral research after her two-year break from studying. Her return to academia sees her undertaking an interdisciplinary project, working between the Schools of History and Art History under the supervision of Professor Riccardo Bavaj and Dr Sam Rose, to study the impact of German-speaking émigré artists on the British art scene from the 1930s onwards. Despite many of these individuals enjoying success in their careers in continental Europe, relatively little is known about their time in Britain. She hopes to find any forms of influence they may have had on the British art scene- both nationally in terms of artistic content and style and more locally through teaching, interaction, exhibition, and collaboration. Already, this topic is provoking questions relating to the entanglement between modernism, identity, and the experience of migration.

Before pursuing her PhD, Lauren trained as a tattoo artist and continues to work in this field alongside her research, which allows her to indulge her two passions simultaneously. She hopes to use her work to help bridge the gulf between tattoo art and conventional art history, as she believes that each has much to offer the other. She also enjoys painting, podcasts, and pets of any kind. She plans to spend the next 18 months travelling to archives across Britain, Germany, and Switzerland in search of clues about the lives of émigrés in Britain.

SaintsLGBT+ Exhibitions to Mark LGBT+ History Month 2020

Logo from https://www.saintslgbt.com/

We’re delighted to publish this guest blog post written by Lauren Reeves on behalf of SaintsLGBT+, detailing the two fantastic exhibitions they are staging in collaboration with the University Library as part of QueerFest and LGBT+ History Month:

February is LGBT+ History Month here in the UK. Since 2005, when Schools OUT organized the first ever LGBT+ History Month in Britain, we have celebrated the abolition of Section 28 by promoting the visibility of Queer identities both in the past and in the present. In collaboration with QueerFest, the University of St Andrews Main Library will be hosting two exhibitions of local LGBT+ history: Read You, Wrote You (sponsored by the Glasgow Women’s Library) & The Memories Project.

Read You, Wrote You is a selection of LGBT+ zines and magazines on loan from the “Lesbian Archives” of the Glasgow Women’s Library. The purpose of this display is to enable the students and faculty of St. Andrews to discover and celebrate the recent history of pride in the UK. This collection will address: trans rights & issues, queer visibility, intersectionality, queer black history, putting the femme in feminism, and much more.  

The Memories Project takes a more intimate look at queer stories from within our St Andrews community. According to Natalie Pereira, the brave and ambitious curator of this event, the ‘project aim is to tell the stories of everyday queer people in St Andrews through a selection of portraits, accompanied by personal anecdotes’. Students & faculty have kindly volunteered to discuss their individual experiences of being LGBT+, queer life in St Andrews, and their political understandings. 

In addition to these two displays, the university library will be gathering a number of its LGBT+ books and films into a central book rack for visitors to check out & take home to show support for queer writing and publishing. 

Read You, Wrote You will be on display on the 2nd floor of the Main Library from 7 February to 16 February.  Memories will also be found there (immediately to the left as you enter the Main Library) for the duration of the month. 

LGBT+ History Month 2020

Logo from https://lgbtplushistorymonth.co.uk/

This year, once again, the School is marking LGBT+ History Month in a number of ways.

We’ve teamed up with the University Library, which will display the seven rainbow posters celebrating important historical figures, objects, and moments in LGBTIQ+ histories and the history of sexuality that we put together last year. You can catch these displays on screens throughout the library for the whole month of February.

In addition, we’ve handed over the list of recommended texts on LGBTIQ+ histories and the history of sexuality, which colleagues have been compiling and adding to for the past three years. These books will be showcased on dedicated shelving on the ground floor of the library and are available for anyone to take out and read.  The idea is that as books are picked up and checked out, the library will continually replenish the shelves with more books from the list throughout the month.  Please do look out for this selection of reading, curated by staff and PhD students in the School – it would be great to see as many of these texts as possible taken out and read during LGBT History Month!

We’re also hoping to stage a student-led activity towards the end of the month, currently being planned with the School of History President and the History Society – watch this space and the usual communication channels for more information!

In addition, SaintsLGBT+ are staging two exhibitions as part of Queerfest which will be hosted by the library.  The first, Read You, Wrote You, displays a fascinating selection of LGBT+ zines and magazines on loan from the fabulous Glasgow Women’s Library. The second, The Memories Project, is an intimate exhibition of portraits and anecdotes in which St Andrews staff and student discuss their everyday experiences of queer life and being LGBT+ in St Andrews. Both can be found on the 2^nd floor of the Main Library (near the entrance). Read You, Wrote You will be exhibited from 7^th – 16^th February; The Memories Project will be there for the whole month.