Professor Arthur Chapman, UCL To register for this event, please head to this link ..read more

Professor Jocelyn Létourneau and Dr Raphaël Gani, Université Laval 12th October 2023, 5.30 pm – 7.00 pm, Hybrid Event (face-to-face and Zoom) Event Summary Imagined communities, Benedict Anderson wrote forty years ago, are reproduced through the words that their members use to refer to themselves collectively, which constitute what Michael Billig called ‘banal nationalism.’ What words do Québécois and American, French, English, Scottish and Canadian people use when asked to reflect unexpectedly and succinctly on their national historical experience and to summarize the history of their nation ..read more

Professor Penney Clark and Professor Alan Sears, 13th June, 2023, 4.30-6.00pm, British Summer Time (CET+1) Hayden White made the point that “both science [empirically-based history] and art have transcended the older, stable conceptions of the world which required that they render a literal copy of a presumably static reality. And both have discovered the essentially provisional character of the metaphorical constructions which they use to comprehend a dynamic universe” (1). White’s position was initially enormously controversial. However, we agree with historian Peter Novick, who said, with ..read more

Dr Arthur Chapman, 8th March 2023, Bentham House, UCL In his talk, Dr. Chapman re-examines these old questions in the new context of the early twenty-first century. He argues that it is vital that we educate ourselves about history but also that we need to change our understanding of what history is, what we teach in history, and how we teach it. The TedX recording of the event, released on the 1st May 2023, is available at this link ..read more

Rūta Kazlauskaitė, Postdoctoral researcher at Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki Virtual reality (VR) is the latest iteration of a memory technology among the modern technologies of mass culture. It enables users to acquire embodied, first-person memories of events they did not live through personally. Increasingly ubiquitous in museums, heritage sites and school education, VR is a spatial, interactive and embodied technology that positions users “inside” a virtual scene or a storyworld and leverages the users’ sense of body position and movement to enhance learning and a sens ..read more

Soviet War Memorial, Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna (© Bwag/CC-BY-SA-4.0)Zoom seminar. 28th June 2022, 5-6.30pm UK / 6-7.30pm CET Prof. Dr. Marko Demantowsky, Dr. Barbara Pavlek Löbl and Carina Siegl, M.A., Faculty Center for Transdisciplinary Historical and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna In the past, there has been case-by-case research about Austrian monuments and memorials and their relevance to questions of Austrian national identity. However, these case studies have not been integrated into a holistic conceptual framework and, above all, there is no consensus on what makes memorial si ..read more

21st April, 6-7.30pm BST, Via Zoom Dr Lindsay Gibson, University of Brtish Columbia, and Dr James Miles, Teachers’ College, Columbia University. Since the early 2000s, use of the term presentism has rapidly increased in both the historical discipline and public discussions of history. Most recently, the pulling down and defacement of statues in countries around the world inspired by the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests prompted countless articles, discussions, and debates about presentism. The description of presentism featured in many of these discussions reveal a lack of clarity and fundamen ..read more

How do 17-18 year-old students engage with differing historical accounts? A case-study from Cyprus 29th March 2022, 5-6.30pm GMT, via Zoom Old Nicosia dead-end by Marco FieberDr Maria K. Georgiou, SYNTHESIS Centre for Research & Education There has been increasing international research on history education (Afandi, 2012; Barca, 2005; Carvalho and Barca, 2012; Cercadillo, 2001; Chapman, 2009; Hsiao, 2008; Martens, 2015; Shemilt, 1980; Lee et al., 1994) that shows that students, to a more or a lesser extent, operate with similar ideas about differing historical intrepretations (known as ‘ac ..read more

7th March 2022, 6-7.30pm GMT, via Zoom Professor Ethan Kleinbern, Wesleyan University This talk, is meant to challenge some assumptions about the ways we think about the past and “do” history. In particular, I challenge the idea of a stable past or meaning that can be called back or retrieved. What I call “ontological realism.” The past by definition is gone and thus has no definite properties or perhaps we can say that it has latent properties that are activated when we do history. But this activation of the past is always partial leaving remains that are hidden or dormant. This is a past tha ..read more

27th January 2022, 16:30 – 18:00 BST Dr Catharine McCrory, UCL Institute of Education This UCL History Teaching Workshop led by Dr Catherine McCrory is the second exploring teaching decisions on the micro level of individual lessons and lesson segments. The first half of the workshop will explore the need to use but also move beyond popular generic teaching strategies, while the second part will use a Year 9 history lesson to consider how we make space for pupils to engage with the cognitive challenge of history in ways that develop their historical understanding. The workshop is free and ope ..read more