History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | early modern history

Hans Holbein ship with sailors

Cut-throat communities, angry noblemen, and a noseless pirate! My journey through the joys and horrors of writing a dissertation

Below, the first of a series on this year’s bumper crop of student dissertations, from my own supervisee Tom Underwood.  Tom was one of the most prepared and organised students I’ve ever supervised, but as he mentions below, also still honing his dissertation down to the wire, and we were blown away with the results.  Tom is planning to continue onto an MRes, where his impressive skills at reading early modern handwriting, and patience with sifting his way through basement archives should come to further good use. – ed Whether its Errol Flynn’s smooth-talking Captain Blood, or Johnny Depp’s rum-soaked Jack Sparrow, the pirate occupies a special place within popular […]

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IMG_4500 Amelia presentation cropped

From Margins to Centre? An undergraduate conference on marginalised histories

At Portsmouth we were delighted to have not one, but two students presenting their work at the recent ‘From Margins to Centre’ conference at the University of York – a testament to the innovative and exciting research our students are devising and doing. In this blog post our second contributor, third year student Amelia Boddice, discusses the conference and where her paper fitted into the themes of the day. As well as building her employability skills, the conference prompted some thought-provoking reflections on the nature of historical enquiry: Amelia clearly got lots out of the day – just as it should be! The whole history team here at Portsmouth pitched […]

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800px-Jenny_Geddes_Tumult

Introducing the Disrupted Authority Project

By Jessica Dyson & Katy Gibbons Members of the History and English Literature teams at the University of Portsmouth are excited to be launching “Disrupted Authority” – a research project that focuses on the early modern period (1450-1700) and brings together the work of English Literature’s Dr Jessica Dyson and Dr Bronwen Price, and History’s Dr Maria Cannon, Dr Katy Gibbons and Dr Fiona McCall. This is a particularly timely project in the light of the current shifting and unpredictable political landscape. The key themes of this project – authority, power, gender, religion –  invite comparisons with how people and groups today understand and represent their positions and rights within […]

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Windsor Castle

Life after Graduation

One of our recent graduates tells us how the skills he gained studying at Portsmouth, and the volunteer experience he gained while studying, helped him secure an exciting job in the heritage sector.  For security reasons, he has not been named. Having graduated in the summer of 2019 and with a firm understanding that it was now time to get back into the world of work, the task was on to find a job, one that both stimulated me and used the great many skills learned through the three years at Portsmouth. Upon entering university I knew that my one objective was to better myself in both educational values and […]

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Women in Totnes church 620 x 320

New conference: Disruptions and Continuities in Gender Roles and Authority, 1450-1750

The new Disrupted Authority research group at the University of Portsmouth – SASHPL are organising an interdisciplinary conference linking issues of gender and authority in the early modern period, to be held at Portsmouth on the 29-30 June 2020.  One keynote speaker will be Professor Ann Hughes, from Keele University, whose book Gender and the English Revolution is essential reading for those wanting to understand issues of gender in the seventeenth century.  There is a call for papers for academics and postgraduates, across a range of disciplines, to send in abstracts for potential twenty-minute papers to present at the conference. If you want to know more, see the conference webpage […]

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milldam

History Research Seminars Winter/Spring 2019

Every year, the History team at Portsmouth organise a series of research seminars that take place across the autumn, winter and spring terms. Historians are invited from a range of institutions, both in Britain and abroad, to talk about their latest research projects. The subjects presented cover a broad historical timespan and offer insight into a diverse range of topics. In this winter and spring terms there will be talks on children’s writing in 1930s Britain, relationships in early modern England, immigration in Tudor Southampton, the Royal Marines’ institutional legacy, and the health of British seamen while travelling overseas. All are welcome to attend. All talks take place in Milldam […]

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