British History

The project explores the perception and (re)negotiation of status and social order in post-Roman western Europe by comparatively analysing the definition and implementation of hierarchies in the Frankish World and Anglo-Saxon England. It focuses on the records of church councils and synods, regarding these assemblies as crucial for the development of new societal models in an age of transition.

Why would a well-educated man or woman subscribe, at great cost, to a hand-written newsletter, when cheaper newspapers were already easily available? This project investigates the so far largely hidden sphere of scribal news in a world dominated by the printing press, and follows the flows of information that ran between Britain and the Continent in the years around 1700.

Pauper letters and applications for relief contain sometimes rudimentary but often extensive information on the applicants’ material situation, their family circumstances, and their relationships with their home parish, or specific officials or friends from whom they expect support. This project proposes to collect and edit a substantial online corpus of these narratives.

The editorial project presents a comprehensive selection of diplomatic reports written for the Foreign Office by British envoys to the German States in the 19th century, covering the period from the Vienna Congress in 1815 to the dissolution of the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) in 1866, the North German Confederation (1867–1870) and from the foundation of the German Kaiserreich in 1871 to 1897.

This project explores not only the actual photographs, but also their detachment from their original archival context, their circulation on the art market, and their display across different types of museums and institutions. This is done in order to determine the disciplinary framework for studying early photographic specimens, whether scientific, industrial, or colonial.

What is considered 'normal' and why? How are notions of normality communicated, reproduced and negotiated? What are the differences between academic and individual understandings of normality? In my project I examine how social scientists, historians and those being researched in Germany and Britain produced knowledge about normality in the 20th century.

During the interwar years, sociologists started to invent ‘qualitative’ methods to understand how people lived their everyday lives – and how they made sense of them. My project will compare two of these new groups of researchers: the Chicago School and the British Mass Observation project. I will investigate the extent to which both groups were similar or different, and why.

[Image from boltonworktown.co.uk, Copyright Bolton Council, Image ref. 1993.83.19.09]

The project understands the inventing of a language – whether for political, epistemic, or artistic purposes – as an act of world-making. Focusing on the proliferation of artificial languages in the English-speaking world in the period from the 1920s to the 1980s, the project situates these initiatives in the context of wider debates concerning the universality or cultural relativity of language.