Chapter 11 The IHR’s seminar culture: past, present and future – a round-table discussion

David Bates

My experience of the IHR’s seminars is that of someone who first came to the IHR in 1967 and who held posts at the Imperial War Museum (1969–71) and the Universities of Cardiff (1971–94) and Glasgow (1994–2003), before becoming director of the IHR (2003–8). I have remained in regular contact with the IHR since then.

As a PhD student at the University of Exeter (1966–9) and during the two years at the Imperial War Museum, London, during which time I was not certain that I would be able to have a career as a medieval historian, the IHR provided succour and a refuge which shaped my future. My experience was both social and intellectual. The seminars were places to meet with like-minded people in ways which were stimulating and, in ways I have since learnt, unique. During my Cardiff and Glasgow times, I would often try to ensure that doctoral students were invited to give a paper at the relevant IHR seminar. The way in which students and the postdocs were required to present their research to a rigorous, but usually friendly, audience helped them, and also informed my opinion of their work. This experience is just one facet of the IHR’s support for historians in Wales and Scotland before and after devolution.

My years as director gave me an overview that I had not previously possessed. The sheer range of subjects covered and the way in which scholarly communities are brought together has no equivalent that I know of. The mixture of the long-established seminars and the new ones that were created demonstrated both the dynamism of the historical discipline and a role that I believe only the IHR can play. They supplied a remarkable overview of what the study of history involves. Those years also convinced me that the seminars must be as generously funded as possible.

Alice Prochaska

I started in the 1970s as a migrant from Oxford, where I was writing a DPhil thesis on Westminster Reform 1807–1832. After the required graduate year residing in Oxford, I moved to London to use the archives at UCL and the British Library. My supervisor recommended that I join the IHR and allocated to me one of Oxford’s paid-for places there. The IHR’s Eighteenth-Century English History Seminar and the Common Room gave me the base I needed, both academically and socially, when I would otherwise have been quite unmoored. It was sometimes – but not always – challenging and the best of the papers gave important insights and leads on sources. There was too much rather dry administrative and military history for my taste, but I was grateful to be introduced to an international social circle of fellow graduate students, and grateful too, for the friendship and encouragement offered by Ian Christie (1919–98) and John Dinwiddy (1939–90), the Seminar’s two co-convenors.

For full disclosure: it was at the IHR and this Seminar in particular, that I met and got to know my future husband, the American historian Frank Prochaska. In the early 1970s there were many American graduate students at the IHR; they seemed extremely well informed about a wide range of world history, and they enriched the life of the Common Room, and our post-seminar visits to the pub, intellectually as well as socially. I also met people of different nationalities and generations embarking on careers in historical research. My horizons opened up in ways that would not have happened, or at least not so much, had I stayed in Oxford.

Later, working at the Public Record Office (PRO, now the National Archives), 1976 to 1984, and then as secretary and librarian at the IHR between 1984 and 1992, my research interests shifted to the twentieth century. I was commissioned to write a history of trade unions and worked as an archivist ordering and describing a broad range of modern records that were then being made available for research for the first time, under the thirty-year rule. I got involved in running the seminar on twentieth-century British history (sometimes hosted at the PRO), and the slate of co-convenors included the journalist and historian Peter Hennessy (b. 1947) and schoolteacher and historian Anthony Seldon (b. 1953) – who co-founded the Institute of Contemporary British History (ICBH) in 1986, which in turn formally joined the IHR in 1999 – as well as Ben Pimlott (1945–2004), Kathleen Burk (b. 1945) and John Turner (b. 1949).

This distinguished company really changed the nature of the contemporary historical research seminar. Our ‘Witness Seminars’ were the brainchild of Hennessy and Seldon at the ICBH and drew on the co-convenors’ extraordinary contacts, especially in broadcasting and politics, to enable historians to benefit from the testimony of the participants and decision makers of recent past events. I can remember half the former members of the Edward Heath cabinet standing in the IHR’s overcrowded Common Room sipping tea from polystyrene cups before going upstairs to the Local History Room to share their reflections. Another memorable encounter brought together people from both sides of the fascist-communist divide who had fought each other at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936. One of my co-convenors suggested we should invite Enoch Powell, who had been health secretary under Harold Macmillan, to speak about Conservative policy on the NHS, and it fell to me to issue the invitation (and selected correspondence relating to Powell’s visit has been archived in the Institute’s Wohl Library IHR/3/3/22). Not surprisingly, this particular event attracted protests and pickets and led to a subsequent special session to discuss, amongst much else, the nature of historical evidence in a contested contemporary context. Powell himself meticulously insisted on addressing only the topic he had been invited for and would not be drawn on his subsequent disastrous career. It was a fascinating, if nerve-shredding, episode. And here I must pay tribute to Michael Thompson (1925–2017), the wise and benign director of the IHR, who treated the considerable fuss with calmness and a great sense of proportion and presided over a special session to discuss issues of free speech and dispassionate historical enquiry.

Tim Hitchcock

The IHR seminars, and the British History in the Long Eighteenth Century Seminar in particular, have been at the centre of my intellectual and academic life since the early 1980s. Adrift among the precariat created by Margaret Thatcher’s assault on the universities, for half a decade the IHR became my intellectual sanctuary and only connection with the academy. Here a generation of scholars made connections and argued – creating a remarkable community drawn from around the world. The mid-1980s also saw the creation of the Postgraduate Seminar and the Women’s History Seminar – both helping to fundamentally change how all the other seminars worked, making them more open, outward-looking and welcoming. I have had the huge privilege of co-convening the Long Eighteenth Century History Seminar since 1993.

In those almost forty years, I have attended perhaps a thousand seminars. First, there is the anticipation. Chat in the tearoom (that is, the Common Room), meeting the speaker and catching up with old friends. Anything can happen. The paper could change how you see the world, or it could leave you flat. But in those moments before sitting down to listen, no one knows which it will be. And what follows is the most intimate of conversations. Initially all the talk is one way, as the speaker guides you through their thinking and their evidence. But in my mind, it is always a dialogue, as questions rise, and judgements are made. How does this fit with the literature? Have they considered other sources? How does this change how I think about the period? After fifty minutes, or so – just enough time to present what will perhaps become a journal article, or chapter of a thesis, you may have learned something, or not, but you have followed along with someone else’s thoughts on a research journey. And in the questions, the other side of that dialogue is given voice.

By the time you get to the pub, the single conversation has become many, as that last question – how does this change how I think? – is interrogated from half a dozen perspectives.

Kate Wilcox

My experience of the seminars is varied. I have wide-ranging interests in history but no specific research area of my own, so I have been to many different seminars. It’s always a lovely aspect of them that things of interest can come up in unexpected places. I have felt very welcome at most seminars I have been to; although, I’ve had a couple of isolated incidents of people expressing surprise that a librarian would come to a seminar.

My favourite moments have been going to papers given by people I have known, for a long time, as library readers. It is nice to see the outcome of their research. I remember especially papers by the Canadian historian Robert Tittler on the trade of painting and Tim Wales speaking on some findings of the Intoxicants and Early Modernity project based at the University of Sheffield. As a librarian at the IHR, it’s always interesting to learn about how sources are used in research, and this is also very useful in developing lateral thinking when answering library enquiries.

My other experience of the seminars is from the organizational side. In the early years of the Institute there was a direct link between the teaching seminars and the editions of primary sources that were on the shelves in the room at IHR where the seminar was being held. As the seminars moved away from being teaching seminars and became pre-prepared research papers, this link has been lost. However, librarians now assist in other ways. The library team would be called to help with technological issues, and I remember having to stand on a chair in the old Wolfson Room on several occasions adjusting data projectors, with a room full of people. We’d also sometimes be asked to help photocopy handouts. I suppose that support role was a continuation of the librarians fetching books at the early seminars. The reception and other events staff have been key to the smooth running of the seminars. It has been sad to see the receptionist role eroded in recent years after their line management was separated from the IHR.

Livestreaming has of course opened up seminars to people who can’t attend physically and began before the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated wider take-up. I remember watching the first IHR livestreamed seminar from the library enquiries office. When working fully and partially from home during the lockdowns I went to more seminars, it was nice to go to one at the end of the working day. Since returning to working full-time in Senate House, it has become harder to attend. The Internet connection on the train is not reliable enough to stay connected to Zoom and staying late to go to an online seminar doesn’t have quite the same draw as staying late to go to an in-person one.

Ellen Smith and Rachel Bynoth

We are seminar convenors at History Lab – a network of postgraduate students in history and related disciplines, based at the IHR. History Lab was founded in 2005, and a year later it had 500 members worldwide. The seminar series associated with History Lab was previously called the Postgraduate Seminar, the Postgraduate and Early Careers Seminar and also the Lab at Lunch Seminar. The committee finally landed on its current eponymous title the History Lab Seminar, harking back to the early twentieth-century conception of the IHR as a postgraduate research ‘laboratory’. In contrast to other seminars at the IHR, which are orientated around the study of a particular theme, time period, geographical area, theory or method, the History Lab Seminar is run by postgraduates for postgraduates and is not restricted to any form of subject specialization or periodization.

The seminar series at History Lab offers postgraduate members a welcoming, collegiate space to present, often their first paper, and receive feedback to progress their theses or first publications. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, the Seminar was forced to move online, using its blog, as well as its Tweets and Zoom meetings to substitute for in-person seminars. As a result, it could afford to be less London-centric than before, incorporating committee members from all over the UK, and even giving postgraduates from across the world the opportunity to present their research in an esteemed IHR seminar online.

More generally, we have found that being part of the IHR’s seminar culture means we can connect postgraduates, especially PhD students, to other seminars, scholars and opportunities, both in London and beyond.

Claire Langhamer

I can’t now remember exactly when I delivered my first IHR paper, nor can I recall the precise details of what it was about; I imagine it had something to do with women’s leisure and was probably delivered to the Women’s History Seminar. I know that it would have been after I started my first job at Sussex University. As a PhD student at the University of Central Lancashire, the London seminar scene seemed a long way away – geographically, and in other ways too. It was not part of my own doctoral rite of passage.

What I do remember from my first IHR seminars are the feelings they engendered: the fear of being exposed as an academic fraud, the quiet pleasure of being taken seriously and the kindness of the participants. The imposing architecture of Senate House, the proximity to historians who had shaped fields of enquiry, the easy – and not so easy – sociability afterwards, all contributed to a sense that there was a distinctive structure of seminar feeling.

More recently, my experience of the seminars has been one of unalloyed joy against a backdrop of deep uncertainty. During the 2020–22 COVID-19 lockdowns the ability to attend a range of different papers on Zoom was a lifeline like no other. The seminars offered a sense of community and purpose at a time when both felt under threat, drawing together academics from across the continents in the global experiment of pandemic seminar production. The importance of the seminar space as a place of collegiality and care, as well as challenge and debate, was never more apparent. The move to hybrid and in-person seminars later in 2022 was infused with hope that a kind of normality might indeed return. My first year as IHR Director was marked by the need to balance the enhanced accessibility of the online seminar with the desire to be back in a room with other human beings.

The seminar experience then reflects the specificities of, and relationship between, historical change and career stage. Both the academic life cycle and the shifting context of intellectual production frame the meaning of the seminar for individuals and for communities of scholars. Changes in the form and content of seminars, as well as in the identity of participants, correspond to wider historical developments, though there are also striking continuities. The contingency of the seminar seems to have become more obvious in recent years – and not only because of COVID-19. Longer term shifts within the higher education sector have changed the conditions under which academics at all career stages perform their labour, squeezing the time and resource available for acts of collegiality and community-building. The way that we do our job may be rooted in academic tradition, but it is also impacted by, and responds to, shifts in the world around us.

David Bates

The seventy-fifth anniversary publication The History Laboratory (1996) contained a good account of the seminars’ history which is thought-provoking in relation to their changing role within the academic profession and the IHR. For all that, the seminars can be said to have democratized since then. That said, the basic point made there that the seminar is a place for informed discussion and the sharing of knowledge remains as relevant as ever. The regular attendance that a programme of seminars throughout the academic year requires is a way to safeguard against excessively narrow specialization. This is of the greatest importance to teaching, as well as research. It is also important to be aware that the benefits that an individual takes away from any seminar are often intangible ones that only become clear over time.

The national role for which the IHR was founded, and for which the School of Advanced Study (SAS) has been funded since 1994, means that the seminars are institutionally neutral because they do not belong to any single higher education institution in the UK. SAS’s role and that of its constituent Institutes, about which I became very well informed while I was director, are a part of national life that should be developed. All this certainly informs what historians do because they bring together people from many institutions in a way that seminars elsewhere rarely do. At the IHR’s seminars, ‘guests’ are not just speakers, but individuals who happen to be in or near London at a particular time. Also, the consequential benefits from the core personnel of most IHR seminars being drawn from across London and its vicinities also inform what historians do because they routinely bring together the staff of many institutions. The IHR’s international reputation means that scholars from abroad visiting London and the UK attend a situation that has global significance. The remarkable range of expertise that the seminars often bring together can provide opportunities for discussion and networking that are unparalleled even in leading research-led universities. This informs what historians do because it brings them together for intellectual and social exchange. The national and international contacts that are created can lead to participants in the seminars being invited to other countries and benefitting from the discussions that follow.

Alice Prochaska

At their best, the IHR’s seminars provide a testing ground for historians at all stages of their career to try out theories and learn from each other. They can also help provide information on historical resources. Quite often, discussion in the seminars will change the direction of someone’s research. Sometimes, collaborative opportunities will open up. The seminars also offer opportunities for historians to compare notes on teaching and curricula. A great deal of informal mentoring goes on. And there must be untold occasions when people have been saved from error and misunderstanding.

Tim Hitchcock

When I first started attending seminars at the IHR they were intimate drafting sessions, composed mainly of University of London PhD students (which I was not), led by a professor. But even then, they contrasted strongly with my previous experience of academic life at the Universities of California, Berkeley and Oxford. At Berkeley, public lectures by famous academics were the order of the day; while at Oxford the pressing need to rush back to college for dinner stymied post-seminar conviviality and debate. And while IHR seminars were superficially similar to their Oxford counterparts, they felt different, always more sociable, although in the early days frequently more rebarbative (particularly once you got to the pub). In the 1980s the expectation was that you would approach the convenor beforehand and ask their permission to attend. The speaker would read out the paper – perhaps a draft thesis chapter – pencil in hand, marking up typos and awkward phrases as they went. At the end of six or seven thousand words, the professor would critique, while others chipped in with points of clarification or minor correction. It was a system designed to work at the pace of the printing press – a brief stopping point between drafts and a viva, on the way towards an article or a book, with its peer reviews and revisions, galleys, first and second proofs. Seminars were an all-important part of a machine for the management of academic production. No article saw the light of day without first gaining the approval of a seminar audience. But even in that more cloistered age, IHR seminars then led to the pub and dinner, and an evening of debate.

Since the 1980s their role has changed. As typewriters and linotype have given way to word processors, PowerPoint and the Internet; as the universities expanded and international travel grew; as the costs of publication plummeted and publishers were turned from gatekeepers to touts in search of ever more content, seminars evolved dramatically. Perhaps most obviously, they changed from drafting sessions to a species of public performance. Backed by the ubiquitous, gaudy PowerPoint, the speaker now stands at a podium rather than sitting at a table, their eyes challenging the audience to engage. For many postgraduates, it is their first introduction to the queasy feeling that accompanies giving a large undergraduate lecture. But it is also a form of public outreach. Each new book needs to be promoted, and each funded project needs to demonstrate its ‘impact’. The intimate conversation remains, but the place of the seminar in the machinery of the academy has changed. From a kitchen-table conversation among colleagues, it is now a shout from the rooftops. In the process historians have become much better performers, to the detriment, perhaps, of a quieter culture of scholarship.

Kate Wilcox

In the past, especially when the library was more fully staffed, some librarians were research-active and engaged with particular seminars as researchers in the field, including as seminar convenors. None of the current library staff holds an academic post, although we do engage with the seminars and feel that they are an important part of the life of the Institute.

From the seminars I have attended, I have seen that the informal format leads to feedback, discussion and increased knowledge of sources. The themes in the seminars come directly from things historians are researching and interested in, and this in turn develops new ideas.

With many seminars being held online now, we miss the buzzy atmosphere in the building when people are gathering for the seminars to start. It’s nice that some are starting to return to in-person meetings. In the library, we could always tell when a particular seminar was on because there’d be an increase of people using the relevant library collection that afternoon. Our recent library survey results have shown that some people have not been using the library as much recently because they have not been in the building for seminars.

Ellen Smith and Rachel Bynoth

The History Lab has the funding and resources to deliver a regular seminar every two weeks during term time. This provides postgraduates with a space for discussion that generates scholarly networks, ideas and critiques which in turn inform projects such as theses and articles, often in the absence of established postgraduate seminar groups at their home universities.

Speakers are confined to forty minutes in which to present their paper, generally aided with a visual presentation on PowerPoint. Speakers have the opportunity to shape and sharpen their arguments through formulating their ideas for a general, non-specialist audience and through rigorous comments and debate. Audience members collect theoretical and methodological insights from the papers, which we know has helped them develop their own research ideas. The post-paper question and answer segments of the seminar can be challenging for speakers, but they enable ideas to be reaffirmed and refined. As a postgraduate-tailored seminar space, History Lab is less hierarchical than other seminars, encouraging livelier, more dynamic conversations between speaker and audience, and facilitating easier dialogue and collaboration between scholars, often across disciplinary boundaries. We tend to get audiences of around twenty people with a variety of research interests. From time to time, we welcome senior scholars to our seminars, interested in the papers of our postgraduate speakers, which enables postgraduates to connect with these more established historians in a casual setting. As convenors, we often prefer smaller, more intimate gatherings at seminars, finding they are conducive to motivating attendees to reflect deeply and critically about the paper with comments and questions, and to build relationships with the speaker and other listeners. Those who attend History Lab regularly become part of an intellectual culture which approaches the past beyond, irrespective of specializations, in a supportive environment, enabling postgraduates to become more confident, well-rounded and receptive historians.

Claire Langhamer

History-making is always a collaborative process, even if the single-authored monograph continues to flourish within the discipline. Historical research develops in dialogue with students, with supervisors, with colleagues, with archivists and librarians, with referees and reviewers, and with those closest to us. When we co-author work, that dialogue is more immediately manifest, but when we publish alone the texture of collaboration is necessarily flattened into the gratitude that underpins acknowledgements and the formality of academic references.

The seminar is a place where we perform the collaborative dynamic together, rather than through the to-and-fro of written comment and response. It is a place where we can think collectively and where we can build on other questions and contributions in the quest for new understandings. It is a place where production and reception are evenly balanced. Whilst the formal presentation of single-authored papers still tends to dominate, the point of a seminar is less about performance and more about exchange. The very best seminars leave the presenter with a sense that their work has in some way been transformed by the act of being discussed; and they leave other participants feeling that they too think differently, because of what they have heard.

Seminars are made up of engaged commentators and critical friends, willing to offer their thoughts on whatever is being presented. The seminar experience can thus have a fundamental impact on the development of a particular project, a wider approach or even a career. Many seminar series sit right at the heart of their sub-field, some persisting over many decades, others newly emerging to reflect disciplinary shifts. They generate intellectual energy and can exert profound and lasting influence.

Seminars inform what historians do, and they surface how we work. They also model a commitment to the future of the discipline – most notably in their support for early career scholars – and show that the history community coheres across institutional, career stage and geographical boundaries.

David Bates

The diversification of the discipline since the 1960s has produced a huge increase in the number of IHR seminars and reflects scholarly communities as they are now defined. The result of the sheer range of subjects is that it keeps their subjects up-to-date historiographically and enables scholarly communities to examine the themes that have brought them into existence. This also shapes scholarly communities by conferring an identity requiring them to look to the future.

In thinking about how the seminars shape scholarly communities, the definition of ‘scholarly community’ should be as broad as possible. For this reason, it is best that the seminars be as open as possible and that they welcome, not just those who are manifestly specialists in the field, but all with a general interest in the topic of any specific seminar. The scholarly community should not consist only of individuals who work in higher education institutions, but all who have a serious interest in the subject. As someone much of whose life has been spent at a distance from London, I would warn against the danger of becoming too London-centric in defining the scholarly communities for which the seminars cater. Scholarly communities comprise all with an interest in a particular field, something that is reflected in the national role for which the IHR and SAS are funded. This means that seminar convenors should watch out for scholars from the rest of the UK and abroad visiting London and invite them to attend seminars, sometimes to give papers, but also for social as well as intellectual reasons.

The integration of the holders of IHR fellowships and bursaries into seminars in recent decades is a good and positive development because it contributes to shaping scholarly communities for the future. It is of crucial importance for the discipline and for the IHR’s role that this integration be further reinforced. There are reasons why the use of Zoom and Teams during the COVID-19 pandemic ought to be continued because it can allow international participation in ways that previously took place only intermittently. However, almost everyone I talk to argues, as I do, that face-to-face discussion is preferable and socializing after a seminar is a foundation for robust and new networks. Future strategy must balance the pros and cons, and give thought to hybrid seminars, but it must not lose sight of the immense profits that have followed for scholarly communities from a century of IHR seminars.

In a lot of ways, this question can be answered along lines similar to the previous one. The emphasis on the social alongside the intellectual is of the greatest importance.

Alice Prochaska

Of the two seminars that I was involved in, the eighteenth-century one followed a more usual path, creating a network of people with research interests in the period. Many friendships were formed, and some have lasted for decades, leading to academic engagement far beyond the IHR itself (for example, invitations to speak in North America, joint research projects, special teaching initiatives, references to publishers, and much more).

The seminar on twentieth-century Britain helped shape a community of academic interest in the subject that went far beyond scholarly historians as conventionally understood. There was a fluid interchange between historians, politicians, policy makers, journalists and broadcasters. It was possible, for example, to see how the seminar allowed political practitioners to try out their ideas whilst also learning from others about particular aspects of policy. Similar work is now carried out by History & Policy (est. 2002), which under the directorship of Philip Murphy has just moved back to its original home at the IHR.

Tim Hitchcock

Generations of scholarship, and links between generations, are made by seminars. In part, it is a simple matter of perhaps a few dozen people coming together every two weeks in term time – exchanging pleasantries and relieving the isolation that frequently comes with historical research. But seminars also create wider ‘virtual’ communities, that in their turn underpin imagined ones. Over the decades, most historians of eighteenth-century Britain, for instance, have attended the Long Eighteenth Century History Seminar. Hundreds of researchers have come along for perhaps five or six occasions while doing the research for a doctorate in London’s archives, or on research leave later in their career. The field is small enough that few universities have more than one or two specialists in eighteenth-century history, or more than one or two postgraduates in the area at a time. As a result, this virtual community is spread across space and time; from Japan to India, to North America and back to Europe and across generations from the 1970s to the 2020s. But it is in the Seminar that this virtual community conducts its debates and acknowledges its ever-changing collection of sub-disciplines, from histories of space and place, gender, sexuality, disability and emotion – to whatever comes next.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, as the Seminar went online, the virtual community that the seminar had always enabled came together in remarkable ways. With an audience (and speakers) Zooming in from around the world, the breadth and shape of the seminar’s scholarly community was both revealed and expanded. It has made the easy conversation about a paper much more difficult to conduct. There were no more quiet discussions on the way to the pub, pointing out a paper’s strengths (or flaws). But it has also allowed old friends of the seminar to be re-incorporated into the formal online event, and for many new colleagues to join. For the Long Eighteenth Century Seminar, the future is hybrid. The sociability and the debate in the pub and over dinner remain all important, but the inclusive global audience also needs to be maintained.

Kate Wilcox

The seminars enable relationship building and collaborations through the seminars themselves but also through the informal conversations that happen before and after the seminar. Some seminars bring together people from different fields.

The online seminars have perhaps reshaped these communities by enabling access for people who wouldn’t normally be able to attend. It’s clear that new connections and discoveries are being made both through discussions but also through comments made through text-chat functions on platforms like Zoom or on social media.

Ellen Smith and Rachel Bynoth

Since COVID-19, History Lab has changed dramatically, allowing the committee to provide a meaningful and wide-reaching forum for the postgraduate community to gather online and mitigate the isolation of PhD life. Zoom and hybrid seminar environments have lessened travel and financial barriers which affected past attendance figures, attracting participants beyond London-based researchers. Now speakers and audience members come together not only from across the UK, but also the world, and develop, deepen and refine their ongoing research, from home and office environments, following up conversations and contacts through social media, email and our recently developed blog.

Comments from seminar speakers indicate that they often leave the seminar having met and gained positive feedback from their peers, and occasionally from members of the public or leading scholars in their field, inspired to follow new avenues of research, and armed with contacts from, and introductions to, various institutions and researchers. History Lab always sets the expectation for seminars to provide a safe, inclusive and welcoming atmosphere for speakers to receive constructive criticism.

Claire Langhamer

Like a good conference or workshop, a seminar is capable of producing something that goes well beyond the sum of its parts – a feeling that the terrain has shifted as the result of thinking together. A seminar series – framed thematically or chronologically – can advance agendas, whilst also shaping disciplinary and sub-disciplinary memory: it is, of course, always important to know where we have come from as well as where we might be going.

The deceptively simple act of coming together – of being bodies in a room, virtual or otherwise – is itself an act of community development and maintenance, notably so in an academic environment where time for open intellectual discussion is often in short supply. Seminars shape scholarly communities through this everyday practice and through being open and welcoming to all. Some have more defined constituencies: the History Lab Seminar offers both an intellectual and social forum for PhD students, whilst History Lab Plus offers a space for early career historians and independent researchers. The IHR’s seminars play a distinctive role in transcending university affiliations and helping to generate a critical mass that might not be available in single institutions. They are explicitly open to all who are history-curious wherever they are located.

And yet the seminars do far more than act as a location for discussion. They also provide a space to create new communities of scholarship or to bring together those working on the most dynamic parts of the discipline in new formations. Sometimes this happens organically as seminars develop or emerge over time; sometimes it is actively encouraged. In its centenary year, the IHR initiated ten Partnership Seminars to address new areas of research and approaches to the past. These had a particular emphasis on collaboration and interdisciplinarity and a commitment to cross-sectional and global approaches. They included the interactive series Historians across Boundaries: Collaborative Historical Research, which was explicitly designed to ‘promote awareness of existing research in different fields and explore how we can embed collaboration into our future research’.

David Bates

To an extent, this depends on the subject of the particular seminar. In some cases, the nature and ethos of the topic requires it. Manifestly the diversification of the historical discipline since the 1960s has produced a much greater interdisciplinarity. This on its own can require engagement with broader societies outside the historical community that is composed of members of a higher education school or department of history and of major research projects. As to the place of the seminars within both the University of London and wider publics, local, national and international, the seminars should surely be as open as possible. As someone much of whose life has been spent at a distance from London, I would again warn against the danger of becoming too London-centric. The national role must always be emphasized. I also think that seminars could become a vehicle for discussion between academics and public figures, including politicians, museum staff, journalists, etc. This is already the case, but in the future more could and should be done. Through its conferences, the IHR has a long and praiseworthy tradition of engaging with the place of the historical discipline in broader society. While the autonomy of each seminar series must continue to be respected, a case exists for encouraging seminars to pick up themes that any conference has identified as particularly stimulating and worthy of further exploration.

Alice Prochaska

My experience is not current but let me give a few examples. First of all, the seminars have provided a recruiting ground for talks to the Historical Association and the Association for Local History, as well as membership of other societies. I joined the Council of the Royal Historical Society as Vice President. I also joined the committee of the History at the Universities Defence Group (HUDG) and I believe it was they who nominated me to the 1989–90 History Working Group on the National Curriculum, set up by Kenneth Baker at the Department of Education and Science, as it then was. There followed an intensive couple of years working with the other members of the group to design the first national curriculum in history, and testing it out in the media, and at public meetings and group seminars around the country. And, in May 2022, Philip Murphy organized a ‘Witness Seminar’ on that experience.

Tim Hitchcock

History is at the heart of how every society understands itself. In a constant dialogue between the past and the present, each new problem is interrogated via a distant mirror. In the case of the Long Eighteenth Century Seminar, this works on a number of different levels. First and foremost, this is a global conversation. We actively seek to engage with scholars everywhere the topic is discussed. And since Britain’s place in a global history of the eighteenth century is important (however problematic), the Seminar responds to developments in public discourse, in India and North America, the Caribbean and Australia. But as importantly, the period is part of Britain’s national discussion. In a narrower sense, the Seminar is also in dialogue with its immediate community, with London. There has been a remarkable flourishing of independent London history groups in the last two decades, and we seek to maintain strong links to them, providing an important venue for London’s history. And whether this is focused on economics, race, poverty or politics, the seminar responds, seeking out papers and speakers.

Historians are fundamentally engaged in the present. For myself, history is quite simply a way of thinking more clearly about the present. The seminar provides a supportive environment for historians to engage with history, and by doing so, engage in a debate.

And as the IHR seminars evolved from the late twentieth century, they have become ever more open to public participation. Each session remains an ‘academic’ event, but increasingly the audience includes independent scholars, making the seminars themselves feel ever more amphibious: an academic discussion, held in an increasingly public space.

Kate Wilcox

Membership of the IHR library is open to everyone. The library runs inductions and tours for new students and other researchers. Although they are overtly introductions to the library they also serve as an introduction to the Institute’s other activities including the seminars. New library users are always impressed and excited by the range of seminars. New readers from outside academia are sometimes surprised that they are open to everyone.

Some seminars are clearly making a conscious effort to reach new public audiences by introducing new topics and different types of speakers, including practitioners working in galleries, libraries, archives and museums. With the introduction of the new IHR Partnership Seminars, the IHR has sought to do this in a more formalized way.

The online format has made casual participation in the seminars easier. People who are unable or may feel intimidated by going to an in-person session in Senate House find it easier to drop in anonymously online.

Ellen Smith and Rachel Bynoth

The History Lab Seminar responds to and engages with social shifts and trends in a number of ways. They support, represent and remain attentive to the needs of postgraduates, from master’s students to doctoral researchers. The seminars are an excellent space to make current day connections and figure out the relevance of research to today’s societies and cultures. This not only helps postgraduates with the ‘so what’ question but it also encourages further ideas on how this work can benefit societies post submission and with next steps. This fits in with a large part of History Lab’s agenda to assist postgraduates as they learn about themselves during their PhDs, find their place in the world and work towards building and shaping their careers.

To further this agenda, our tenure as seminar co-convenors saw us spearhead a popular series of special events catering to history postgraduates as they prepare for their future. Whilst some of these events have been academic in nature, others have been designed to mitigate the emotional and practical difficulties of finding gainful employment outside the university sector.

The History Lab seminars naturally reflect the wider ethos and mission of the History Lab, which continues to develop in response to the challenges of diversity, equality and inclusion. The spring of 2021 saw the launch of the Olivette Otele prize to be awarded annually for the best paper submitted to the History Lab Seminar by a Black PhD research student in the UK. We hope that this prize gestures towards the need for similar schemes for other marginalized groups as well as wider social action.

Public history and outreach are also gaining significance as areas of historical enquiry and practice, encouraging researchers to access new and wider audiences for their publications and to think about the contemporary social, cultural and political resonances of their work. The seminars we have hosted as seminar convenors have asked pertinent questions of the past that also interrogate and invite modern-day issues, highlighting the significance of the historian’s craft to areas of policymaking, current international affairs, political discourse and navigating cultural and social life.

Claire Langhamer

History has never been more popular within broader society. From high-profile works of historical fiction, and the transformative work of community historians, to the boom in genealogical research and economic importance of the heritage sector, people continue to find meaning – and pleasure – in understanding the lives of people in the past. The COVID-19 pandemic encouraged even more people to think historically, and to record their own experiences for the benefit of future historians. Individuals are interested in their own family histories and the history of their own communities. They are also interested in people, places and times that have no immediate personal resonance. This is partly because these things are intrinsically interesting, but it is also because understanding lives that are strikingly different and strangely familiar helps us place ourselves and others in context. The past can provoke strong feelings; it can spark political action; and it can encourage new solutions. Thinking historically encourages us to think critically about the present and to plan for the future.

The IHR seminars have long welcomed those with an interest in the past but no formal academic affiliation. Increasingly the seminars model the impact that history as a discipline can have. They build partnerships across different sectors and constituencies, bridging the gap between university-life and historical practice beyond the academy. The Black British History Seminar, for example, brings together scholars, activists, artists and heritage practitioners. Others take contemporary challenges as their starting point covering themes such as ‘Archives and Truth’, ‘Risk and Uncertainty’ and ‘Spaces of Sickness and Wellbeing’. Seminars change their remit over time and according to wider context, reflecting historiographical developments rooted in a wider political culture. The Britain at Home and Abroad Seminar was formed from a merger of the Modern British History Seminar and the seminar entitled Reconfiguring the British: Nation, Empire, World 1600–1900; new seminars reflect societal change. The Women’s History Seminar was established in 1986 to provide a forum for work on women and gender, whilst the emergence of the Digital History Seminar in 2012 reflected the growing importance of digital practice within the discipline.

David Bates

For obvious reasons (i.e., age!), I am no longer involved in debates about seminars and pedagogy. I would nonetheless say that, however they are conducted, seminars matter because they produce intellectual and social exchange in ways that are unique. This will always be the case, no matter how practice changes. In saying this, I immediately think of the need to distinguish between a seminar and a workshop, with the latter usually having an intended specific outcome. The unpredictability of the seminar actually matters a great deal. Without naming any names, all of us will remember a poor paper that produced a lively and enlightening discussion that benefitted the speaker and the participants. And indeed, a magisterial and brilliant one that did not.

As long as the argument that seminars matter is accepted, the case for an exchange of ideas about the present and the future involving the seminar convenors and IHR management might be a persuasive one. The historical ambience that the IHR provides is also a stimulus. We have come a long way from the days when it was normal practice for seminars to take books from the shelves to consult them, but the setting remains important in ways which I have already set out. When it comes to demographics, attention must be given to ensuring that programmes do include scholars at all stages of their professional careers and, where desirable, figures from public life.

Alice Prochaska

They matter to different people for all sorts of different reasons. They are a training ground for research historians – often including people in middle age who find themselves irresistibly drawn back to research into a subject that fascinates them; and in this respect the fact that the IHR is based in central London has made it a mecca for such people, as it now remains through its website. For all graduate students in history, they form an important part of the experience of doing a PhD. They form social networks around the intellectual pursuit of history. They can and do introduce new research techniques, as well as new insights based on people’s research. They can challenge conventional assumptions. Above all, the IHR seminars are part of the lifeblood of the discipline and practice of history. The discipline is constantly changing and being renewed and challenged. Without the exchange of ideas and knowledge that happens at these seminars, historical research nationally and internationally would be very much the poorer.

Tim Hitchcock

The seminars have three basic functions. First, they form a space in which a serious, long-form conversation about the past can take place, leading to the creation of a shared body of knowledge and a point of reference. Second, they both make generations of historical scholarship, and build bridges across generations. They are where postgraduate students have conversations with senior scholars and where they themselves hold the conversations that will shape the field for decades to come. And finally, they are an all-important social space that makes the quotidian job of historical research possible.

On the best of days, after long hours working through manuscripts in the archives, or struggling to turn evidence into argument on paper, that late afternoon journey to the IHR for a cup of tea and a seminar is what makes sense of it all. The beauty and the art of history lies in the depth of the historian’s engagement with a single topic. Days, weeks, months and years are spent becoming ever more immersed. The seminars provide the context that makes sense of that journey. They allow micro-histories and meta-histories to confront one another; they encourage the political historian to listen to the cultural historian; and for them both to listen to the historians of race, emotions and the economy.

The IHR seminar programme is unique. There is no equivalent anywhere else in the world; and they are a prime factor in explaining why the historical profession in Britain is so dynamic, so productive and so important.

Kate Wilcox

They’re a central place for people from different departments, disciplines and sectors to come together to share ideas. They’re important for the IHR as a showcase for the Institute across London, the UK and the world. They complement the library and other Institute functions. They are clearly valued by the people who attend them. They give an opportunity for people to make connections and be inspired by each other’s research and feedback. Comments in the recent library survey showed a mixture of views: some people keen for the online format to continue and others desperate for them to return to in-person, either due to technological preferences or because they felt that the online format is lacking certain essential elements of a seminar. Making the seminars work for a hybrid audience will be important to meet both these needs.

Ellen Smith and Rachel Bynoth

Seminars provide a forum for the development of academic relationships, fostering a sense of collegiality that was shown to be fragile during the recent COVID-19 crisis. Seminars form important steps in the research process, facilitating debate and critique. They reflect the spirit of research at particular moments in time and foreground new and ground-breaking projects. History Lab also pays acute attention to the needs of the postgraduate community, an especially vulnerable group as regards economic and social precarity. In this way, History Lab performs a vital function for aiding the collective wellbeing of those who participate, allowing them to navigate the isolation of PhD research.

Through the careful and considered curation of seminar programmes, convenors can spotlight particular voices or underrepresented scholars, and raise the profile of certain historiographical trends. Seminars do not simply reflect or respond to social or academic currents, rather, seminar committees, convenors, speakers and audiences can effect change and impact or shape the pathways of research and the ways this research is conducted through the seminars they hold.

Seminars require the time, effort and enthusiasm of individuals, generally PhD students. A collective sense of purpose is evident as postgraduates work for each other.

Claire Langhamer

In an increasingly personalized world, the collectivist nature of the seminar matters. The seminar draws attention to the collaborative nature of historical practice and models a collegiality rooted in professional expertise. To be sure, seminars provide a vital space for the presentation of individual research as it is developing, and occasionally they might fail to engage or even descend into bickering. But their primary purpose is dialogue. A presentation is the starting point for discussion, not its conclusion; questions beget further questions; conversation spills out into the social spaces that follow. Writing and archival research can be solitary experiences framed by anxiety as well as delight; once research is published it has a life of its own. The seminar offers a space in between – a space where we can show our workings, try things out and, crucially, make mistakes. It allows us to engage with ideas as they are forming and to help push them forward. Seminars allow us to watch ideas in motion and communities in action; they matter because history is as much about dialogue as it is about findings.