Seminar Abstracts

For the full programme, please click the tab above. 

Tuesday 16th October
Ariane Mak, EHESS Paris

"People say we're unpatriotic": Conflicting Evaluations of the WarEffort in the Betteshanger Colliery Dispute of January 1942 

Clare Trenery, Royal Holloway
Insanity and Epilepsy: Exploring Mental Illness in the Twelfth-Century Miracles of Thomas Becket

Tuesday 13th November
Matthew Champion, Queen Mary
Something Old, Something New: Time in Fifteenth Century Louvain

Responding to the foundation of a new university in the 1420s, drawing on a rich theological vocabulary, and marked by radical changes in the city’s fabric, a new Louvain emerged from the old over the course of the fifteenth century. In this paper, I examine how vocabularies and iconographies of the old and the new were put to use in Louvain, and their implications for a history of time in the fifteenth century.
 
Adrian Garvey, Queen Mary
James Mason and British Masculinity in the 1940s

James Mason was the most popular British film star of the 1940s. However his persona as the ‘fascinating brute’ of Gainsborough melodramas such as The Man in Grey and The Wicked Lady sits at odds with Sonya Rose’s notion of 'temperate masculinity’ in Second World War Britain, the more pervasive gender ideal exemplified by his screen contemporary John Mills. In this paper I will consider this aberrant, even perverse, hypermasculine image in relation to issues of gender, class and national identity in the period.


Tuesday 11th December
Dr James Ryan, Warwick
Violence and the Sacred: the case of the Bolsheviks in early Soviet Terror

Stephen Spencer, Queen Mary
The Emotional Rhetoric of Crusader Spirituality in the Narratives of the First Crusade