Category: Practice-based
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Reaching out to Re-enactors and Vice-Versa
By Jeff Berry In 2010, I was at conference organised by the Columbia University Medieval Guild (now the Medieval Colloquium) when one of the invited speakers threw up a slide of the Ft. Tryon Medieval Festival, held annually in pre-covid times at the top end of Manhattan. Staring out at me from the picture was my good…
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A Royal Bedroom: Gender, Class and Material Culture
By Esther Griffin van Orsouw For my PhD research at the University of Warsaw, I investigate the consumption of art by the Sobieski family and their contemporaries in the late 17th and early 18th century in relation to space. I consider what type of objects the royals surrounded themselves with, whether they favoured any objects…
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A History of Argument: Teaching Students Critical Analysis
By Andrew Struan Writing in 1808 when in office as President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson told his grandson: ‘I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument’. Continuing this line of thought in his letter, Jefferson explained that his fellow Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, was ‘the…
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What Does ‘Inclusion’ Include?: Making Space for Students
Erin Katherine Krafft One of the courses that I teach most frequently is a social theory course for students in their second year of college. I teach no first-year courses, so the students are new to me, and I am new to them. On the first day, facing these twenty-five strangers (or fifty – I…
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Innovating Digital History in the Classroom: an interview with Drs James Baker and Sharon Webb
Back in July, the Royal Historical Association awarded its 2019 Innovation in Teaching Award to Dr James Baker and Dr Sharon Webb at the University of Sussex. This week Stephanie Wright from History caught up with both prize winners to learn more about how they incorporate digital history into their undergraduate teaching. History: Can you…
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Historiography in Action: Teaching and Learning Historiographical Approaches through Active Primary Source Analysis
Liz Goodwin. This semester, my students discussed their memories of the London 2012 Olympic Games. For the majority of them, this took place when they were around 11/12 years old, in the summer between primary and secondary school. They wrote a paragraph down in advance, which was anonymised and randomly distributed in the class. Through…