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Ancients and Moderns
81st Anglo-American Conference of Historians
5-6 July 2012
Senate House, London

Registrations are now open for this year’s Anglo-American Conference of Historians, this year on the theme of 
Ancients and Moderns.

With the Olympics upon us in the UK it seems an appropriate moment to think more broadly about the ways in which the classical world resonates in our own times, and how successive epochs of modernity since the Renaissance have situated themselves in relation to the various ancient civilisations. From political theory to aesthetics, across the arts of war and of peace, to concepts of education, family, gender, race and slavery, it is hard to think of a facet of the last millennium which has not been informed by the ancient past and through a range of media, including museums, painting, poetry, film and the built environment. The Institute’s 81st Anglo-American conference seeks to represent the full extent of work on classical receptions, welcoming not only those scholars who work on Roman, Greek and Judaeo-Christian legacies and influences, but also historians of the ancient kingdoms and empires of Asia and pre-Colombian America.

Our plenary lecturers include: Paul Cartledge (Cambridge), Constanze Güthenke (Princeton), Mark Lewis (Stanford), Sanjay Subrahmanyam (UCLA) and David Womersley (Oxford).

For programme and registrations details, please visit www.history.ac.uk/aach12 or contact the IHR Events Office at AncientsandModerns@lon.ac.uk or on 0207 862 8756.

The University of London is an exempt charity in England and Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (reg. no. SC041194)

Time: Tuesday, 21 February, 5.15 pm GMT

Venue: ST276 (Stewart House, second floor) and streamed live on the web at historyspot.org.uk

Magnus Huber (Giessen), 'The Old Bailey Corpus: Spoken English in the 18th and 19th centuries'

On Tuesday Magnus Huber will be talking about the use of historical court records in the investigation of language change.The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, were published between 1674 and 1913 and constitute a large body of texts from the beginning of Present Day English (almost 200,000 trials, ca. 134 million words). The Proceedings were digitalized by the social historians Robert Shoemaker (University of Sheffield) and Tim Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire) and are searchable at the excellent Old Bailey Proceedings Online (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/), which also provides detailed background information on the Old Bailey and the publication history of the Proceedings.

This talk reports on a project that turned the Proceedings into the linguistic Old Bailey Corpus (OBC). Corpus linguistics relies on the statistical analysis of large collections of electronic texts to investigate language variation and/or language change. In the absence of recorded speech samples before the invention of the phonograph, language historians have turned to written text types that are close to spoken language. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey are particularly suitable for the study of spoken English as they were taken down by shorthand scribes, and their verbatim passages are arguably as near as we can get to the spoken word of the 18th and 19th centuries. The OBC identifies about 114 million words as direct speech from the 1720s onwards, of which 22 million words have received detailed mark-up for sociolinguistic (sex, profession, age, residence of speaker, role in the court-room) and textual variables (the shorthand scribe and publisher of individual Proceedings).

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The IHR Seminar in digital history is actively engaged in presenting and discussing new methodologies which have been made possible through the development of computational methods for the study of history. Further information can be found on the IHR Seminar page at http://www.history.ac.uk/events/seminars/321.  Follow us on twitter @IHRDigHist or join the mailing list for seminar announcements: http://groups.google.com/group/ihr-digital-history-seminar-announce

CALL FOR PAPERS

81st Anglo-American Conference of Historians: Ancients and Moderns
Thursday 5th and Friday 6th July 2012
Senate House, London

Dear Colleague

May I draw your attention to the Call for Papers for next year’s Anglo-American conference of Historians which is taking Ancients and Moderns as its theme. Full details of the conference can be found at www.history.ac.uk/aach12. In order to ensure we get as full a range of topics and speakers as possible we have extended the deadline for the Call for Papers to 9th January 2012. Please do pass on this information and circulate conference details to anyone who might find it of interest.

The Institute’s 81st Anglo-American conference seeks to represent the full extent of work on classical receptions, welcoming not only those scholars who work on Roman, Greek and Judaeo-Christian legacies and influences, but also historians of the ancient kingdoms and empires of Asia and pre-Colombian America. Our plenary lecturers include: Paul Cartledge (Cambridge), Constanze Güthenke (Princeton), Mark Lewis (Stanford), Sanjay Subrahmanyam (UCLA) and David Womersley (Oxford).

Proposals for individual papers, panels (of up to three papers and a session chair) and roundtables are invited. Please send a half-page abstract to the IHR Events Officer at AncientsandModerns@lon.ac.uk by 9th January 2012. Acceptance of proposals will be confirmed by 20th January 2012 and the full conference programme published at the end of January. Registrations open on 1st February 2012. For any queries, please contact the IHR Events Office at IHR.Events@sas.ac.uk on 0207 862 8756.

Best wishes

Professor Miles Taylor
Director, IHR

CALL FOR PAPERS
Ancients and Moderns:
81st Anglo-American Conference of Historians

5-6 July 2012
Senate House, London

With the Olympics upon us in the UK it seems an appropriate moment to think more broadly about the ways in which the classical world resonates in our own times, and how successive epochs of modernity since the Renaissance have situated themselves in relation to the various ancient civilisations. From political theory to aesthetics, across the arts of war and of peace, to concepts of education, family, gender, race and slavery, it is hard to think of a facet of the last millennium which has not been informed by the ancient past and through a range of media, including painting, poetry, film and the built environment. The Institute’s 81st Anglo-American conference seeks to represent the full extent of work on classical receptions, welcoming not only those scholars who work on Roman, Greek and Judaeo-Christian legacies and influences, but also historians of the ancient kingdoms and empires of Asia and pre-Colombian America. Our plenary lecturers include: Paul Cartledge (Cambridge), Constanze Güthenke (Princeton), Mark Lewis (Stanford), Sanjay Subrahmanyam (UCLA) and David Womersley (Oxford).

Proposals for individual papers, panels (of up to three papers and a session chair) and roundtables are invited. Please send a half-page abstract to the Events Officer, Institute of Historical Research at AncientsandModerns@lon.ac.uk by 1 December 2011. Acceptance of proposals will be confirmed by 31st December and the full conference programme published at the end of January. Registrations open on 1 March 2012. Further information on the conference can be found at www.history.ac.uk/aach12.

On behalf of the 2012 Anglo-American Conference Programme Committee:

Hugh Bowden, King’s College, London
Catherine Edwards, Birkbeck College, London
Mike Edwards, Institute of Classical Studies
Rosemary Sweet, University of Leicester
Miles Taylor, Institute of Historical Research
Giorgios Varouxakis, Queen Mary University of London

2011 Anglo-American Conference: Health in History

29th June – 1st July 2011
Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, London WC1H 0XG
www.history.ac.uk/aac2011
Supported by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society of Medicine

This year, the Institute of Historical Research will be holding its flagship event, the Anglo-American Conference, on the subject of Health in History. The history of medicine and of human society in sickness and health is an ever widening window through which the present can view the past. The study of the ways in which societies over time and at war and in peace have defined and treated their ‘sick’, the changing content and status of medical expertise and ethics, and those episodic moments when the globe has been transformed by epidemic, panic and panacea is now an integral part of mainstream history.

The medical humanities are now critically placed in most cultures at the meeting point of research and social policy. The 80th Anglo-American Conference of Historians will feature papers and panels across all periods and areas of the history of medicine. Plenary lecturers include David Arnold, Joanna Bourke, Samuel Cohn, Mary Fissell, Monica Green, Helen King and Paul Starr. The conference will also feature a Publishers’ Fair featuring major international publishers such as Oxford University Press, I B Tauris and Wiley-Blackwell among many others. A Policy Forum organised by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine will also be taking place during the conference, with key academic and professional health experts discussing the role played by historians in the policy environment.

The 3-day conference will be taking place just around the corner from Senate House at the Brunei Gallery, part of the School of Oriental and African Studies on Thornhaugh Street, London. A wine and canapé reception will also be held on Friday evening at the Wellcome Collection (Euston Road, London) and will feature a private viewing of their latest exhibition, ‘Dirt’.

For programme and registration details, please visit http://www.history.ac.uk/aac2011 . For any queries, please contact the IHR Events Office at healthinhistory@sas.ac.uk or on 0207 862 8756.

Dear NACBS colleagues,

I am writing to you about the redevelopment of the Institute of Historical Research, which is scheduled to begin later this year.

As was announced before Christmas, the IHR will be moving this summer into a temporary location for two years, as the University continues with the refurbishment of Senate House. We will be rehoused in the 3rd floor of the South Block and in the Mezzanine. IHR staff have now been allocated new offices and we hope to finalise soon the relocation of the Common Room facilities as well.

We have now agreed with the Senate House Library which sections of the IHR Library will remain on open access during the temporary relocation, and full details of the new arrangements are now available on the IHR website: on the news page and on the Library pages. I have also attached this information to this email for your convenience.

I can also announce that the University has confirmed that it will be able to rehouse all of the IHR Events programme, that is our seminars, colloquia, conferences and Friends’ Events programme. It has also been agreed that external scholarly organisations which use IHR rooms and facilities will be charged the same rates during 2011-13 as they would in our usual premises. During 2011-13 our seminars and other events will run in the Ground Floor rooms of the South Block of Senate House, and on the Second Floor of Stewart House (also part of the Senate House complex).

The University will give final approval to these moves in the Spring, and we will continue to keep our members, users and visitors as fully informed as possible. Later in the year I will also be able to announce in more detail the planned modernisation of our current premises into which we shall move back in 2013. In the meantime, if you have any queries or concerns please do not hesitate to contact me.

I look forward to seeing you at the NACBS in Denver next November, when we will be inviting you to join our IHR 90th birthday celebrations. Whilst we face a huge logistical challenge in making this temporary move, we are all delighted and excited by the prospect of creating an IHR fit for the 21st century. I hope very much that you will join us in bringing that project to life.

With best wishes,

Miles Taylor

Professor Miles Taylor
Director
Institute of Historical Research
University of London
Senate House
Malet Street
LONDON  WC1E 7HU
t: +44 (0)20 7862 8759
f: +44 (0)20 7862 8811
e: Miles.Taylor@sas.ac.uk

Web: www.history.ac.uk

______
Library arrangements during temporary relocation of the IHR

The IHR has now agreed with the University which sections of the Library collection should take priority for open access during the next phase of the refurbishment of Senate House.  As indicated in the Director’s statement in December, during the two year period of relocation to the 3rd floor of the South Block only one-third of the IHR Library will remain on open access.  The bulk of the remainder of the collection will be housed in the Senate House Library Tower and available through a dedicated fetch service.

In order to ensure the most effective use is made of the space available, a survey of collection usage has been running throughout this academic year.  The usage level of each collection has been the main criteria for retention on open access, amongst other considerations such as usage patterns, growth rate, the needs of Institute staff and students, ease of requesting and fetching, type of shelving available, the size of the individual books within the collections, online availability (mainly in the case of periodicals), and availability elsewhere in other local libraries. The outcomes have been discussed and approved by both the IHR Library Committee and the IHR Advisory Council.

The following collections are to remain on open access, with the exclusion of folio material and periodicals:

Ordering and consultation arrangements for materials in the closed stacks

It has been agreed that the IHR library staff will administer a dedicated hourly fetch service from the 3rd floor temporary location.  Library staff will aim to ensure the service is as responsive to demand as possible, and requests for material can be made in person, or via telephone, email, or the website, where there will be a request form.  Please note that due to staffing restrictions it will not always be possible for material to be fetched outside the core hours of 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday.  The Library would strongly encourage those wishing to request closed access material to contact the Library in advance of their visit wherever possible, so we can ensure material is waiting on arrival.  In addition, material can be kept out for readers who wish to consult closed access items over a longer period.  As is the case currently, library staff will work in an accessible enquiry office throughout library opening hours, ensuring continuity of service to readers.

Reader facilities
The current IHR photocopiers and microform reader/printer will be available in the temporary location, in addition to reader desks, catalogues terminals and PCs.

Opening hours
The IHR Library will maintain its current opening hours in the temporary location.  However, please be aware that there will definitely be a period of closure in August to enable the move to take place.  The moving schedule is yet to be agreed but closure dates will be publicised as soon as they are known.

If you have any queries about these proposed changes, please contact the IHR Librarian Jennifer Higham on jennifer.higham@london.ac.uk

The following reviews of possible interest to followers of the Intelligencer were published in November in the Institute of Historical Research’s e-journal Reviews in History.

The first is a review by Alice Reid (no. 817, with editor’s response) of the Small and Special database of patient admissions at the hospital from 1852 until 1914.

Elsewhere a new paperback edition of the Blackwell Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages provoked debate (no. 816, and response) between Rowena Archer and the editor S. H. Rigby, while an unsettling account of racism in Britain, Sascha Auerbach’s Race, Law and ‘The Chinese Puzzle’ in Imperial Britain, is analysed (no. 815, again with an authorial response) by Flemming Christiansen.

A new collection of previously published essays by one of Britain’s leading economic historians, Martin Daunton, is reviewed (no. 821) by Jim Tomlinson, who finds State and Market in Victorian Britain: War, Welfare and Capitalism provides a powerful analysis of the dynamics of the Victorian state.

Another pre-eminent historian covered this month is Glenn Burgess, and you can read a review here (no. 822) by Sarah Mortimer of his latest work, British Political Thought, 1500-1660: The Politics of the Post-Reformation. The author’s response is also available.

Also, make sure to check out Peter Yearwood’s response to Carolyn Kitching’s review of Guarantee of Peace: The League of Nations in British Policy 1914-1925.

A very different subject is discussed in Catherine Rider’s take (no. 826) on an examination of differing presentations of men’s and women’s magic in the medieval period and beyond, Hedi Breuer’s Crafting the Witch: Gendering Magic in Medieval and Early Modern England.

The Cabinet Papers 1915-1978 is a new online resource from The National Archives, and is given a glowing review here (no. 828) by Michael J. Hopkins, while in the field of cultural history Ginger Frost’s Living in Sin: Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England is reviewed (no. 830) by Tanya Evans.

As always, all comments or suggestions should be sent to danny.millum@sas.ac.uk.

Next July, the annual conference of the Institute of Historical Research is taking as its theme environmental history. Over two days we shall feature a series of lectures, panels, policy forums, exhibitions and book launches devoted to this exciting field. We have lined up some of the world's top experts as keynote speakers: William Beinart, Alfred Crosby, Harriet Ritvo and Donald Worster, and shall be ensuring that there is full press coverage. We anticipate over 300 registrations.

I am writing now to give you advance warning of the event, at which I hope very much you will wish to join us in some shape of form. We will be back in the South Block of Senate House, ie: using the Beveridge Hall and the surrounding reception area and galleries for the main events. Do let us know as soon as possible if you would like to be involved, and please pass on news of the conference to your colleagues and graduate students. Details of the cfp are below.

As always, we are grateful for your support, and may I thank those NABCS colleagues particularly for helping to make Cities in 2009 such a success. The Anglo-American conference has been running at the IHR since 1921 and is the main national history event of the academic calendar. This is a wonderful opportunity for us and for you to communicate to the wider history community some of the findings and concerns of the environmental sector past, present and future.

I shall be attending the NACBS in Louisville next month and looking forward to updating you with more news on the AA2010 and other IHR developments then.

Yours sincerely,

(Professor) Miles Taylor, 
Director of the Institute of Historical Research
Anglo-American Conference 2010: Environments
Call for papers now open at www.history.ac.uk/aac2010

For further details please contact: jennifer.wallis@sas.ac.uk