Monthly Archives: February 2015

Opening hours w/b 2 March 2015

Next week, our staffed hours will be slightly reduced. We will be open:
Monday, 2.15-5pm; Tuesday, 2.15-4.30pm; Wednesday, 2.15-5pm.

Thursday and Friday the library will be unstaffed. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. Please do get in touch with us in advance to arrange any visits.

Have a happy weekend!

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Wellcome Unit Seminars Monday 2nd March

Hilary Term 2015 Seminar Series

At: The Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine
Seminar Room, 47 Banbury Road, Oxford

Visual and Material Culture in the History of Medicine’
Conveners: Dr Erica Charters and Dr Sloan Mahone

Week 7 – 2 March

Katherine Allen, University of Oxford

Recipe books and networks of medicinal knowledge in eighteenth-century England

Katherine is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford in the history of science and medicine. Her research is on domestic medicine in eighteenth-century England, with a focus on mansucript recipe books. She uses domestic medicine as a lens through which to examine eighteenth-century society’s engagement with broader cultural trends, including an interest in natural philosophy and the rise of consumerism in the metropole of a global empire. Her Distillationproject considers the extent to which eighteenth-century households maintained the recipe collecting tradition as part of medical treatment whilst simultaneously evolving with the commercialisation and professionalisation of medicine. One of her key research objectives is determining the motivations for collecting and preparing medicinal recipes, apart from the end objective of a consumable product. Some of the themes she explores are healthcare, material history, authorship, networks of knowledge, distillation, and ingredients (within the context of consumerism, botany, and changing medical treatment).

 Coffee is available from 14:00 – Seminars begin at 14:15 prompt.

Please note there is no parking at the Unit

Life-Writing Lunch Seminar: Frances Larson on Henry Wellcome

Life-Writing Lunch Seminar: Frances Larson on Henry Wellcome

Tuesday 10 March (Week 8), 1-2pm, Haldane Room, Wolfson CollegeHenry Wellcome

Anthropologist and writer Frances Larson will speak from her biographical work on Henry Wellcome (An Infinity of Things, 2009) a book published to critical acclaim and which was shortlisted for the MJA Awards and chosen as a Sunday Times Book of The Year and as a New Scientist Best Book of 2009. This event is free of charge and open to all: places are limited, and because we provide a sandwich lunch, you must register in advance. To register online, please follow the link on: www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/clusters/life-writing/events/lwlunch

Wellcome Unit Seminars Monday 23 February

Hilary Term 2015 Seminar Series

At: The Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine
Seminar Room, 47 Banbury Road, Oxford

Visual and Material Culture in the History of Medicine’
Conveners: Dr Erica Charters and Dr Sloan Mahone

Week 6 – 23 February

Lukas Engelmann, Cambridge University
Picturing the unusual: Medical photography from plague to AIDS

Lukas Engelmann concluded his studies in History and Gender-Studies in Berlin in 2009. He received his PhD in History at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2013, titled “AIDS as a clinical picture of disease. The normalization of an epidemic in the AIDS atlas” (2013). His dissertation engages with the visual history of AIDS/HIV, contributing to a broader perspective on visualizations in medial history and intervening with an interdisciplinary research design into the emerging field of the historiography of AIDS.

For his doctoral research he received a fellowship by the DFG-Graduate School “Gender as a Lukas Engelmanncategory of knowledge,” spent a term as a PhD-visiting student at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University and became a research fellow at the Brocher Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland.

He published articles in the history of science and medicine, gender and visual studies and organized various workshops on knowledge-politics and AIDS/HIV. In April 2013, he became a post-doc research fellow at the Institute for the History of Medicine at the University of Zurich.

From May 2014, Lukas Engelmann will be an appointed post-doc research associate at CRASSH following the visual history of the Third Plague Pandemic in North and South America.

Coffee is available from 14:00 – Seminars begin at 14:15 prompt.

Please note there is no parking at the Unit

Digital History Day – 4 March 2015

[Re-blogged from the HFL Blog]

The Digital History Day, to be held at the History Faculty, George Street, gives an introduction to digital tools and methods for historians, focusing on the resources developed and hosted by the Institute of Historical Research.IHR Digital History Day 4 March - poster

In addition to presenting particular tools, including British History Online (BHO) and the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH), the workshop will consider research communication, for example using social media, and the challenges of working with new types of sources.

This is an excellent opportunity for historians to learn and participate in discussions about important issues in the context of our changing academic environment.

All welcome.

Round Table discussion for Faculty staff and graduates

12.30-1.30pm – Rees Davies Room, History Faculty

IHR participants: Simon Baker, Jonathan Blaney, Sarah Milligan and Jane Winters (Institute of Historical Research)

Topics to be covered include big data for humanities research, the importance of digital citation and the ‘problem’ of search.

Workshop
2-4pm, Lecture Theatre, History Faculty

2.00 Digital history at the Institute of Historical Research: an overview – Jane Winters
2.20 Case study I: Bibliography of British and Irish History – Simon Baker
2.40 Big data for historical research – Jonathan Blaney
3.00 Case study II: British History Online – Sarah Milligan
3.20 Communicating your research online – Jane Winters
3.35 Digital citation – Jonathan Blaney
3.50 Questions?

The participants:

Simon Baker joined the IHR in 2004 as assistant project editor for the Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History and is currently one of the editors of its successor, the Bibliography of British and Irish History. Previously he worked in the photographic library at the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England; and at the British Film Institute, where he worked in the National Archive (film and television) and the National Library. While at the BFI he was involved in the first moves towards computerisation of data and digitisation projects, as well as subsequent migration and merging of data into other databases and the development of online resources.

Jonathan Blaney joined the IHR in 2007 as project editor for British History Online’s project to complete the digitisation of the Calendars of State Papers. He now continues to work for part of the time on BHO, as well as spending time on other IHR projects, most recently in the field of big data. Jonathan has worked as lexicographer for Oxford University Press and as an editor on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He subsequently worked for the Oxford Digital Library, where he was a text encoding reviewer on the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership and Eighteenth Century Collections Online Text Creation Partnership, and also advised on a number of digitisation projects.

Sarah Milligan joined the IHR in 2014 as publishing manager for British History Online. Previously, she worked as an editorial and research assistant with the Map of Early Modern London (MoEML), the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) and the Victorian Poetry Network (VPN), all based at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. She remains a Research Affiliate with MoEML. Her diverse interests include Victorian poetry, early modern London and encoding historical dates.

Jane Winters is professor of digital history and head of publications at the IHR. Currently, she is principal investigator of the Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities project; co-director of Digging into Linked Parliamentary Metadata; co-investigator of Traces through Time: Prosopography in Practice across Big Data; and publishing editor of the Bibliography of British and Irish History. She is also executive editor of the IHR’s journal, Historical Research, and associate editor of Frontiers in Digital Humanities: Digital History. Jane is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a member of RESAW (Research Infrastructure for the Study of the Archived Web), the Academic Steering & Advocacy Committee of the Open Library of Humanities, the Advisory Board of the Academic Book of the Future project, and the UK Medical Heritage Library.

Wellcome Unit Seminars Monday 16th February

Hilary Term 2015 Seminar Series

At: The Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine
Seminar Room, 47 Banbury Road, Oxford

Visual and Material Culture in the History of Medicine’
Conveners: Dr Erica Charters and Dr Sloan Mahone

Week 5 – 16 February
Clare Hickman, King’s College London
Dr John Coakley Lettsom and the mangel-wurzel: Botany, agriculture and medical practitioners in the Eighteenth Century

This paper will explore how gardens were designed and used by medical practitioners as places for scientific experimentation, botanical education and agricultural improvements during the late eighteenth-century. Beginning with the rural retreat of John Coakley Lettsom at Grove Hill where he combined agricultural interests, particularly the cultivation of the mangel-wurzel root GiantMangelvegetable, with an ornamental landscape, it will also consider the private gardens of John Hunter and Edward Jenner, alongside the more public botanic gardens of Edinburgh University and the London botanic garden. By investigating these spaces I hope to explore aspects of botanical networks, the role of the garden as a scientific space, its use as a tool to cement professional identities, and the function of gardens in relation to knowledge production and dissemination.

Coffee is available from 14:00 – Seminars begin at 14:15 prompt.

Please note there is no parking at the Unit

New: e-access to Nursing History Review

We are pleased to announce that electronic Access is now available for the Nursing History Review, the Official Publication of the American Association for the History of Nursing.NHR

Nursing History Review, an annual peer-reviewed publication, is a showcase for the most significant current research on nursing and health care history. Contributors include national and international scholars representing many different disciplinary backgrounds. Regular sections include scholarly articles, reviews of the best books on nursing and health care history, invited commentaries, and abstracts of new doctoral dissertations on nursing and health care history. Historians, researchers, and individuals fascinated with the rich field of nursing will find this an important resource.

Access is via OxLIP+, and is available from Vol. 1 (1993) to the present day.

Opening Hours w/b 9th February 2015

Our opening hours next week will be:
Monday & Tuesday, 2.15pm-5pm

Wednesday the library will be Unstaffed

On Thursday there will be limited staffing between 2.15pm-4.30pm due to a departmental meeting.

On Friday the library will be staffed 2.15pm-5pm.

Please get in touch with us if you need to come and use the library.

Have a lovely weekend!