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Introducing the Disrupted Authority Project

By on February 20, 2020 in News, Research in Focus

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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Self-identity under slavery: Frederick Douglass narrates his story

By on February 14, 2020 in Learning in Focus, Research in Focus

Joshua Bown, a first year History student at the University of Portsmouth, has written the following blog entry on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, for the Fragments module, which looks at the possibilities and challenges of using primary sources for historical study. The module is co-ordinated by Dr Katy Gibbons, Senior Lecturer in History at Portsmouth. The use of egodocuments as a primary source for historians has provided both significant and controversial contributions to the field. As Laura Sangha puts it, the potential advantages of studying these personal documents seem obvious, in that they may ‘reveal what an individual actually thought and felt about […]

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Life after Graduation

By on February 12, 2020 in Learning in Focus, Public History

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

By on January 31, 2020 in Events, Research in Focus

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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How to ‘forget’ difficult pasts: slavery, memory, and the maritime frame

By on May 25, 2017 in Research in Focus

In Theresa May’s ‘Brexit speech’, on January 17th 2017, the prime minister suggested that Britain’s “history and culture is profoundly internationalist” [1]. This is certainly one way of framing Britain’s historic relationship with the rest of the world. Alternatively, you might suggest that May spelt “centuries of colonial rule, oppression, slavery and genocide” wrong. As cultural sociologist Iwona Irwin-Zarecka argues, the range of possible interpretations of historic events and themes can be limited through processes of ‘framing’ [2]. Such ‘framing’ doesn’t necessarily block out other possible interpretations, but it does act to restrict the range of meanings. The past can be ‘framed’ in certain ways, and certain interpretations and narratives […]

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Using Official Sources: The Chadwick Report (1843)

By on May 4, 2017 in Learning in Focus

Rozene Smith, a second year history student at the University of Portsmouth, wrote the following blog entry on how historians can use The Chadwick Report (1843) to understand 19th century social reform for the Introduction to Historical Research Unit.  The unit is co-ordinated by Dr Jessica Moody, Lecturer in Modern History and Heritage at Portsmouth. The nineteenth century witnessed an obsessive fixation on empirical and factual data, culminating in a fetishisation of valuable official documents.[1] Consecutive parliamentary acts passed in this period secured centralised funding for official state record-keeping and began the process of establishing a governmentally-sanctioned Public Record Office.[2] Between 1832 and 1846, over one hundred Royal and Parliamentary commissions […]

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