Centre for History and Culture

The Centre for History and Culture developed in 2007 from the research interests and expertise of the staff and postgraduate students in the Department of History at Bath Spa University. It has since expanded to include colleagues from other disciplines, who share similar historical interests, and a range of local, national and international affiliates.

Located as the University is, on the outskirts of the UNESCO World Heritage Site city of Bath, for centuries one of Europe’s leading spa resorts and an urban centre with a long history as a site of important socio-cultural interchange, it seemed only natural for the Centre to develop along two broadly intertwined lines. Thus, the Centre’s research tends to focus on particular questions around History and Culture, especially with regard to gender and the urban experience over time, and to the practical application of History and Culture through Heritage.

The Centre aims to:

• encourage networking among British and European historians, literary scholars, historical sociologists and postgraduate students with shared interests
• offer seminars, day schools, master classes, colloquia and conferences with the dual aim of encouraging graduate student involvement and developing collaborative European research projects that will lead on to individual and multi-authored publications.

Director

• Dr Elaine Chalus, Senior Lecturer in History. FRHistS. 18th century British social, cultural and political history; gender; spas and spa culture. Email

Secretary/Treasurer

• Dr Roberta Anderson, Teaching Fellow, Senior Lecturer in History. FRHistS; FHEA. Medieval, 16th & 17th century British social, cultural and religious history. Email

Staff Members

• Dr Kristin Doern, Senior Lecturer in History and Heritage. 18th & 19th century leisure, pleasure and consumption; temperance; history and heritage
• Dr Alan Marshall, Senior Lecturer in History. FRHistS. 17th century British social and cultural history; the industrial heritage of North-Eastern England
• Dr Alison Hems, Senior Lecturer in Heritage and Applied History
• Dr Bronach Kane, Lecturer in History, Medieval social and cultural history, religious history, gender and women's history
• Dr Matthew Spring, Senior Lecturer, Music
• Dr Rebecca Feasey, Senior Lecturer, Media and Cultural Studies
• Dr James Nicholls, Senior Lecturer, Media and Cultural Studies
• Dr Tracey Hill, Senior Lecturer, English and Cultural Studies
• Dr Stephen Gregg, Senior Lecturer in English

Details of our Affiliate Membership can be found here

Centre Lecture Series

Forthcoming Events: Conferences

• Kings and Queens: Politics, Power, Patronage and Personalities in Medieval and Early Modern Monarchy, 19th - 20th April, 2012, Corsham Court.
  Click here for more information and to register

• Gender in the European Town [final network meeting] 16th -18th  May, 2012, Bath, venue tbc 

• The Experience of Neighbourliness in Europe, c. 1000 - 1600, 17th -18th  May, 2012, Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, 16-18 Queen Square, Bath.
  Click here for information and to register.|
  For information about accommodation, please click here.
  PROGRAMME

Forthcoming Events: Papers and Public Lecture
 

• Dr Bronach Kane:  Paper: Shaping Desire in the Late Medieval English Church courts

   From Plato to Foucault, attempts to shape human desire have been explored as a constituent of power relations. This paper situates medieval ideas of desire in an ecclesiastical context, suggesting how discourses on sexuality were accommodated in the official records of the Church.  The church courts in medieval England formed a site in which popular and clerical ideas of desire could encounter and influence one another.

  The paper draws on litigation from marriage disputes in the courts of Canterbury and York between the thirteenth and late fifteenth centuries. In order to have a marriage annulled, parties had to demonstrate the existence of a prior conjugal bond, effectively proving the occurrence of an earlier marriage. When defendants wished to resist claims of marriage, a host of witnesses testified to their knowledge of sexual contact between the couple in dispute. From these depositions emerge accounts that constructed men and women as desiring subjects, whose emotional affection was often rejected. The bodies of both parties were imagined by witnesses whose testimony was formed in the nexus of these different influences. This paper will explore how desire was formulated and enacted from both popular and official perspectives.

   7 - 9 June 2012, Kulturgeschichtetag, Univiersität Innsbruck

Recent Events

• Dr Elaine Chalus:  "'My dearest Tussy': Family & Navy in the Fremantle Papers".  25 February 2012 at The Cockhaven Manor, Bishopsteignton, Devon, starting at 0945.

• Space, Place and Environment Strand of Gender in the European Town meeting. 8th - 9th  December, 2011, London

• International Conference, Cosmopolitanism and Culture, 21 - 22 October, 2011
• South West Meeting of London Historians, Bath Spa University, 28 July, 2011
• International Women’s Day and planting of the Suffragettes' Trees, March 2011 (.pdf)
• Programme of Events for International Women's Week (.pdf)
• Conference: More Than a Spa Resort? The Urban Experience in Bath Since the Reformation (24 April,, 2010)
• Conference: Gender and Loss (27 - 28 August 2009)