History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | Portsmouth Darkfest

Rob and Eleanor

Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence

In this blog Dr Rob James, Senior Lecturer in History, reviews the activities final year student Eleanor Doyle has undertaken as an undergraduate at Portsmouth, for which she deservedly won recognition at the Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence on Tuesday 2nd April 2019. Eleanor was the recipient of a V-C Award for Excellence for all the work she has done enhancing the student experience while simultaneously promoting the university to educational and industry bodies. Also winning a V-C Commendation at the same event was our Dr Karl Bell, Reader in Cultural and Social History, for his work organising Darkfest, an annual creative and cultural festival, and running the Supernatural Cities project […]

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A Festival of Dark Delights: Portsmouth DarkFest 2018

Dr Karl Bell, Reader in Cultural and Social History, discusses the launch of this year’s Portsmouth DarkFest. Karl researches ‘everything spooky’, and his second book was on the Victorian legend of Spring-Heeled Jack. He’s now working on a book on proto-science fiction ideas in British culture between c.1750-1900. This weekend sees the return of Portsmouth DarkFest, an annual creative and cultural festival that explores the supernatural, the spooky and urban noir. Now in its third year, the festival originally grew from my historical research into nineteenth-century ghost stories in Portsmouth. I was particularly interested in the power of folkloric stories and the way haunted locations can change our understanding of both […]

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Darkfest

Portsmouth Darkfest returns! October 26th – November 30th 2017

Dr Karl Bell, Reader in Cultural and Social History at Portsmouth, has organised another series of events this autumn as part of Portsmouth Darkfest, a creative and cultural festival that explores all things dark, supernatural and sinister. For details of the wide range of exciting events taking place, click here. Karl’s research interests cover nineteenth-century British society’s continued fascination with supernatural beliefs, magic and folklore, and feeds into his final year Special Subject, Magic and Modernity: Witchcraft and the Occult, c. 1800-1920s.

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