Chapter 9 The Postgraduate Seminar in Theory and Method (1986–2008)

The origins of the Seminar

The Postgraduate Seminar in Theory and Method was really the outcome both of some wider changes in academic culture and of a group of younger scholars entering the profession. None of this would have been possible if the IHR had not itself changed in some respects. The IHR was an institution that felt in the mid-1980s like an annex of the British Library, at that time just a short walk away in the British Museum; it displayed a slightly other-worldly quality, which was part of its charm for some and yet daunting for others. Like many of the figures involved in the foundation of the Postgraduate Seminar, I was not part of the University of London. There were postgraduates at the IHR who were attached to many universities in the UK and other countries.

In 1983 I commenced my PhD at the University of Sussex in Brighton where I worked under the supervision of the pioneering scholar of history from below, J. F. C. Harrison (1921–2018), on Victorian populism.² I first encountered the IHR in 1985 because, while in Brighton, I was invited up by Virginia Berridge (b. 1946) – later to become one of the leading scholars of public health policy – to deliver a paper to her Newspaper History Seminar. Speaking at this event alerted me to the possibilities of the IHR both in terms of its seminars and library but also the opportunity to socialize with other postgraduates.

At the time, my department at Sussex (like other university history departments) paid for a number of postgraduate places at the IHR. This carried the benefit of IHR membership but also much-coveted borrowing rights at Senate House Library. Coming up from Brighton to live in the metropolis, I looked to the IHR as an alternative institutional home. Like many postgraduates from institutions outside London, I identified with the IHR as the hub of the historical community in Britain (but not necessarily with the University of London). A year after I joined, the IHR actually became my employer as I was paid to set up the seminar rooms and purchase cakes from a local supermarket for teatime. I only gave this up when I started part-time teaching.

The Institute in those days felt conservative, run by a group of men and women who were the products of Harold Macmillan’s Britain. There was also a significant young fogey contingent, all bow ties and Harris Tweed. In the Common Room there was a consistent cast of misfits and eccentrics sipping coffee while reading old volumes of Punch and who could be found in the numerous nooks and crannies of the library upstairs. Some turned out, on closer inspection, to be leading historians. We postgraduates imagined how a cosy Agatha Christie-type murder mystery could be set there whose title would be ‘The Clio Conspiracy’.

Yet, whilst some history departments elsewhere (especially in new, plate-glass universities, polytechnics and adult education) were throwing up challenging ideas about history from below, women’s history and the linguistic turn, this tide of new historical inquiry seemed to stop just short of the entrance to Senate House. Notoriously, it had taken the IHR a long time even to subscribe to Past and Present.

Attendance at seminars was a slightly mysterious process. New members were informed that they needed to write to convenors in order to get permission to attend a seminar (although I admit I never bothered with this). A pecking order existed at seminars when it came to contributions from the floor: regulars usually got to contribute the initial points. There were seminars where women had a tough time being called upon to ask a question. Some discussions could also be gladiatorial: questioning could be fierce and aggressive.

Yet the mid-1980s was also a period of transformation for the IHR. Some of this derived from F. M. L. (Michael) Thompson’s time as director (1977–90). Despite his own instincts, Michael showed a willingness to engage with new ideas and recognized how the academic world was changing. Another reason was the then secretary and librarian of the IHR, Alice Prochaska, who, from 1984 until 1992, developed an inclusive spirit and helped open the Institute up, once again, to postgraduate students. Librarians such as Donald Munro and Robert Lyons also showed a commendable openness to young scholars and became cherished in their turn. When I first joined, Robert Lyons gave me a tour of the four floors of the IHR, showing me how the place worked. This allowed me to get to know him. Donald Munro had been active in producing a series of bibliographies on British history which in retrospect were the predecessors of the modern online Bibliography of British and Irish History.³ He was always happy to chat about history, politics or anything else over tea. If there was a strong sense of hierarchy at the IHR, there was also a spirit of welcome (although many postgraduates still found the Institute forbidding). The launch of the Women’s History Seminar in 1986 (see Chapter 10 by Kelly Boyd) was another sign that the historical ‘winds of change’ were sweeping through the IHR. Even a year after I joined, the Institute seemed a different place.

Given my interests, I not only attended the Victorian and Edwardian Britain Seminar but also the two seminars devoted to the twentieth century: one run by Alice Prochaska (and others) on modern British policy and administration and the other co-ordinated by Pat Thane and Jonathan Zeitlin on state and society in modern Britain. The long nineteenth century seminar was run by Michael Thompson and Roland Quinault, and it was followed by drinks and then a meal at an Indian restaurant in Fitzrovia. Michael usually ordered for everybody, and no one minded.

Why did the Postgraduate Seminar come into existence? It derived from an event that shook up the IHR and proved a catalyst for change. At this time the Seminar on British Policy and Administration in the Twentieth Century established, as part of its mission, invitations to key political figures, asking them to reflect on their careers and their participation in significant political events. These ‘Witness Seminars’ gave rise to talks by Tony Benn and Douglas Jay, as well as a number of civil servants. But, in 1986, Enoch Powell, then MP for South Down, was asked to speak at a witness seminar on the Conservative governments of the 1950s (of which he was a part).⁴ A group of postgraduates, led by Clare Midgley (Kent PhD, 1989), objected to the invitation on the grounds that it lent academic legitimacy to a man whose notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 had fuelled racism and incited racial violence.⁵

The arguments that went back and forth between the IHR and the students anticipated a lot of the current arguments about no-platforming and cancel culture.⁶ The organizers of the witness seminar made the case that Powell was not being asked to speak about his views on race and that, in any case, the purpose of the event was to probe the memories of a former cabinet minister. Postgraduates in the IHR’s Common Room were themselves divided, some arguing for free speech and for the opportunity to listen to a key figure in modern British politics (whatever they thought about his views on race).

The episode blew up into a larger challenge to the ethos of the IHR itself. Why were there no formal channels to make student voices heard? Why was the choice of historical subjects at seminars so conservative? Even the subject of Powell’s talk was criticized. Why ask a cabinet minister to speak and not an ordinary person who had lived through the 1950s? This illuminated the distance between the organizers of the witness seminar and the postgraduates who were calling for a different kind of history. As it was, the talk by Enoch Powell went ahead, but, whilst he was speaking, postgraduates held an alternative informal seminar on the politics of history in the Common Room. Powell was brought into the building through a route avoiding the main entrance in order to avoid any potential encounter with protestors and it is still unclear if he ever knew there had been a controversy over his invitation. Ironically, many of the protestors would have sympathized with the contents of Powell’s testimony. Much of it was devoted to attacking Britain’s reliance on the nuclear deterrent.

In the wake of Powell’s talk, the management of the IHR agreed to a debriefing session in which the protestors and representatives of the Seminar on British Policy and Administration in the Twentieth Century were invited to give papers to state their case. What was then the Local History Room (the biggest room in the building at that point) was packed out. A large number of postgraduates were there but so were many established historians, concerned about the issues raised by the protest. It was a defining moment for the IHR. Michael Thompson chaired the event. John Turner (b. 1949) of Royal Holloway made the case for the witness seminar organizers, insisting that the invitation to Powell did not involve any endorsement of his views on race. The postgraduates were led by Clare Midgley and Amanda Vickery (London PhD, 1991) who gave short papers making the case against the Powell invitation. In retrospect, this was an extremely brave thing to have done. There was much dark talk among the postgraduates that they might have ruined their careers by speaking out (although, as things turned out, this was far from the case).⁷ From the floor there were comments from Ben Pimlott (1945–2004) and Roger Mettam (1939–2022) supporting the invitation, with Anna Davin (b. 1940) and Jinty Nelson (b. 1942) criticizing it. Some of the exchanges were heated. Would one ask members of the far right to speak? Whose views were so offensive that they would not be invited? Was not the invitation to Powell, at the very least, extremely distasteful? The postgraduates insisted they were not in favour of getting rid of Powell’s books in the library but against (as they saw it) giving him the legitimacy of an invitation to speak.

A number of issues then got thrown up in the discussion that posed a profound challenge to the ethos of the IHR itself. Why was there no representation for students on the board of the IHR (something common in many universities after the 1960s)? This might have provided a conduit through which such issues as the Powell invitation could be discussed. There were also complaints about the culture of seminars and some suggestion that students should be able to run their own seminars. The meeting ended with Michael Thompson saying he would take note of these points.

Whilst the issue of the Powell invitation was not resolved (he attended at least one IHR seminar later on), the IHR moved on the question of representation. A position was made available on the board for a postgraduate representative; the first was Pamela Edwards (London PhD, 1995).⁸ It was also agreed that postgraduates could have their own seminar although it had a slightly unofficial quality, being allowed to meet in mid-afternoons at two-thirty and not in the usual slot around five o’clock preferred by most seminars.

For reasons that were never clear to me, Julie Wheelwright (researching an ahead-of-her-time topic on women who dressed as men and fought in wars) asked me, on behalf of the postgraduates, if I would organize this new seminar.⁹ It was thought best if it would be a seminar devoted to theory and methodology as that was a space that could unite all postgraduates regardless of the topics or periods they were working on and which was also different from the kind of history promoted by other seminars. We decided that we would have papers by postgraduates but would also invite talks from senior academics. Setting it up, I had the feeling that we were tolerated by the IHR but were not quite part of its established seminar culture. We were not (at that time) given a red book as an attendance register though we were allowed to advertise the seminar’s existence on the ground-floor noticeboard. We used our own register in which we recorded details of each event.¹⁰ The first annual report of the IHR to even mention the Seminar was in the 1991–2 session, five years after its formation.

The early spirit of the Seminar

The Postgraduate Seminar in Theory and Method was meant to abandon any sense of hierarchy; hence it employed a rotating chair who had to be a postgraduate. The main idea was to provide a space in which postgraduates could speak, experiment and build their confidence. Not all postgraduates thought the Seminar a good thing; some regarded it as an indulgence and a distraction from their dissertations.

I did not have a firm agenda for the Seminar which, in retrospect, was a good thing. In my mind, I took inspiration from the Sussex University History Workshop group where I had heard papers whilst a student there (I helped run it at one point). This was an informal offshoot of the main History Workshop movement, which was still at that time running its remarkable conferences which were jamborees of people’s history, offering new perspectives on the past that were not being heard in the academy, and deploying categories of class, race, gender and sexuality.¹¹ The Sussex University group had been quite rigorous in its discussions, and I thought we could do something similar at the IHR.

In the 1980s most history departments did not put on events about preparing for the job market that are routinely found today in many places. There was also, among postgraduates, a lot of discussion about the poor quality of supervision. Why was there so little actual training in the mechanics of historical research (apart from classes in palaeography for those who needed it)? Why was the relationship with supervisors often so distant? One postgraduate met his supervisor in the first week of his PhD and was told to come back and see him in a year’s time after he had done some work. I recall another student telling me how he had asked his supervisor who his external examiner might be, only to be told ‘none of your business’. The Postgraduate Seminar therefore provided a space to explore what a PhD was. Was it just a passport to the academic community or something more? We were concerned about the PhDs that had been completed in the 1970s where it seemed some candidates had put in ten years of work. How could we compete with that given the pressure to complete our theses in a much shorter time frame? Some students who were aged over thirty were concerned that universities would not hire them as they would be too expensive on account of their age. We did not use the word ‘networking’ but that was essentially what some of our discussions were about. The Seminar was a forum where we could train each other not only in how to be historians but also in how to deliver a thesis that would pass.

What we did not realize was that the academic world was changing. Universities increasingly expected students to compete their PhDs within an allotted time, usually three years. There would be increasing numbers of training events for students as part of the professionalization of graduate teaching. The first Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) was in 1986 and reshaped academia in the UK. During the 1990s, age became less of a criterion for employment (something that particularly discriminated against women); instead, the RAE (the precursor to the current Research Excellence Framework [REF]) tended to favour the hiring of people who were likely to produce strong outputs, regardless of age.

At the time, however, the conversation amongst us was very much about whether we would ever get jobs. The supply of academic positions had dried up (although, taking the long view, each generation of scholars feels this way). We would read the Times Higher Education Supplement or the education section of the Guardian and complain about how little hiring was taking place. There was some resentment about people (as we saw it) who had walked into cushy jobs in the 1960s whereas we were consigned to an academic precariat. University departments were increasingly middle-aged. Little did I know that it would take me six years to secure a permanent academic position. In many ways the situation eerily foretold the current state of the job market for scholars entering the profession.

One important dimension to the Postgraduate Seminar was that it did have a spirit of welcome. Newcomers would be dragged off for tea afterwards. The layout of the IHR’s Common Room helped: its tables, chairs and stools could be quickly moved around and re-assembled. It was a true haunt for postgraduates, acting like a magnet where one could find like-minded people (although it was occasionally described by us as the ‘vortex of inactivity’). Conversations could be loud and sometimes boisterous. Postgraduates and senior scholars mixed on what felt like equal terms, ripping apart the hierarchical atmosphere of the IHR. The introduction of fresh coffee, available all-day round, from 1986 was important, making it feel like a slightly downmarket version of a gentleman’s club. Although women were tolerated (and indeed there was a relatively even gender spilt among postgraduates), there was outrage among the old guard when one postgraduate breast-fed her baby in the Common Room.

The Seminar (from its foundation in 1986 onwards) gained from the explosion of young historians who had fetched up at the IHR (doing their PhDs, trying to start an academic career or going in for the very few post-docs that existed). Their relationship to the profession felt extremely precarious. Some were already finding their way into part-time teaching, sometimes at various American universities in London.

The later 1980s and 1990s saw more postgraduates from North America visit London to do research for their PhDs back home, including a remarkable number of students supervised by Judith Walkowitz (b. 1945) who was then at Rutgers and who encouraged her students to make use of the IHR: Anna Clark (PhD, 1987), Pamela Walker (PhD, 1992), Erica Rappaport (PhD, 1993), Joy Dixon (PhD, 1993). They all attended the Seminar at various times and went on to become established academics. Given the research interests of the kind of people involved, we had strong links to two seminars at the IHR: Women’s History and the Eighteenth Century British History Seminar. Tim Hitchcock (Oxford DPhil, 1985), Lee Davison (Harvard PhD, 1990), Tim Kiern (London MSc, 1982) and Robert Shoemaker (Stanford PhD, 1985) would spend endless hours in the Common Room discussing the ‘weak but strong’ eighteenth-century state.¹² These discussions formed the basis of their edited volume, Stilling the Grumbling Hive.¹³

From the start we adopted the (what was by then) conventional model of IHR seminars with a fifty-minute seminar followed by discussion. Many people at the Seminar were not postgraduates at all; everybody was welcome. Age was not an issue, though most were between about twenty-two and thirty-two. The way papers were chosen was pretty ad hoc, based on friendships and informal connections. It was not unusual for a person to show up to listen to a seminar and be asked to give a paper a few months later. Long post-event discussions in the Common Room would be followed by further conversation in the Students’ Union Bar in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and, frequently, a cheap meal off Boswell Street in Holborn at Dee’s Thai restaurant (which, alas, no longer exists).

Clare Midgley and I spoke at the first seminar in late 1986 which examined the uses of history. I made some conventional arguments about the impossibility of objectivity but also espoused a methodology derived from the increasingly fashionable forms of microhistory. Both Clare and I insisted that the pursuit of history was inseparable from politics. Maria Dowling (1955–2011: LSE PhD, 1981) did the second seminar about the practice of historical biography with reference to Anne Boleyn.¹⁴ The paper provoked a discussion of whether biography was an appropriate pursuit for historians. At the time social historians often disdained biography because they wanted to talk about big structures. Kelly Boyd (Rutgers PhD, 1991) did the third one which looked at the history of masculinity, through her research on British boys’ story papers (text-based precursors to the comic book, such as the Sexton Blake stories).¹⁵ At the time the history of masculinity was a subject that barely existed so there was a real sense in which the Seminar broke new ground right from the start. The focus in all of these papers was on bigger methodological questions rather than detailed research, so that everyone could contribute regardless of whether they specialized in the area discussed or not. By not being tied to a particular period, we were able to take a wider view on the practice of history.

The Seminar thus proved a place where important new questions could be asked about how history should be written. The 1980s was the moment when the Marxist categories were being contested and we were asking new and difficult questions about the Left, trying to understand why it was so unsuccessful. Well before the so-called ‘Red Wall’ crumbled in 2019, it was clear that there was a significant working-class vote for the Conservative Party.¹⁶ Many of us were reading Marxism Today (1957–1991), which had developed out of the reformist wing of the Communist Party, going to its conferences and cherry-picking parts of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.¹⁷ The key work which expressed the political dilemmas of this moment was Eric Hobsbawm’s article, ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ which first appeared in 1978 and was heavily debated over the next ten years.¹⁸ An important moment was the appearance of Marxism Today’s ‘New Times’ analysis in 1989 with its emphasis on the way post-Fordist economic structures were changing political realities in the modern world.¹⁹ History Workshop was still running events (including its annual conference and a London group that met every month run by Anna Davin). We subscribed to the idea, strongly influenced by E. P. Thompson (1924–93), that historical writing could make a difference to politics in the present. Coming from Sussex University (where there had been much grand talk about giving the working class back its history) I felt at home.²⁰ We were full of politics itself, interpreting everything in political terms.

And yet the atmosphere was not hugely ideological in the sense that protagonists were deeply immersed in theoretical debates. Marxism was being contested. Categories such as ‘class’ now seemed more complex, not least in the light of gender analysis. Those of us who had been reading Gareth Stedman Jones’s Languages of Class (1983) were increasingly focused on the linguistic turn. We talked about the politics of language and the way it constituted forms of power. Thus Jonathan Fulcher (Cambridge PhD, 1993) in 1990 gave a paper on ‘Language and Discourse and History’, drawing on his own research about British politics in the 1820s. Increasingly, we began to identify with forms of cultural history. In 1989, for example, Marybeth Hamilton (Princeton PhD, 1991) spoke on ‘Brothels, Drag Queens and Mae West in 1920s New York City’.²¹ For me, one of the formative moments was when Michael Roper (Essex PhD, 1989) – now a professor in sociology at Essex University – spoke about his work on masculinity. He had developed an oral history of businessmen which showed the importance of mentors early in their careers.²² We spent some time discussing whether women had mentors in the same way – Phyllis Deutsch (New York University PhD, 1991) insisted they didn’t.²³ Roper also argued against Marxist ideas of false consciousness. This was central to our purpose as it allowed for different stories about social class to be written. Too often the Left had argued that capitalist society had prevented the workers from properly appreciating their exploitation. At worst, this led to crude and reductionist portraits of working-class life. Increasingly, we wanted a social history that thought seriously about the ways different social groups had agency and negotiated with each other (which might be thought of as the Gramsci influence). There was much talk about post-Marxism though not much agreement about what it was.²⁴ Looking back, many of these conversations anticipated current discussions of the importance of intersectionality. We sought analyses that highlighted the differing roles of class, race, sexuality and gender as dynamic forces in the construction of identities and social structures.

This set the stage for the defining event of the Seminar’s first year. We knew John Styles (Cambridge BA, 1971) and John Seed (Hull PhD, 1981) as two historians who thought deeply about social history in different ways but were open to theory. John Styles was at the time writing about eighteenth-century crime although his work with the Royal College of Art was drawing him into design and textile history (he went on to become professor of history at the University of Hertfordshire). John Seed was teaching at Roehampton University: his exploration of the social formation of the Manchester middle class was informed by a deep grounding in critical theory that few could rival.²⁵ We asked them to speak at a meeting of the Seminar in the summer of 1987 about culture and politics (we did not define their brief any more than that). On the day, I recall the International Relations Room was packed out with postgraduates. Styles and Seed had very different perspectives but critiqued conventional empirical approaches to the past and discussed the complexities of using theory. Both argued for richer forms of cultural history which incorporated the material base but also the agency of representation, image and the power of design. The freedom to talk about politics and theory as well as history made the whole event quite liberating. I recall that Anna Clark (working on politics and nineteenth-century women with Judith Walkowitz) argued from the floor that many of the conventional ideas about empiricism versus theory looked tired when compared to the work coming out of feminism and women’s history. Pamela Edwards (researching a thesis on the political thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge with Fred Rosen at University College London) argued that theories about meaning and interpretation remained important and that they had not been displaced by an approach based upon gender. There was a sympathy for ideas derived from cultural anthropology although, looking back, I am surprised at how little attention was paid to the kind of perspectives coming out of literature departments, despite the fact that we were interested in language and vocabulary. In many ways, what interested us were ideas expressed in language rather than language in itself: a reinvigorated intellectual history that was a marked feature of these years. Styles spoke warmly about J. G. A. Pocock’s intellectual history, sending me off to read his work on the politics of virtue, which had recently appeared.²⁶ In a different mode, there was also strong admiration for Roger Chartier’s explorations in cultural history, using appropriation models for understanding popular culture, which allowed for a concept of people’s agency (exactly what we wanted to uncover).²⁷

Through the late 1980s, there was increasing interest in Michel Foucault (1926–84), not least because his work spoke to the histories of both crime and sexuality (which preoccupied many members of the Seminar). There was less interest in categories around post-modernism and history although Hilda Christensen (IHR Research Fellow, 1991–2) spoke in 1992 about ‘History, Feminism and Post-Structuralism’. The latter became a marked characteristic of historical discussion in the 1990s, following a series of interventions by Patrick Joyce (b. 1945).²⁸ Explorations of post-modernism became much more a feature of the reading group on cultural history that Joyce and Raphael Samuel (1934–96) organized for some years in the mid-1990s at the IHR and which sought to rethink ideas about history in the wake of figures such as Hayden White.²⁹

Renewing the Seminar

In the summer of 1987 (and before I finished my thesis), I got my first job teaching part-time in the history department at the then Polytechnic of North London. Although I remained with the Seminar, I handed the running of it to Amanda Vickery who organized it for a year. It was run after that by a collective rather than a single person. Tim Hitchcock, Kelly Boyd and Tony Claydon (London PhD, 1993, and later professor of early modern history at Bangor) ran it together. They were then succeeded in the 1990s by collectives which involved, at various times, Tony Henderson (London PhD, 1992), James Ryan (London PhD, 1994), Deborah Sugg Ryan (East London PhD, 1995), Heather Shore (London PhD, 1996), Tim Meldrum (London PhD, 1996), Theresa Ploszajska (London PhD, 1996), Jonathan Nix (London PhD, 1997), Adam Sutcliffe (London PhD, 1998), Brenda Assael (Toronto PhD, 1998), Hera Cook (Sussex PhD, 1999) and Karen Harvey (London PhD, 1999). By 2000 the line-up was made up of Louise Gray (London PhD, 2001), Tanya Evans (London PhD, 2002), Hannah Greig (London PhD, 2003), Cathy McClive (Warwick PhD, 2004) and Tim Fletcher (London PhD, 2008).

In 1990–91, Tony Henderson (then researching a PhD on eighteenth-century prostitution at Royal Holloway with Penelope Corfield) was asked, on the basis of his role as a convenor of the Seminar, to take part in a working party on postgraduate training in historical research chaired by Roger Mettam. The group reviewed the issue of whether there was a need for a more professional approach to postgraduate training and to assess the question of whether a PhD should be seen as a work that can be done in three years. The working party recommended the expansion of the kind of training courses available at the IHR with increasing government funds being made available to get more postgraduates to take part. It also recommended that postgraduates receive greater opportunities to teach.³⁰

Numbers at the Postgraduate Seminar could vary wildly, depending on who was speaking and what the topic was. Only a few had an embarrassingly low attendance. When Tony Claydon spoke about the origins of English nationalism, the register shows there were twenty-four people there. I was annoyed by one postgraduate who asked to speak and (as we later discovered) used the Seminar as a dress rehearsal for giving a paper at one of the other IHR seminars a few weeks later. I felt that our seminar needed to be more than just a springboard for speaking to the ‘grown ups’.

The Seminar could respond to political events as they happened. When Margaret Thatcher resigned in 1990, we put on a seminar the following week, titled ‘Thatcher and the Historians’, where we looked at her legacy. Edmund Green (London PhD, 1992) was quite brilliant, exposing the gap between Thatcher’s rhetoric and what she had actually accomplished. Changes in the political left were registered by the Seminar. Patrick Curry delivered a paper titled ‘New New Left and Old New Right’ on 12 February 1990 which floated arguments about post-Marxism.³¹ A couple of months before this, I delivered a paper titled ‘Disinventing the Radical Tradition, 1660–2000’, seeking to rethink the history of the Left, moving away from a simplistic emphasis on the rise of socialism and emphasizing liberal and progressive currents of thought. In retrospect, I realize I was playing around with some of the arguments that would go into the formation of New Labour.

At the same time, the Seminar was also concerned with wider issues about how history was being taught. Peter D’Sena (now associate professor of learning and teaching at the University of Hertfordshire and a senior fellow at the IHR) spoke in 1990 about the new National Curriculum. In October 1992 there was a round-table discussion of ‘Postgraduate Study in an Era of Mass Higher Education’ and, the following year, a similar discussion of ‘Heritage and the Preservation of History’. James Ryan (now professor of history at Portsmouth University) organized a session titled ‘Politics on the Campus: Political Correctness and the Practice of History in Universities’. The Seminar also had a consultative meeting in 1993 with the History at Universities Defence Group which was responding to concerns about cuts to funding for the discipline (it later became part of History UK).

Having had a slightly unofficial quality, the Seminar was increasingly accepted as a significant part of academic life at the IHR. Towards the end of his tenure as director, Michael Thompson agreed to give a talk (in 1990). We had hoped to get him to talk about his own theory of history. Michael did not quite do this, but he did talk about the threats to the writing of history as existed at that time. There were other established historians who spoke at the Seminar. In 1995, Alun Howkins (1947–2018) from Sussex University spoke about what the Mass Observation project revealed about rural England in the Second World War.³²

Another sign of change was when, early in the new century, Hannah Greig (now reader in early modern history at the University of York) and Tanya Evans (now associate professor in history at Macquarie University in Australia) organized what may have been the first ever postgraduate-run conference at the IHR (on ‘desire in history’) with graduate students delivering papers on material culture (the desire for things), the history of the emotions (desire as an experience, is desire an emotion?) and the histories of sex and sexualities.³³ The postgraduate experience at the IHR was therefore rather different from what it had been in the mid-1980s. The Seminar in the 1990s started to become a more postgraduate-only event, something it had not been before. It did, however, prove enduring and, after 2008, merged into the History Lab which became a national network for postgraduate students.

Looking back

When I look back from 2023, it is striking how preoccupied we were with issues of gender and class and how little we had to say about race – especially given the origins of the Seminar in the Enoch Powell protest. Furthermore, the Seminar was never terribly rigorous in its discussion of theory which was meant to be its raison d’être. There were certainly few examples of ‘high theory’. I suspect we all felt we were feeling our way. I am also struck by the way we did not talk about digital history. Mine was a cohort that commenced researching our PhDs on pads of paper and completed them on laptops. The Internet, of course, barely existed at that time. We had no inkling of how the process of historical research was going to change in some fundamental ways through the application of new technology, though Tim Hitchcock proved to be a leader in this respect.

At an intellectual level, the Postgraduate Seminar did seek to recast some of the grand narratives that we inherited, especially from Marxism. We thought about class but increasingly felt the challenge of arguments about language and about post-structuralist approaches (though it is arguable how much the latter really caught on amongst historians). If there was a hallmark of the discussions, it was a rejection of reductive explanations based on the economy. There was a strong emphasis on the fact that the coming of women’s history (and the greater role of women in the academy) had to change the way we thought about the past. We also tended to see cultural history (or, at least, a blend of social and cultural history) as very much the way forward. To that extent, the Postgraduate Seminar reflected the way the discipline was changing.

Hannah Greig recollected her fondness for the Seminar: it

was where I presented my first paper, learned how to drive forward seminar discussions, how to chair a paper, and was the centre of my PhD experience for a number of years. It gave us a sense of ownership and belonging in the IHR. It was a robust and challenging forum though.³⁴

Looking over the Seminar’s registers, one sees the genesis of major books and articles that were subsequently published. Many of the organizers and participants were people who went on to have major academic careers. Yet one notes wistfully the names in the registers of people who were postgraduates and who, for various reasons, were not able to get academic jobs but who were nevertheless an important part of the IHR community. As an historical source, the registers provide a useful record not only of people’s affiliations but also of what they considered their research interests at the time when they signed their names. The regularity of the Seminar’s meetings is worth mentioning. In the academic year 1992–3, for example, fourteen papers were delivered.³⁵

The Postgraduate Seminar was an empowering space for a generation of postgraduates who would subsequently shape the writing of history in various ways from the 1990s onwards. It prefigured the networks created by the History Lab but also helped change the culture of the IHR, extending the range of topics discussed and creating a sense of welcome. I have tried here to identify some of its intellectual formation so as to explore the academic culture of the 1980s and 1990s.

Notes

1. 1.  R. Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the Thatcher Era (London, 2010); B. Jackson and R. Saunders (ed.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge, 2012); and E. Evans, Thatcher and Thatcherism (London, 2018).

2. 2.  R. McWilliam, ‘From Scholarship Boy to Social Historian: J. F. C. Harrison (1921–2018): An Appreciation’, Cultural and Social History, xv (2018), 463–8; M. Chase, ‘J. F. C. Harrison (1921–2018)’, Labour History Review, lxxxiv (2019), 71–83. See also J. F. C. Harrison, Scholarship Boy: A Personal History of the Twentieth Century (London, 1995).

3. 3.  For one example, see D. J. Munro, Writings on British History 1946–1948: A Bibliography of Books and Articles on the History of Great Britain from about 450 A.D. to 1914 (London, 1973). See also Bibliography of British and Irish History: https://www.history.ac.uk/publications/bibliography-british-and-irish-history [accessed 26 Apr. 2023].

4. 4.  For complementary details on the Witness Seminars and the Enoch Powell affair at the IHR, see the contribution by Alice Prochaska in Chapter 11; and for selected correspondence relating Powell’s visit, see Institute of Historical Research, Wohl Library: IHR/3/3/22.

5. 5.  Midgley was concerned in her research with issues around race and empire which went on to inform her subsequent work: C. Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London, 1992); and C. Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865 (London, 2007).

6. 6.  C. L. Riley (ed.), The Free Speech Wars: How Did We Get Here and Why Does it Matter? (Manchester, 2020).

7. 7.  Clare Midgley (b. 1955) recently retired as professor of history at Sheffield Hallam University. She was also President of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History between 2010 and 2015. Amanda Vickery (b. 1962) is professor of early modern history at Queen Mary University of London and one of the UK’s most prominent public historians.

8. 8.  P. Edwards, The Statesman’s Science: History, Nature and Law in the Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York, 2014).

9. 9.  J. Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (London, 1989). Wheelwright completed an MA at Sussex University in 1986. Following a career in journalism, she received a London University PhD in 2014 and became director of the Centre for Culture and the Creative Industries at City University.

10. 10.  IHR/3/3/50. See also IHR/3/3/52 and IHR 05/1/1 for subsequent registers.

11. 11.  M. Chase, ‘Sussex University History Workshop’, History Workshop Journal, xii (1981), 195–6; and R. Samuel, History Workshop: A Collectanea, 1967–1991 (London, 1991).

12. 12.  Tim Hitchcock, who was then teaching at the Polytechnic of North London, went on to become professor of digital history at Sussex University. Lee Davison became the historian attached to the Federal Deposit Corporation, Washington, DC. Tim Kiern became director of liberal studies at California State University, Long Beach. Robert Shoemaker became professor of history at Sheffield University. Hitchcock and Shoemaker became pioneers of digital history, going on to collaborate with Clive Emsley (1944–2020) on The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913, Old Bailey Online: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ [accessed 20 Apr. 2023].

13. 13.  L. Davison, T. Hitchcock, T. Keirn and R. Shoemaker (ed.), Stilling the Grumbling Hive: Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750 (Stroud, 1992): the preface (p. ix) acknowledges the origins of the book in the tearoom of the IHR.

14. 14.  Maria Dowling later became a lecturer at St Mary’s University College, Strawberry Hill.

15. 15.  This became her book, K. Boyd, Manliness and the Boys’ Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855–1940 (Basingstoke, 2003). Kelly Boyd was later a lecturer in History at Middlesex University and is now a senior fellow at the IHR.

16. 16.  M. Pugh, The Tories and the People, 1880–1935 (Oxford, 1985); and B. Campbell, Iron Ladies: Why Do Women Vote Tory? (London, 1987).

17. 17.  Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith (ed.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London, 1971). See also J. Harris, ‘Marxism Today: The Forgotten Visionaries Whose Ideas Could Save Labour’, Guardian, 29 September 2015.

18. 18.  E. Hobsbawm, ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’, Marxism Today, xxii (1978), 279–86. For the subsequent debate, see the book that Marxism Today issued which reprinted the article and offered multiple responses from figures on the British left: E. Hobsbawm, The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London, 1981).

19. 19.  S. Hall and M. Jacques (ed.), New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s (London, 1989). For the impact of this, see the following special issue: M. Hilton, C. Moores and F. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite (ed.), ‘New Times Revisited: Britain in the 1980s’, Contemporary British History, xxxi (2017). See also C. Clarke: ‘Learning the Lessons of Marxism Today’: Progressive Review (20 Dec. 2011): https://www.ippr.org/juncture-item/learning-the-lessons-of-marxism-today [accessed 20 Apr. 2023].

20. 20.  F. Gray (ed.), Making the Future: A History of the University of Sussex (Brighton, 2011), pp. 143–52, and pp. 252–6.

21. 21.  M. Hamilton, The Queen of Camp: Mae West, Sex and Popular Culture (London, 1996). Marybeth Hamilton is now administrative editor of History Workshop Journal.

22. 22.  This later was developed into M. Roper, Masculinity and the British Organisation Man since 1945 (Oxford, 1993).

23. 23.  Phyllis Deutsch went on to become editor-in-chief at the University Press of New England (1996–2017).

24. 24.  Some of these perspectives went on to inform my analysis in R. McWilliam, The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation (London, 2007).

25. 25.  J. Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 2007); J. Seed, ‘Unitarianism, Political Economy and the Antinomies of Liberal Culture in Manchester, 1830–1850’, Social History, vii (1982), pp. 1–25; and J. Seed, Marx: A Guide for the Perplexed (London, 2010).

26. 26.  J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985).

27. 27.  R. Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton, NJ, 1987). See also L. Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley, CA, 1989).

28. 28.  P. Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth Century England (Cambridge, 1994). On Joyce, see R. Colls, ‘Post-Modern Pat: The Work of Patrick Joyce’, and J. Vernon, ‘More Secondary Modern than Post-Modern: Patrick Joyce and the Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Britain’, Cultural and Social History, xiii (2016), 135–48 and 149–54.

29. 29.  On Samuel, see A. Light, A Radical Romance: A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation (London, 2019); S. Scott-Brown, The Histories of Raphael Samuel: A Portrait of a People’s Historian (Acton, Australia, 2017). On White, see H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1975).

30. 30.  ‘Working Party of Postgraduate Training in Historical Research Report’ (1991), copy in author’s possession; Tony Henderson’s thesis became the book, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730–1830 (London,1999).

31. 31.  On post-Marxism, see P. Curry, ‘Towards a Post-Marxist Social History: Thompson, Clark and Beyond’, in Rethinking Social History, ed. A. Wilson (Manchester, 1993), pp. 158–200.

32. 32.  N. Verdon, ‘Remembering Alun Howkins, 1947–2018’, History Workshop Journal, lxxxviii (2019), 299–313.

33. 33.  Hannah Greig, email to the author, 13 Oct. 2021.

34. 34.  Hannah Greig, email to the author, 13 Oct. 2021.

35. 35.  Institute of Historical Research: Annual Report, 1992–1993 (London, 1993), 42–3.

References