A level studies in history and media led Damiana Kun to focus her Portsmouth history dissertation on how a patriarchal screen industry has ignored modern research and continued to attach negative stereotypes to one of history’s most famous and complex women. Damiana’s supervisor was Dr Maria Cannon. Whether someone has a deep interest in history or not, many remember the six wives of the Tudor King Henry VIII by the old English nursery rhyme: “Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived.” However, in popular culture, Anne Boleyn is perhaps the best known out of the six wives, as the one who supplanted a long-time wife and queen and set a nation […]
Tag Archives | media
The misrepresentation of Catherine De’ Medici’s female rule
For her third-year dissertation UoP history student Sadie White looked into representations of the French Queen Catherine de’ Medici, one of several late-sixteenth century female rulers famously denounced by John Knox in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558). As Sadie describes, Catherine, foreign, from a family considered inferior in status to the French monarchy, no great looker, and barren for the first ten years of her marriage, has had a hard press over the years, both in her own time, and still today, as represented in contemporary TV and film drama. She is a salutary reminder of how female rule continues to be […]
Discovering a railway-worker ancestor
Our own Dr Mike Esbester was featured on BBC 1’s ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ on 5 September 2024, helping Rose Ayling-Ellis learn more about her ancestor’s railway accident. The episode is available to watch on BBC iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0022n0p
Telling tales about the Past
The celebrated historian Natalie Zemon Davis died recently. In this post, our own Dr Katy Gibbons looks at how second-year students studying the ‘Debating the Past’ module, translated her most famous work into other media: emojis, memes and poetry! What role does story telling play in history writing? How far can historians use their own imagination when discovering and relaying the stories of people in the past? This is one of the many questions that we engage our students with as they look in depth at historiography, and think about how historians ‘do’ history. In our second year core module, ‘Debating the Past’, one of the texts that might be […]
‘More diverse and culturally inclusive’: Post-war immigration and its impact on British culture
In this blog, recent BA (Hons) History with Politics graduate Phil Matthews reflects on the impact immigration has had on British culture in the post-Second World War era. Phil, who wrote the blog as part of his assessment for the second year module ‘Working with the Past’, coordinated by Dr Mike Esbester, describes how many aspects of British culture changed as a result of mass immigration into the country in the latter half of the twentieth century. Britain, Phil notes, transformed into a multi-ethnic society and benefitted massively from immigrants bringing their own country’s cultures with them. The twentieth century normalised the multi-cultural society that we live in today, Phil […]