Author Archives: B Merritt

Hayden White Road

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A few reflections on day one and two of the three day Masterclass led by Professor Hayden White on 20th and 21st of February. Written by Michael Solda, a MA History of Ideas student at Birkbeck College.

Addressing a public audience, Professor Hayden White, true to his figuration as the anathema of ‘scientific’ historians, raised the question: what is wrong with mixing fiction with history? Don’t worry if you are without a quick answer, the question is rhetorical. The answer, of course, is nothing. But before we arrive somewhere without knowing how or where we are, let us not let ‘of course’ slip by unnoticed. ‘Of course’ is nothing other than to say being from or on a course. To recognize something as true-of-course is to situate oneself as part of the course. But we must ask, what course? Where have we been situated? And above us appears a sign: ‘Hayden White Road.’  So let us rephrase for the sake of transparency: the answer, on Hayden White Road, is that there is nothing wrong with mixing fiction and history when writing an account of a past event.

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Presenting and Interpreting the Processes of Stone Carving: The Art of making in Antiquity

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This post was written by Pari White, a PhD Student in Archaeology in Birkbeck’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Dr Will Wootton (Department of Classics, Kings College, London) is the Principal Investigator of a two-year Leverhulme funded project on stone carvers and carving in the Roman world, which began in July 2011 as a collaboration between the Departments of Classics and Digital Humanities at Kings College London. As part of the winter programme for the ‘Rome in Bloomsbury’ seminar series organised by Jen Baird from Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, on 14 February, Will gave a talk on the compilation of their database, which will include some 2500 previously unpublished photographs from the private collection of Peter Rockwell of Roman period sculptures that are mainly located in Rome, Italy and Aphrodisias, Turkey. Peter Rockwell has worked as a sculptor in Rome since the 1960s and is also a renowned expert in stone carving. Part of the research conducted by Will Wootton and Ben Russell includes a series of interviews with Peter Rockwell about these objects in terms of tool usage, methods of carving and other research questions which will be recorded on audio and film and transcribed. The database will eventually be made available on the web and is aimed at a wide audience both as an educational and research tool.

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Violence, Memory and Commemoration: Perspectives from Southern, East and Central Africa

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This post was contributed by Sarah Emily Duff, who graduated with a PhD in History from Birkbeck, in March 2011. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. She writes about food, history, and culture at Tangerine and Cinnamon.

On Friday 9 December, Birkbeck hosted the latest workshop in the Societies of Southern Africa: History, Culture, and Society seminar series. The series is organised by Wayne Dooling at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Rebekah Lee from Goldsmiths, and Birkbeck’s Hilary Sapire, who chaired Friday’s session.

The seminars focus on new research, and are a space for rethinking familiar themes within the scholarship on southern Africa. I presented a paper at the first workshop held to launch the series at SOAS in December 2009. Titled ‘Identities and Imaginaries in South Africa’, the workshop considered the construction of national, regional, and raced identities in South Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since then, the series has dealt with cities, urbanisation, and the anti-apartheid struggle. Friday’s workshop, ‘Violence, Memory and Commemoration: Perspectives from Southern, East and Central Africa’, was the first to broaden its scope beyond southern Africa. Each of the four papers focused on the politics of commemoration in four African nations, and the similarities between the examples were often more striking than the differences.

The first speaker was Rachel Ibreck from the University of Limerick. Her paper, ‘The Time of Mourning: The Politics of Commemorating the Tutsi Genocide’, looked at the ways in which the official annual mourning period for the 1997 Rwandan genocide, 7 to 13 April, is used and contested by a variety of groups both within and without Rwanda. For the Rwandan state, it is an opportunity to assert his legitimacy as a stable, democratic, and orderly government. State ceremonies emphasise unity and reconciliation, even if they privilege one memory of the genocide over others. But at regional ceremonies, the week is used to instil order and discipline in the provinces. For many Hutus, particularly those who live abroad, this is a week where non-participation is an act of resistance: a refusal to buy in to official narratives of remembrance which elide the ruling party’s involvement in the genocide.

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Age Spots and Spotlights: Celebrity, Ageing and Performance

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One-day symposium on Friday 9 December 2011

This post was provided by Kim Akass, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire.

According to Dr Janet McCabe (Birkbeck) and Dr Deborah Jermyn (Roehampton), co-organisers of Friday’s Age Spots and Spotlights one-day research symposium: ‘We live in a culture where youth is revered and envied, while ageing remains feared, even repugnant.’ One thing is clear, living your life in the glare of the media may bring its rewards, but once the glow of youth begins to fade, living those autumn years under the media’s microscope isn’t always so pretty.

Chaired by Dr James Bennett (Royal Holloway) the first panel of the day, ‘Celebrity, Ageing and Performance’, comprised Birkbeck academics on a variety of topics. First up was Dr Tim Markham, whose paper, based on interviews with BBC war correspondents, looked at the careers of Martin Bell, Jon Simpson and Kate Adie, and their younger colleagues’ opinions of their aged and gendered (in)appropriate behaviour. Concluding that age both undermines and supports war journalism, Markham’s paper argued that, in the end, Simpson, Adie and Bell function as repositories of our own projections. Prof. Mary Wood looked at the life and career of Franco Zeffirelli and pondered whether, in the twilight years of his long career, he could be considered an auteur or merely a celebrity.

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