History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | supernatural

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Bridging the gap between the academic and non-academic worlds: Engaging the public in academic research

In this blog Reiss Sims, who has just gained a first-class degree in History at Portsmouth (well done, Reiss!), discusses a project he worked on last year with some of his fellow History students for the module ‘Working with the Past’, coordinated by Dr Mike Esbester. As part of their project, the students looked into how academic historians take their work ‘out of the academy’ and into the public realm. Reiss and his fellow students interviewed our Dr Karl Bell, who researches all things supernatural, to find out how he has tried to engage the wider public in the history he studies. Last year, as part of our assessment for […]

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Building Supernatural Cities

In this post, Karl Bell, reader in cultural and social history, talks about his new book Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety and Spectrality, bringing together scholars from across the globe working on the relationship between supernatural beliefs and urban cultures.  He describes what the book is about, and what he learned from the process of international academic collaboration. In my most recent book I brought together and led an international group of scholars in an exploration of magic, monsters, ghosts and storytelling in urban cultures around the world.  Examining these ideas from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety and Spectrality (Boydell and Brewer, 2019) challenges […]

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Goblin scullery maids, ghostly miners and cannibal sailors: my experience of studying for a PhD at the University of Portsmouth

Dr Eilís Phillips followed three years of undergraduate study at the University of Portsmouth with a three-year PhD on Victorian monsters, supervised by Dr Karl Bell, Reader in History at the University.  Her work is an inspiration to many, not least to my own students studying ideas of the monstrous in the 17th century Civil War context.  Impressively, while studying with and teaching at the University, Eilís has combined her academic studies with regular performances as a musician at many locations in Portsmouth and the surrounding areas – ed.   My PhD was a three-year, CEISR-funded interdisciplinary project which used an approach based in History – grounded in historiography – […]

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Wymering Manor: Portsmouth’s oldest domestic building

In this blog, the fourth in a series of posts looking at sites of historical interest in Portsmouth, Dr Katy Gibbons, Senior Lecturer in History, discusses the significant but often overlooked history of Wymering Manor, the oldest domestic building in the city of Portsmouth. Katy’s research specialisms focus on the religious and cultural history of early modern England, and specifically on the Catholic communities living under Protestant rule. This connects to her teaching at Levels 4 and 6 of the History curriculum, particularly specialist modules on religious identity in Elizabethan England. For a place rich in heritage, Wymering Manor, on the outskirts of Portsmouth, is one of its often-overlooked gems. […]

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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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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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