Event Archive

Select this category for information about events after they have taken place, such as videos of lectures, reports on the event or a transcript of the lecture.

Portraits, biographies and public history: the RHS Colin Matthew Lecture, 2021

On 2 November, the Society was delighted to hold its first in-person event of the year: the 2021 Colin Matthew Lecture for the Public Understanding of History, in association with Gresham College.

This year’s lecturer, Professor Ludmilla Jordanova, spoke on ‘Portraits, Biographies and Public History’, and specifically on inter-relationships between these three elements, to an audience at the Museum of London and online.

The lecture is available to watch here via YouTube.

The lecture explored, and challenged, the often marginal and decorative status of biography and portraiture in the disciplines of history and art history. Rather, as  Ludmilla Jordanova argued, both genres offer compelling ways ‘of opening up questions about the past … the shifts on reputations, the changing status of occupations, and much more’.

Portraits and biographies also inspire affective responses. These ensure their contribution to public history — defined here as a depictions of the past in the public domain — long before it became a popular twentieth-first century historical practice.

Central to the lecture was the historian and biographer, Colin Matthew (1941-1999) whose career embraced biography and portraiture through his founding editorship of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, trusteeship of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and his commitment to history, and both of these institutions, as means of public education.

Ludmilla Jordanova delivers the 2021 Colin Matthew Lecture, with a 1993 portrait image of Colin at his desk at the Oxford DNB.

 

Watch the 2021 Colin Matthew Lecture for the Public Understanding of History

 

 

The annual Colin Matthew Lecture was established in 2004 between Gresham College and the Royal Historical Society, where Colin served as Literary Director, 1985-89.

Videos of recent lectures, including those by David Olusoga, Mary Beard, Amanda Vickery and Justin Champion, are available via the Gresham website.

Getting Published: a guide to first articles and journal publishing

RHS online workshop for Early Career Historians, 21 July 2021

 

 

The first in a new RHS series of training workshops. The focus of this event was publishing a first article: with advice from journal editors and recently published authors.

 

 

Dr John-Paul Ghobrial, ‘Hard Times? Eastern Christian Migrants to Early Modern Europe’

RHS Lecture, Gustave Tuck lecture theatre, Friday 5 February 2016

From Lebanese immigrants in Argentina to Iraqi refugees in Sweden, Eastern Christians can be found today scattered across the entire world.  Too often, however, this global migration has been seen purely as a modern development, one arising from contemporary political and confessional events in the Middle East.  In fact, this phenomenon had its roots in the early modern period.  From the sixteenth century onwards, Christians from the Ottoman Empire set out for distant worlds and foreign lands, travelling as far as Europe, India, Russia, and even the Americas and leaving traces of themselves in countless European and Middle Eastern archives, chanceries, and libraries.  Some of these individuals created new lives for themselves as copyists, translators, and librarians in Europe, while others struggled to eke out a living for themselves as alms-collectors.  Their stories of survival and adaptation have long been overlooked.  While historians have tended to study these individuals in a piecemeal fashion, this lecture will assess the extent to which the movement of such individuals to Europe constituted a wider phenomenon of migration and exchange between Europe and the Ottoman Empire.  The lecture will focus especially on the experiences of a handful of these newcomers in an attempt to paint a picture of what life was like for Eastern Christians in early modern Europe.

John-Paul Ghobrial is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Balliol College.  He is an historian of the Middle East with a special interest in exchanges between Europe and the Ottoman Empire.  His first book, The Whispers of Cities (Oxford, 2013), explored the circulation of information between Istanbul, London, and Paris in the late seventeenth century. Since 2015, he has been the Principal Investigator for an ERC-funded project, ‘Stories of Survival: Recovering the Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World’.  

 

Public History Workshop

In association with the award of the RHS Public History Prize

It is anticipated that the workshop will become an annual event, which every second year will also celebrate the award of one postgraduate and one undergraduate prize in public history, in conjunction with the Historical Association.  Part of the workshop will be devoted to discussing how a vibrant community of research and practice can be developed in Britain and what support students and early-career researchers need. The idea behind the workshop is to give those at the beginning of their academic lives a supportive forum to share their ideas, make contacts and help shape the future of the field.

The workshop is free and refreshments will be provided on the day, but no travel bursaries are available for this first running of the workshop

Keynote speakers:

Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London, and President of the Historical Association.

Pamela Cox, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex, and presenter of the BBC series Shopgirls: the True Story Behind the Counter and Servants: the True Story of Life Below Stairs.

Ludmilla Jordanova, Professor of History and Visual Arts and Cultures, Durham University; Trustee of the Science Museum Group and chair of its collections and research committees; author of History in Practice and The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice.. 

 Programme

10.00     Lawrence Goldman to open event

10.20     Pam Cox: Public Audience History (+Q&A)

10.50     Daniel Johnson: Public Engagement and the Making of the Twenty-First Century Museum

Michael Mantin: From Pithead to Sick Bed: Disability and the South Welsh Coal Industry in the Museum

(+Q&A)

11.50     Ludmilla Jordanova: Public History – A Provocation (+Q&A)

12.20     Lunch

13.20     Alexander Hutton: Golden Age Thinking: Historians of the Industrial Revolution and their Publics

Claire Hayward: Memorialising the Past and Representing the Present in ‘homomonuments’: the commemoration of same-sex love and LGBTQ communities

(+Q&A)

14.20     Activity: Advocating Public History

15.00     Tea

15.20     Justin Champion: ‘Making public, making a difference’: designing research questions with a public purpose?

15.50     Discussion

16.30     Close

 

2015 Colin Matthew Memorial Lecture: Timothy Garton Ash ‘Free Speech and the Study of History’

Colin Matthew 1Colin Matthew (1941-1999), Professor of Modern History (Oxford), was a long time Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (1976-1999). He served as its Literary Director from 1985-1989 and as a Vice-President from 1993-1997. Simultaneously a Fellow of the British Academy, Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, Chairman of the Friends of the Bodleian Library, editor of the New Dictionary of National Biography, and much else besides, Colin was deeply committed to the principle that academic history should be accessible to a wide public. The lecture is named in his honour.

Timothy Garton Ash ‘Free Speech and the Study of History’

A growing number of countries have so-called memory laws, ranging from the criminalisation of Holocaust denial, to prescriptions for the teaching of certain subjects, memorial days and public monuments. Which, if any, of these are justified? Which are more effective in combatting evils they are supposed to combat, based on misinterpretations of the past?

Timothy Garton Ash, who has just completed a book on free speech, will argue that phenomena such as Holocaust denial are better contested by the completely free, robust exchange of scholarly, journalistic and political debate, and that the state should not use its coercive power to limit the study of history.

Contributor Tim Garton Ash of st Antony s college Oxford Pic Rob JudgesTimothy Garton Ash is the author of nine books of political writing or ‘history of the present’ which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last thirty years. He is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

You do not need to register for this free public event. It will be run on a “first come, first served” basis, so please feel free to arrive a little early to ensure that you can get a seat. Doors will be opened half an hour before the start of the event.

The Colin Matthew Memorial Lecture for Public Understanding of History is co-hosted
by Gresham College and the Royal Historical Society.

Colin Matthew 2

Colin Matthew