Fly like an Eagle

My Study Abroad Year at Temple University in Philadelphia by Tom Golebiowski When I first applied to study history at the University of Southampton, the idea of going on a year abroad hardly crossed my mind. I was coming to Southampton for the fantastic course, the exciting social life and the amazing campus: I couldn’t picture being anywhere else. Continue reading →

To remember or not to remember: the Holocaust in Belarus

Dr. Claire Le Foll The Holocaust is not my area of expertise. However, I felt an urgency to write about it, and more specifically about the difficulty of remembering it in today’s Belarus. This urge resulted from a conjunction of circumstances: the foreword I wrote recently for the second edition of Bashert, a memoir by Andrea Simon on the fate of her family from the Belarusian shtetl of Volchin; a recent visit to Belarus; and recent news from the city of Brest. Continue reading →

British Museum exhibition exposes hypocrisy of new loan agreements for looted objects

On February the 15th the British Museum opened Rediscovering Gems, a new small exhibition displaying a range of prized ancient Roman and Greek artefacts. The prompt for this exhibition stemmed from an announcement last year which revealed that numerous pieces from the museum’s collection were missing, stolen or damaged. Some of the gems exhibited are among those previously classified as missing. Continue reading →

Maud Cunnington (part 1)

In this blog post, Maddie Watson, a finalist Modern History and Politics student at the University of Southampton, introduces their work on Maud Cunnington as part of their Beyond Notability Internship, run by Southampton Digital Humanities. In this part, Maddie discusses their encounter with Maud via linked data and their exploration of her work as an archaeologist. The second part of the blog can be read here. Continue reading →

Global Challenges: History, Policy, Practice – a new departure

On 6 January 2020, protestors stormed the Capitol in Washington, DC. As an American citizen watching from afar, I felt powerless to do anything about the rending of the American body politic that was occurring. A year after these events however, as Congress began its investigation into the attempted insurrection, I was invited to submit a statement for the official record, placing the spread of the misinformation that had helped trigger the attack into historical context. Continue reading →

Monarchy and Democracy in Liechtenstein

by Dr Alastair Paynter In 2021, 44 states worldwide have a monarch as Head of State. Of these, sixteen are part of the Commonwealth (although this will be reduced to fifteen when Barbados becomes a republic). In Europe alone, there are twelve sovereign monarchies—Andorra, Belgium, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Vatican City. Continue reading →

Teaching in an Age of COVID

Professor Neil Gregor Avenue Campus, where single and dual honours History students once congregated en masse. This year has brought its challenges for tutors and students alike.  But the need to rethink how we deliver our teaching has also brought its advantages. These are not only practical – they have also been intellectual. For me, this has been particularly the case at final year undergraduate level. Continue reading →

Reflections on teaching in the age of COVID

Dr George Gilbert Wholly or mostly online teaching throughout the academic year 2020-21 has been forced upon us as a result of a global pandemic, and not something any academic working in higher education chose willingly. It has meant in many cases quite radical reshaping of longstanding and more recent modules, and, to such an extent, quite substantially redesigning a well-established and (one would hope) fairly effective history curriculum. Continue reading →

Edgar Feuchtwanger, OBE

By Tony Kushner The History Department and the Parkes Institute are delighted to share the good news that Edgar Feuchtwanger has been awarded an OBE in the 2021 Queen’s Honours  List for services to ‘Anglo-German understanding and history’. Edgar, who was born in Munich in 1924 into a distinguished German Jewish family of bankers and culture (his uncle was the famous and influential novelist, Lion Feuchtwanger) came to Britain as a child refugee in February 1939. Continue reading →

Professor Chris Woolgar, Fellow of the British Academy

In this year of pandemic and distancing, the Southampton history department is united in pleasure and appreciation at the election of our colleague, Professor Chris Woolgar, as a Fellow of the British Academy. This is a rare and high honour, which is given to a few of the most influential, original and admired academics internationally across the fields of the humanities and social sciences each year. Continue reading →