Afterword
I write this piece sitting in the IHR Common Room, empty apart from me but filled with the presence of all the historians past who have sat in this space, reading, thinking, talking; often enough, waiting for the appointed hour when the seminar that they have come to the Institute for will begin. It’s a different place now even from when I first came to the IHR in 2009 as a postgraduate student on the now-defunct MA in Contemporary British History. I certainly miss the canteen, and the large presence of retired historians to be reliably found here, even if I cannot say that I always agreed with the political views I overheard; reading the essays in this collection has made me realize both how much the Institute and its seminar series have changed since they began in 1921, but also what has persisted.
Before I began reading, I had no idea that the seminars were first set up as a space for postgraduate education; of just how long some seminar series had been going on for; or for just how long in some of them what one might politely call the ‘traditional’ way of conducting affairs had persisted. (That said, some legends do get handed down; I had heard from my colleagues in the Modern British History Seminar all about F. M. L. Thompson’s habit of ordering food for the entire table – it probably wouldn’t go down so well today.) Some things have come full circle. The original function of the IHR as a place of postgraduate education has again been placed centre-stage with the development of the Postgraduate History Seminar and the History Lab Seminar (as detailed by Rohan McWilliam, and Ellen Smith and Rachel Bynoth respectively); many seminars also make an effort to have a termly slot in which postgraduate work can be showcased. Likewise, the key role that women played in the setting-up of the IHR was not evident from the way that the seminars came to operate by the mid-century. And yet, the thriving of the Women’s History Seminar, and the fact that the last two directors of the Institute have been women, have placed women at the centre of things again – as the staircase at the IHR, now wonderfully decorated with photographs of London’s female historians over the last century, serves to underline.
My own first encounter with IHR seminars came in 2009 at the Contemporary British History series held late on Wednesday afternoon, which those of us on the MA programme were encouraged to attend. I had a distinct sense of joining the grown-ups, of not being an undergraduate anymore (I seem to remember that the free wine was also something of a draw). I experienced the intellectual exchange of seminar culture for the first time, the vibrant trading of views noted by all the contributors to this book. An encounter at the Women’s History Seminar later that year fundamentally changed the course of my proposed PhD; several years later, I was to give my first IHR seminar paper at the same series on my doctoral research on the Women’s Liberation Movement. As I moved back to London after gaining an academic post at the University of Reading, I became involved in convening the Modern British History Seminar, as it then was; the attendance of myself and several other convenors at the Reconfiguring the British: Nation, Empire, World 1600–1990 Seminar led to the merging of those two series, headed by a notably younger group of convenors, part of the process of change and evolution illuminated by this volume. I found myself nodding with familiarity at comments about the different atmospheres of the different seminar series, though it must be said that I have never found any seminar to be anything other than friendly and supportive – perhaps illustrating the shift away from the more combative atmosphere of the past described by some of the contributors here. The traditions of conviviality at the pub have just about survived the COVID-19 pandemic; and it is perhaps that tradition of dinner and drinks afterwards, of discussing the paper and the ideas – and often enough, the state of higher education – that is the thing that all the seminar series have in common. Hopefully those last few seminars that have yet to come back in person after COVID-19 will be able to do so in some form soon. After all, our labours must have some reward!
A number of these essays – particularly Kelly Boyd’s and Rohan McWilliam’s – make clear that much has changed for the better in terms of the opening up of IHR seminars to both a wider range of topics and a wider audience. Indeed, the pioneering nature of particularly the Women’s History and the Postgraduate History seminars in this respect can hardly be understated. I was struck by a sense of how much we owe these groups of historians and the work they undertook in opening up the discipline. Without wishing to indulge too much in whiggish notions of historical progress, it seems inevitable that the direction of travel for the IHR will be for it to continue opening up its seminars in different directions. As Ulrich Tiedau, Claire Langhamer and Kate Wilcox have all noted, the increasing emphasis on public outreach has led to a greater desire to engage with a wider range of historical practitioners, to think more broadly about who gets to be called an historian. Such moves are partly, but not wholly, the result of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and its requirements to show the ‘impact’ of our research; we should note that the work of the History Workshop movement in bringing a much wider range of people into dialogue with professional academics considerably predated the advent of REF, and is surely an equally important part of this impulse to democratize the practice of the past.
As all the contributors have made clear, huge strides have been made in issues of gender representation in the Institute, but perhaps issues of race and ethnicity have somewhat lagged behind in terms of the consideration that has been given to them by convenors. The Black British History Seminar was instituted only in 2020, and the IHR is still a notably white space in what is one of the most ethnically diverse cities on earth. Like academia in general, seminar series also remain notably middle-class. We should not underestimate the very real structural barriers to participation in events such as IHR seminar series, though I don’t doubt the commitment of many in the Institute to trying to overcome them (whether they can be overcome fully without profound changes in wider social structures seems doubtful). Online and hybrid seminars seem here to stay, despite the occasional faff of setting them up; the desire to be ‘back in the room’ and the recognition of the wider audience that a hybrid format enables sometimes rub up against each other, but the authors here all seem to recognize this as the future. Such a model also allows for a truly global range of speakers, in a way that surely could not have been predicted in Pollard’s time; one of the highlights of the Britain at Home and Abroad seminar in 2022 was Chris Hilliard (University of Sydney) ‘zooming’ in at 4 a.m. from his home in Australia to deliver a truly excellent paper. That he wanted to do so despite being unable to partake in the usual post-seminar reward of dinner and drinks speaks to the still vastly important function of the seminar as a space to try out ideas and gain rigorous feedback. Now the Institute comes to people, as well as people to the Institute, and this shift will surely only increase the global reach of the IHR.
Inevitably, the Institute will keep changing, shifting, evolving in ways that we both can and can’t foresee. The impact of COVID-19 in hastening the move to online and hybrid formats certainly couldn’t have been predicted, and yet has had a profound impact on the way that the Institute operates. Who knows what will be around the corner next? (Not another pandemic, one hopes.) The wider trends of academic life, of higher education policy and the demands of REF, will undoubtedly shape the future of the Institute, as will broader social shifts. The strength of the IHR over the past hundred years has resided in its flexibility, and its ability to shape itself to the needs of the day; if the Institute is to continue for another hundred years, it is clearly these qualities that it must retain – aided by the presence of a committed staff and the wider support of its users and the historical profession at large. The IHR, is, after all, nothing without the people who make it; witness the outpouring of grief for Glen Jacques, the much-loved receptionist who died in 2022, and who did so much to make the Institute a friendly and welcoming place.
It is difficult to imagine history in the UK – and particularly in London – without the IHR and its seminars series. It’s a place many of us have spent so much time, somewhere that’s always there. Sometimes, perhaps, we take the place for granted – but how much poorer life would be without it! We can only hope that in another hundred years’ time, another volume will be prepared to celebrate two hundred years of seminars, another century’s worth of talk to be recorded, discussed, probed. Of course, none of us will be there to see it. But here’s to the future – long live the IHR! And long live the seminar!