Introduction

David Manning*

Since its founding in 1921, the Institute of Historical Research has been the most formidable practitioner of the history seminar in the English-speaking world. The significance of this reality has yet to be fully grasped by either the Institute or its stakeholders. Part of the problem is that the life of the IHR’s seminars has never been systematically recorded let alone evaluated. But then it is also the case that the venerable institution of the history seminar – a conceptual and linguistic abstraction of a complex, multifarious culture – is itself poorly understood. A history of the history seminar is something of a lacuna in not just the histories of historiography, scholarship and education but also the cultural memory of academia. Rectifying this is not easy. A marketized, instrumentalist culture now complicates an appreciation of both the function and value of the history seminar. The praxis of history seminars is changing in ways that are not unrelated to the existential upheavals in university life. Teaching seminars are adapting to ‘engagement’ and ‘employability’ agendas as well as a more streamlined approach to studying for assessment, whilst research seminars are suffering from a dearth of time in an historian’s working day. It is an open question as to whether such transformations in seminar culture constitute the latest evolution of what historians do, or a more fundamental rupture in proceedings; but ambiguity in this moment is matched by a degree of silence about what is at stake. How can we defend the history seminar properly if we do not know what it is, and how can we understand what it is without an assessment of what it was?

Our book offers a timely intervention. It works with a paucity of sources and resources to cut through uncritical appeals to ‘innovative practices’ and ‘the good old days’ to tell a unique story and an imperfect, yet profound, history.

What follows is not the product of any orchestrated plan to commemorate or celebrate the centenary of the IHR with a study of its seminars. The idea for the book emerged in 2020 out of a serendipitous discussion between Penelope Corfield and myself on the history of historiography. This prompted me to reflect not just on the intergenerational nature of our conversation but on our contrasting experiences as members of the IHR. For whilst Penelope has been in the thick of things since the 1970s, my engagement has been very occasional, certainly marginal, and only since the late 2000s. Curiosity combined with a melancholic foreboding, prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, to force a realization that the absence of a history of the IHR’s seminars was lamentable, especially given that an increasing number of their prominent members were retired, or dead. More in hope than expectation, I started contacting past and present seminar convenors – most of whom I did not know personally – with a view to developing a volume of essays that would alleviate this lack in some way. In the midst of the COVID-19 ‘lockdowns’, a project was born through the good will of would-be contributors and nothing more than written (in one case handwritten) correspondence. The initial momentum of my idea turned into a cooperative endeavour that was welcomed and supported by the IHR and the University of London Press. This formative period was destabilized by financial and political turmoil at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study (SAS), of which the IHR has been a constituent part since 1994.¹ Restructuring precipitated losses and changes in personnel at Senate House and the IHR’s operations were recast by its mission and strategy for the period 2020–2025. Such moves were part and parcel of ongoing challenges to the sustainability of researching and teaching in history and the humanities across the British university sector. This book emerges from these contexts to complement, rather than reflect, the IHR’s ambitions for reflection and renewal.

Our project began with a set of guiding principles, but the actual work of preparing the book has involved negotiating and accepting certain realities that have come to determine the composition and condition of our text. The aim from the outset was to establish a critical, evidence-based history of some of the IHR’s most long-lived seminar series, working primarily, although not exclusively, with those that started life in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. The feasibility of this design rested entirely on securing contributions from seminar convenors who could make up for the shortage of archival records by utilizing personal memories, papers and contacts to build up a body of hitherto unidentified sources from which to work. It was also necessary to find individuals who were willing and able to take responsibility for preparing and writing a chapter on behalf of the seminar that they were most closely associated with. Initial enthusiasm for the project did not always result in a firm commitment to produce a chapter. The practical challenges did not end there. Colleagues in post had to be willing to write an essay that would not necessarily help them meet their own key performance indicators for the next Research Excellence Framework (REF): the national audit of academic work that determines the allocation of public funding for research amongst British universities. Set against the internal politics of seminar series, it is not always straightforward for any one person to reflect a broader consensual view on how a particular seminar ought to be represented for posterity. And one prospective contributor – Roger Mettam (1939–2022) – sadly passed away before his chapter could be realized. Taken in the round, these points provide some context for how and why our text is the way that it is. The value of our book does not stand or fall on being representative of the IHR’s seminars; but there are obvious gaps that would benefit from being filled at some point in the future.

Contributors have been in their element when working as subject specialists who can draw upon their lived experience as convenors and participants of seminars. Yet further research has involved them engaging with unfamiliar types of contemporary sources. This has been tricky. Crucially, though, our aim has never been to produce chapters that resemble specialist journal articles. What we have here will hopefully enhance public discussion, inform undergraduate and postgraduate learning, and inspire further scholarship. Each chapter shows critical intent, but the nature and scope of this endeavour reflects the primary sources available and the inclinations of authors. With a nod to both the individuality of authorial intention and the autonomy of each seminar series within the wider body of the IHR, the methodological design, structure and length of the chapters have not been standardized. And rather than appealing to university employees at ‘different career stages’, this book advances the work of scholars at different stages of life. Research and reminiscences intermingle as part of an organic open-ended conversation. There is insight and vulnerability in what follows.

Before introducing our chapters and some of their cross-cutting themes, I should say a little more about the IHR and its seminars, albeit with the caveat that a history of the Institute has yet to be written – notwithstanding an illuminating compendium of sources compiled by Debra Birch and Joyce Horn, The History Laboratory: The Institute of Historical Research 1921–96 (1996), and the multi-authored blog series From Jazz to Digital: Exploring the Student Contribution at the IHR, 1921–2021 (2021).

The founding of the IHR was most certainly a ‘landmark in British historiography’.² Established by the University of London on Malet Street in Bloomsbury during an era that coincided with the birth of modern postgraduate qualifications in Britain, the Institute quickly became the country’s leading proponent of postgraduate study in history. Intriguingly, it was the teaching and learning activities of this enterprise that first gave expression to a fledgling seminar research culture between students and their teachers and amongst teachers themselves. In the first instance, seminars operated as a sort of dissertation supervision in the round, but gradually evolved to encompass other ambitions and activities. Seminar series were differentiated by the historical periods and themes that reflected the expertise of their convenors, who were typically academic staff at the University of London. Seminar groups met regularly, usually once a week or once a fortnight through term time, with some lasting no more than a year or two whilst others developed through several iterations to last for decades. From the very beginning the ‘Institute came alive in the late afternoon’: students and teachers met together in the Common Room for a cup of tea before participating in lively academic seminars (see Figures 0.1 and 0.2).³ The form, content and function of these events have changed over the years. There was no simple shift to what might now be thought of as a traditional format of a fifty-minute paper followed by a similar length of time given over to question-led discussion. Nor was there a common linear path for seminars as they moved their emphasis away from postgraduate training towards the research undertaken by academics with a university position. A long view reveals a plurality and fluidity in format, membership and experience; yet the seminars have always been the beating heart of the IHR, and the people involved its lifeblood.

That said, the IHR has never been defined solely by its seminars. From its inception the Institute has had a national remit that has focused on at least three other core activities that reflect the work of the seminars whilst at the same time being somewhat separate from them. One, developing the historian’s capacity to undertake research, especially by means of enhancing the IHR’s library collections and more recently its digital online resources. Two, enabling historians from across Britain and around the world to connect and collaborate. Three, providing opportunities for historians to engage with representatives of other public institutions. In its own words the IHR is today, as it always has been, the UK’s ‘national centre for history, dedicated to supporting historians of all kinds’.⁴

Our book complicates and enriches this picture. My own offering presents a history of the history seminar within a political-polemical frame. Trevor Dean and Kate Lowe remarkably draw upon the reminiscences of forty-two people to illuminate the life of the Italy 1200–1700 Seminar and the influence of its founder, Nicolai Rubinstein. David Ormrod’s exacting account of the Economic and Social History of the Early Modern World Seminar gives a unique perspective on the relationship between, and evolution of, its named sub-disciplinary fields of enquiry. The intellectual and personal loyalty engendered by the IHR’s seminar culture is borne out in Jason Peacey’s insightful study of the convenors, audiences and speakers of the British History in the Seventeenth Century Seminar. Penelope Corfield deftly explores the ecology of the British History in the Long Eighteenth Century Seminar, where historiographical developments have come from manifold labours of love that sustain intellectual rigour and friendly camaraderie. Ulrich Tiedau’s carefully documented contribution shows how the Low Countries History Seminar was singularly formative in championing Dutch history in the English language. Pamela Pilbeam powerfully encapsulates that varied and enduring spirit of international collaboration at the heart of the IHR’s seminar culture, which was been no more apparent than in the workings of the Modern French History Seminar. Sarah Stockwell’s elegant reading of the life of the Imperial and World History Seminar establishes both an original study of the British academic world and a revisionist take on the emergence of postcolonial historiography. Rohan McWilliam’s fascinating memoir on the Postgraduate Seminar in Theory and Method (1986–2008) recounts both a dramatic moment of reckoning for the IHR’s commitment to postgraduate learning and period of methodological innovation. Kelly Boyd’s absorbing study of the founding and running of the Women’s History Seminar sheds new light on the relationships between feminist history, women’s history, gender history and women historians. And a final round-table discussion with contributions from David Bates, Alice Prochaska, Tim Hitchcock, Kate Wilcox, Ellen Smith and Rachel Bynoth, and Claire Langhamer, provides an exceptional blend of sensitive and captivating comment on the past, present and future of seminar culture at the IHR. Natalie Thomlinson’s thoughtful Afterword speaks to some of the resonances and silences in and between chapters, to some of the changes and continuities in the IHR’s seminar culture.

Here a range of cross-cutting themes give way to stimuli for further study and research. The rise and fall of the IHR’s modernist raison d’être takes on new meaning amidst a crisis in twenty-first-century meta-modernism. The IHR’s seminar culture speaks to an original and significant history of British historiography in national and global contexts, from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century. The seminars have been an extraordinary home to visitors and immigrants from abroad, servicing diverse national, international and transnational histories whilst also informing the making and breaking of colonial historiographies. The seminars are a continuing wellspring of manifold experiences of learning that have contributed to the wider intellectual culture of London, Britain, Europe, North America and much of the English-speaking world. And the seminars bear witness to the enduring import of women historians. What constitutes ‘research’, ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ in history must now be reassessed in light of the lives of historians, experienced both synchronically and diachronically. Historians can now be seen anew as both the subjects and objects of ‘history’. Seeing ideas and phenomena associated with precarity, employment, inclusivity, professionalization, training, networking and public service evolve through contrasting iterations of meaning from one generation to the next is both interesting and challenging. The extent to which the IHR’s historians have participated in the intellectual, political and cultural life of countries around the world puts to shame some of our present-day contrivances for identifying and evidencing the ‘impact’ of historical studies. Understanding the Institute’s seminars as an academic resource that works in concert with the books and manuscripts at the British Library and other London-based archives is just as important as appreciating their position within the University of London. The interplay between oral–aural and reading–writing worlds is freshly appraised as essential to making historians and historiography. The labour of historians involves the head and the heart and gives way to histories of work, sociability and relationships, as well as eating, drinking and smoking. Historiography does not just have an intellectual history; it has a spatial, emotional, experiential and sensual history too. The way in which each generation of seminar participants has been both indebted to its forebears and yet also unaware of earlier precedents for some of the things it comes to be concerned with, or advocate for, is quite striking. Cultural memory is selective and fragile. In summary, the significance of the IHR’s seminar culture is not derived from its foundational myth or its present-centred mission and strategy, but rather emerges from, and is sustained by, the ongoing learning practices of historians as scholars and people. What follows serves as a refreshingly novel and organic take on the perennial question what is history? and reinvigorates the relationship between academic historiography and more public forms of historical culture with a new sense of embodied historiography.⁵

Our book shows that the IHR’s seminars have given rise to a complex long-lived culture that is neither monolithic nor static but rather a function of evolving, multifarious synergies between teaching, researching and learning, historiography and participation – intertextual, interpersonal, intergenerational and intercultural. The seminars form a local, national and international hub for scholars and scholarship in ways that are intellectually and socially nourishing. The seminars are vital enablers of high-quality research in a way not dissimilar to critical editing and peer review but with the added zest of embodied interaction. The seminars constitute a living tradition, stimulating and incorporating dynamic change over time to contribute not just to the development of historiography but intellectual life more generally, often in conversation with major political events and cultural phenomena.

Albert Pollard (1869–1948) – the IHR’s original visionary, co-founder and first director – once mused that the essential purpose of the IHR and, by implication, its seminars, was:

to create a corporate tradition of historical technique which shall not be dissipated … by the conclusion of any particular task, the disappearance of individuals, or the dispersal of equipment, but shall have, like Solomon’s House in … [Francis Bacon’s] New Atlantis, fellows, novices and apprentices, ‘that the succession do not fail’.⁶

Such ideals may seem outmoded in the 2020s; however, they also serve as a reminder that learning is not without a sense of devotion, or even romance. To deny how scholars feel about their seminar culture would be to ignore its liminal position between professional and personal worlds; and as the former negotiates inclusion, so the latter negotiates tribalism. But more than this, Pollard’s words challenge us to re-affirm the historian’s craft.

History matters because historiography matters, and historiography matters because academic historians themselves matter. We must do more to make academic historians and their scholarship reflect our multicultural and intercultural society, but by carefully renewing academic practice without just reacting obsequiously and uncritically to public wants. Writing in 2015, David Lowenthal alerted us to how many public factions now struggle to ‘tolerate an alien past’ but instead domesticate history by ‘imputing present-day aims and deeds to earlier times’, either ‘praising them for echoing their own precepts or damning them for failing to conform to them’.⁷ With some caveats and qualifications, academic historians do not attest to how the world ought to have been. Rather, they continue, by their method, to understand and evaluate the complexities, varieties, nuances and contradictions of past people – with profound implications for appreciating how and why the present is the way that it is. In this endeavour historians now have a vital role to play in redefining the public nexus between research and education, in keeping with a sense of civic learning that the IHR helped to inaugurate. It is with this in mind, I look at our chapters and argue that the critical undogmatic traditions of the IHR’s seminar culture must continue, that the succession do not fail.