BECC - News Back to 'Birmingham Eighteenth Century Centre' Can letters reveal important information about social identity? Description:Professor Karen Harvey, Professorial Fellow and Professor of Cultural History, uses 18th century letters to explore experiences of embodiment.Date:07 December 2022 Midlands and Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century and Today Description:Recording available of the Birmingham Research Institute for History and Cultures (BRIHC) and Birmingham Eighteenth-Century Centre (BECC) panel discussion.Date:17 October 2022 Eighteenth-Century Research in the Midlands Description:The annual Midlands Eighteenth-Century Research Network meeting was held at the University of Birmingham in May 2022Date:29 July 2022 Professor Valerie Rumbold elected to the British Academy Description:University of Birmingham Professor Emeritus Valerie Rumbold has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy.Date:22 July 2022 Pacifists making guns Description:Professor Priya Satia (Stanford) delivered the Modern and Contemporary Annual Lecture 2018.Date:14 June 2018 Stanford "Guns" Professor's visit to Birmingham Description:Next week History and Cultures will be delighted to welcome Professor Priya Satia from Stanford University to the UK for the European launch of her book "Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution".Date:06 June 2018 Previous1Next Posts from our blog: Spring Programme of EventsWednesday 15 March, 2-3.30pm How Global Was the Age of Revolutions? Co-sponsored with the Birmingham Research Institute for History and Cultures (BRIHC), this online roundtable features world-leading scholars, including Sujit Sivasundaram (Cambridge) and Joanna Innes (Oxford), in discussion on the late eighteenth century’s global turn. Please follow the link to register online for this event. *** … Continue reading "Spring Programme of Events"Unhomely Empire: A Forum, Part 3By Onni Gust (University of Nottingham) I am writing this response in the uncomfortable and over-lit departure gate of Chicago O’Hare’s international airport, heading back to the UK from the NACBS conference, and from a state, Illinois, that I once fleetingly and ambivalently called ‘home’. This seems like an apt place to be reflecting on … Continue reading "Unhomely Empire: A Forum, Part 3"Unhomely Empire: A Forum, Part 2By Liz Egan (University of Warwick) With just four letters, “home” carries a diverse set of connotations ranging from comfort and belonging, to resistance and violence. In framing their book around the ‘unhomely’ nature of empire for the eighteenth-century British elite, Gust carefully interrogates the centrality of home and belonging to ideas about human difference … Continue reading "Unhomely Empire: A Forum, Part 2"Unhomely Empire: A Forum, Part 1By Ellen Smith (University of Leicester) In Unhomely Empire, Dr Onni Gust considers eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century conceptions of ‘home’ beyond the physical and material space of the house. Gust offers a complex understanding of the ideological and discursive work that home has performed as an emotional concept throughout history. They take the reader through the … Continue reading "Unhomely Empire: A Forum, Part 1"Unhomely Empire: A Forum, IntroductionA year ago, BECC held a reading group and online discussion for our midlands colleague Onni Gust’s new book, Unhomely Empire: Whiteness and Belonging, c.1760-1830. Across two sessions of discussion, we explored the book’s analysis of how empire and whiteness made each other, its uses of intellectual and literary evidence across genres, and its relation … Continue reading "Unhomely Empire: A Forum, Introduction"Magical Source: A Quaker Forgery?This post was contributed by Naomi Pullen, at the University of Warwick. It is part of our Magical Source series, in which historians from Birmingham and Warwick discuss the sources that reshaped their thinking on a topic. The first entry, by Karen Harvey, was about Mary Toft’s Confessions. The second, by Charles Walton, was about … Continue reading "Magical Source: A Quaker Forgery?"Magical Source: Lord Grantham’s CoachThis post was contributed by Ben Jackson, here at the University Birmingham. It is part of our Magical Source series, in which historians from Birmingham and Warwick discuss the sources that reshaped their thinking on a topic. The first entry, by Karen Harvey, was about Mary Toft’s Confessions. The second, by Charles Walton, was about … Continue reading "Magical Source: Lord Grantham’s Coach"Magical Source: Paine’s Letter to DantonThis post was contributed by Charles Walton, from the University of Warwick. It is part of our Magical Source series, in which historians from Birmingham and Warwick discuss the sources that reshaped their thinking on a topic. The first entry, by Karen Harvey, was about Mary Toft’s Confessions. Charles Walton on Thomas Paine’s Letter to … Continue reading "Magical Source: Paine’s Letter to Danton"Magical Source: Mary Toft’s ConfessionsBack in May, BECC and our colleagues at Warwick’s Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century Centre held a workshop for graduate students under the title, “The Magical Source: Light-bulb Moments in Historical Research.” Four historians each presented a source that had reshaped their thinking, and explained how that process took place. This week, we’ll share the written … Continue reading "Magical Source: Mary Toft’s Confessions"Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England: Cathy McClive’s ReviewReading Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England is a rich immersive, sensory, and visceral experience. Sarah Fox’s rigorously-researched exploration of the physicality, materiality, and communities involved in the processes and emotions surrounding late pregnancy, childbirth, and lying-in is a model of how to approach the history of embodiment and the work of birthing. As Fox points … Continue reading "Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England: Cathy McClive’s Review"