A University of Glasgow History Department organised round table for history postgraduates. It’s a chance to hear about some excellent recent research in history, and to think about ways of doing history beyond our traditional research methods.

Speakers and subjects:
Marianna Dudley (Bristol) has used walking and swimming to open up new understandings of the connections between places and people, whether researching military landscapes on foot, or getting a ‘frog’s eye view’ of rivers in modern Britain. David Gange (Birmingham) has used a kayak and paddle as research tools, rethinking the modern history of the British and Irish isles by kayaking the length of their ‘frayed Atlantic edge’. Lin Gardner (Glasgow)—a weaver as well as a historian—used modern materials to build a simplified version of a nineteenth-century sewing machine’s working mechanism, to better understand (and demonstrate) how it developed as a manufacturing tool. And Amanda Thomson (Glasgow School of Art) is an artist and lecturer whose work on place, space, and landscape—especially the forests of Morayshire and the Cairngorms—recently led her to write A Scots Dictionary of Nature.

Format:
Brief presentations from the speakers, followed by open discussion.