The morality of informers

Dr Laura O'Brien has published an essay entitled “La moralité des mouchards: Chenu, de la Hodde et la guerre des pamphlets” [The morality of informers: Chenu, de la Hodde and the war of pamphlets]. Her work, which appears in Morales en révolutions: France, 1789-1940 (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, April 2015) discusses the multifaceted ideas of ‘morality’ in a series of extremely critical contemporary ‘histories’ of the French revolution of 1848, written in 1849 and 1850 by two former police informers and intended to damage the legacy of both the revolution and 1848’s revolutionaries.

History Lab talk

Dr Laura O’Brien, lecturer in modern European history in the Department of Culture, will be giving a History Lab talk on Thursday 19th March at 5pm in Priestman 013. ‘Drawing revolution: political caricature in nineteenth-century France’, is based on her research into French political caricature in the first half of the nineteenth century. This is also the subject of her forthcoming book, The Republican Line: Caricature and French Republican Identity, 1830-52 which will be published by Manchester University Press in July.

All are welcome to attend the talk – it’s free for members of the History Lab and £2 for guests.

Histories as activism

Dr Laura O'Brien

Sunderland historian Dr Laura O'Brien will be giving a paper for the Labour and Society Research Group, a forum jointly run by the Histories of Activism group, based at the universities of Newcastle and Northumbria. Her paper is entitled 'Histories as activism: writing the history of the 1848 revolution in France'. It takes place on Monday 8th December at 5pm in Room 35 of the Lipman Building (Northumbria University, Newcastle).

History conference for sixth formers

Martin Luther King Jr.

On 11th September the History and Politics team will be welcoming over 120 sixth formers and their teachers from across the North East to a conference entitled 'Politics, Power and Rights'. The conference opens with a keynote address by Professor Clive Webb from Sussex University on British race relations and the American Civil Rights Movement. This is followed by parallel workshop sessions on a variety of topics, led by History and Politics staff, including 'Civil Rights before Brown v. Board of Education' (Dr Kevin Yuill); ''Charitable hatred': toleration after the Reformation' (Dr Delphine Doucet); 'Kings and Queens versus Social History' (Dr Peter Hayes). There will also be sessions on the Great Northern Coalfield 1700-1945 (Dr Stuart Howard), Britain between the two world wars (Dr Keith Wilson), revolutionary 'people' in the nineteenth century (Dr Laura O'Brien), and the second world war as a turning point for Britain (Dr Simon Henig). The closing keynote address, which reconsiders Martin Luther King's civil rights legacy, will be given by Dr Kevin Yuill.

New archaeological findings in Ireland

Geophysics fieldwork in Ireland by a team of students and tutors from the North East Centre for Lifelong Learning has yielded a spectacular finding in the form of the ground plan (hitherto unknown) of the early Christian monastery of Carrowmore in County Donegal. This is the headline result from work which also included some wider appraisal of landscape features and it is one which Colm O'Brien (NECLL) will take to an international conference on Early Christian Landscapes in University College Cork later this month. A journal article is also in the pipeline. You can read how the news was reported in the Irish Independent here. The work was carried out with a gradiometer purchased through a capital funding grant from the university.

Proton gradiometer for NECLL

Colm O’Brien (NECLL) has been awarded a capital funding grant from the university to purchase a proton gradiometer for archaeological geophysics. This is to enable fieldwork by the Bernician Studies Group within the Explore programme at NECLL (North East Centre for Lifelong Learning).  Colm O’Brien and Max Adams of NECLL will be taking a team of students to County Donegal in the Irish Republic in the second half of August to survey two early medieval monastery sites.