Like many history students UoP history and politics alumni Lucy Bricknell didn’t leave university with a clear plan of what she wanted to do next. But, as she explains below, she discovered that the skills in researching, analysis and writing she had developed in the course of her studies, prepared her well for a career in communications. When I graduated from the University of Portsmouth, like many graduates, I didn’t have a perfectly mapped‑out career plan. I knew I enjoyed research, writing and understanding the bigger picture, but I wasn’t yet sure how those interests would translate into a job. What I didn’t realise at the time was just how […]
Author Archive | Fiona McCall
Do not seek pleasure – guidelines for 17th-century widows
Last year our own Dr Maria Cannon won a fellowship to study at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. While there she came across a manuscript book, Of the Commendable Estate of Widowehoode, a translation of a 16th century Italian work which advises widows on suitable behaviour, and afterwards wrote this blog piece for the Folger Library blog. Let’s just say that having any kind of fun is out. While its lessons can appear restrictive and depressing to modern tastes, this lengthy guide reveals that women were responsible for negotiating their own behaviour, spirituality and relationship to God. https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/how-to-be-a-true-widow/
An Elizabethan clergyman side-steps scandal
After the Protestant Reformation, clergymen could marry, and increasing numbers did so out of inclination and to show they were committed to Protestantism. The Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 placed regulatory conditions on clerical behaviour, including marriage, although it was still controversial to the public and disliked by Queen Elizabeth I. Second-year UoP history student Madeleine East discusses this historical context using witness depositions from the Winchester Consistory Court, dated March 1571, relating to the marriage proposals of one Hampshire clergyman, a document that she studied for the second-year module Underworlds: Crime, Deviance & Punishment in Britain, 1500-1900 The document was made by ecclesiastical courts, which regulated moral behaviour in Early […]
The Royal Navy and the US/Iran War
This week our own Dr Matthew Heaslip was interviewed by multiple national and regional media outlets including ITV Meridian, BBC South Today and The Guardian to help contextualise Britain’s response via the Royal Navy to America’s war on Iran, specifically the practicalities of the deployment of the destroyer HMS Duncan. Along with being Senior Lecturer in Naval History teaching on Portsmouth’s MA in Naval, Maritime and Coastal History he is also a Visiting Fellow at the Royal Navy’s Strategic Studies Centre. Matt’s research centres on the 20th century Navy, the importance of naval power in Britain’s efforts to exert influence worldwide and its applicability to present-day global geopolitics. ‘When faced with […]
The conflicted loyalties of gunmakers during the English Civil Wars and after
English Civil War royalism has often been depicted as the preserve of the elite, but this was not necessarily the case, as MRes student Natalie Lejeune found in her research into the activities of gunmakers during and after the civil wars. Prior royal service often inclined these specialist craftsmen towards the Royalists initially. After the Royalist defeat, they transferred their work to a new Republican Government prepared to tolerate their dubious loyalties in exchange for their much-needed skills. Yet their loyalties remained conflicted, with some, including female-gunmakers as well as men, secretly supplying arms to Royalist conspiracists on the side, a pattern of mixed loyalties which mirrors those in France […]
Guiding the next generation of history students to become their best selves
James Farrar finished his history studies at Portsmouth in 2021. Although James had always been set on a career in teaching, he decided to gain some hands on experience before studying for his PGCert, which he is planning to gain next year, via the more practical School-Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) route. Below he describes some of the highs and lows of his past four years gaining experience as a teaching assistant, student engagement worker, and cover supervisor, an honest and humorous appraisal (there seems to be a lavatorial theme!) which should be invaluable to current students aiming to follow a similar career trajectory. Time flies when you are having […]