Last week as part of our Welcome Week activities at the University of Northampton, we ran a free trip to the British Museum. A lot of our new students joined us, along with a few returning students who fancied a day out in London! Given this involved a 7.45am start after a busy, sociable week ..read more

[No spoilers!] I’m a big fan of the Alien film series. I have been hooked every since watching Alien 3 in the cinema as a teenager, and the original 1979 film is one of my all-time favourites. So I was excited to see Alien: Romulus, which is currently on general release. After several disappointing sequels ..read more

The Northampton branch of the Historical Association is run by the University of Northampton, and this year we are joining forces with the Leicester branch to provide a combined programme. The joint talks will be online but we are also keen to hear from local schools who would like to host an event. All talks ..read more

Matthew McCormack from History has co-edited a new book on new approaches to teaching the subject. Co-edited with Ruth Larsen (Derby) and Alice Marples (British Library), Innovations in Teaching History: Eighteenth-Century Studies in Higher Education is now out with University of London Press. The book contains seven chapters, which provide case studies for how to teach the eighteenth century. These focus on the themes of digital history, history in the classroom and the use of objects in learning. Matthew’s chapter focuses on his module HIS3018 ‘Citizenship and Gender in Britain’, and explore ..read more

We’re very excited to be hosting TWO workshops on the theme of politicised nostalgias this July! My initial call for papers generated so much interest that, in addition to our in person conference on 5 July, a week later we have an online workshop. The in person workshop is open to speakers only, as it’s in a small space and it intended for genuine workshopping with the intention of building a special issue/edited collection from what results. However, the online workshop is open to EVERYONE! You can register for the online workshop HERE. What does nostalgia mean to you? Photo by Girl with red ..read more

[No spoilers!] I’m late to the party with the TV show The Traitors, but my family have recently discovered it and binged the first two series on iPlayer. In the unlikely event that you haven’t heard of it, the show has been a hit on the BBC, having first appeared on Dutch TV as Der Verraders before being franchised all over the world. It is a cross between a game show and a reality show. A group of strangers are taken to a Scottish castle, and at the outset three of them are secretly appointed ‘traitors’, who gather every night to choose which of the other contestants they want to remove from ..read more

When I was hired by Northampton almost five years ago as their first medieval historian, I never expected that I would end up researching very contemporary history! But one of the rewarding things about working within a small, friendly department is finding opportunities for collaboration in unexpected places. So I found myself swapping ideas with Paul Jackson and Dan Jones about the Searchlight Archive and about histories of fascism more broadly, which helped inform the development of my Medieval Chivalry and its Afterlives undergraduate module and led to the publication of an article on teac ..read more

This month, a member of Northampton’s history team begins his term as president of a national scholarly society. Professor Matthew McCormack will serve as President of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies until 2026/27. The British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (known as BSECS) is a meeting-place for anyone who works on the global long eighteenth century, including those with interests in history, literature, music, drama, art, languages, politics, or any other subject. It holds regular conferences, publishes a journal, distributes funding, supports postgraduate and ear ..read more

Drew Gray and Matthew McCormack from the University of Northampton offer contrasting reactions to Ridley Scott’s new film, Napoleon. I must declare an interest here. As a child I was obsessed with Napoleon. The ‘little corporal’ replaced Nelson as my boyhood hero and I devoured everything I could about him. At school I played wargames and still have about 500 miniature soldiers, each lovingly painted by the adolescent me. In 1970 I badgered my parents to take me to see Dino De Laurentiis’s ‘Waterloo’, with Rod Steiger playing the emperor and Christopher Plummer his nemesis, Wellington. I’ve se ..read more

My 11 year old son has got into metal detecting. Inspired by YouTube and the comedy show Detectorists, we got a cheap detector off Facebook Marketplace. Armed with the appropriate licenses and permissions, we go out to our local common to see what we can find. He wants to find old coins but we usually turn up things like nails and bottle tops. Occasionally we find something more interesting. Last week we found this chunk of iron. It’s about 5 centimetres square, with a cylindrical section on top. We couldn’t work out what it was. Any guesses? I therefore asked Twitter. For years, Twitter was ..read more