History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | Supernatural Cities

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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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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