Creative History in the Classroom Workshops, September 2022-January 2023. (Online)

This series of workshops will reflect on how history lecturers, broadly defined, engage with and use creative methods in the higher education classroom. We know that history is a creative endeavor. Historians are storytellers who not only write history, but also tell a story of the past through the creative curation of archival sources.  When… Continue reading Creative History in the Classroom Workshops, September 2022-January 2023. (Online)

‘I’ve never read Dickens’: Being a Dyslexic Victorian Historian

This paper was given at British Association of Victorian Studies annual conference in 2022. There will be dyslexic errors and quirks. It was at a previous BAVS conference that I confessed that I had never read the novels of Charles Dickens. It was in response to someone’s observation, during an afternoon coffee break, that this… Continue reading ‘I’ve never read Dickens’: Being a Dyslexic Victorian Historian

Assessing Creatively, or why I’ve embraced the #unessay

This post forms the basis of a presentation I gave at the Royal Historical Society and History UK’s ‘New to Teaching Event’ on 10th September 2019. What is the Creative Assessment?  For the past six years, third-year students taking my ‘Victorian Cities’ module have been asked to submit a creative assessment. They can produce either… Continue reading Assessing Creatively, or why I’ve embraced the #unessay

#thanksfortyping & the invisible labours of academic work

I was intrigued to scroll through the hashtag #thanksfortyping last weekend. As I paused between marking essays, new tweets had been uploaded all reminding us that wives have played a part in producing their husband’s academic work. To adapt a famous quote ‘Behind every great academic, there is a women’.  Male historians were no exception as… Continue reading #thanksfortyping & the invisible labours of academic work

Reuniting the nation: can the Victorians show us how to settle a segregated society?

The terms ‘divided’, ‘segregated’, and ‘separated’ have increasingly been used to describe British society in recent months after the divisive campaign over whether to remain in the EU. Journalists now speak with louder voices about a geographical divide between North and South; London and the rest of the Britain; rural and urban. Prior to Brexit,… Continue reading Reuniting the nation: can the Victorians show us how to settle a segregated society?