Gesture - from Botticelli to Microsoft Teams

            

Primavera, Sandro Botticelli (1470s/80s)

            

       As Trinity term starts in Oxford, it is not only teaching which has moved online, but also the regular College and Faculty committee meetings which pepper the diaries of academics in this self-governing republic of scholars. Normally, we meet in groups of 20 in the high-ceilinged rooms of the History Faculty, in groups of 10 in Somerville’s SCR Dining Room, or in the full 40+ Governing Body assembly of college Fellows, in the basement hall of our 1970s’ Wolfson building. Instead, we now meet exclusively on screens. Microsoft Teams, the video-conferencing tool used by the University (and the UK House of Lords), currently shows only the faces of the four most recent speakers. The other digitally-present committee members are visible purely as tiny initials at the bottom of the screen. While online committee meetings work surprisingly well in many respects, the move from physical Oxford rooms to screens has revealed how much of a traditional meeting is conducted silently, via body language. Not all 40, 20 or 10 members of a committee will speak on every topic on the agenda, of course, but vigorous nods, discreet frowns, smiles, agitated shuffling of papers – even when only half-registered by others – together create a mood, a collective sense of a group reaction, over and above what is actually said (and minuted). At present, we cannot see our non-speaking colleagues’ mini-gestures, just rows of silent initials in coloured circles – even as we grapple with critical issues, such as the financial challenge which the pandemic urgently poses for Oxford colleges, or the implications of social distancing for teaching now and in the months to come. The ‘chat’ function, where committee members can post brief comments on the discussion in a side bar for all to see, is helpful, but it is still verbal communication; with emojis, but without gesture or human facial expressions.

                Historians have for decades studied the role and importance of gesture, particularly in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The theme of the International Medieval Congress in Leeds (IMC) back in 2006, for example, was ‘Emotion and Gesture’; in 2016, Piotr Węcowski of Warsaw University published on the gestures of the Jagiellonian kings of Poland in the 15C and 16C, and their grave political meaning to contemporaries. Michael Baxandall’s celebrated book, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972), argued that decoding body language in Renaissance paintings is key to understanding their meanings and composition. He pointed out, for example, that in Botticelli’s famously enigmatic Primavera, Venus’ raised hand would have been understood by (educated) contemporaries as a gesture of welcome to her spring bower. Or that the manically grinning, pointing angel seen at the foot of many Renaissance paintings is a reference to a character familiar from 15C street theatre – the festaiulo who literally pointed out which actor the viewer should be paying attention to. Late medieval preachers, meanwhile, had a repertoire of gestures, or sign language, so extensive that (some argue) a wandering Italian friar could preach through body language alone in, say, Brittany. By contrast, on Teams we communicate oblivious to most of the pointing, sighing and waving of colleagues.

 

                Having our normal professional interactions as scholars shaken up so radically by social distancing, however, can create a new space for potential historical insights and reflections. Looking at day-to-day 21C academic life, as it is turned upside down and rendered no-longer-familiar, mediated entirely through screens, might make us newly alert to elements in past cultures which we have not adequately spotted to date, and generate new research questions about society, culture and communication. Because it is not only teaching and research which are famously complementary scholarly activities; historians and anthropologists know that committee meetings, in both their traditional (tables) and novel (screens) forms, are also a crucial forum for watching, reflecting, and thinking on many levels – a surprising window, if you will, onto bigger norms and wider worlds.

A Birthday Party...

     On a wonderfully sunny afternoon this March, there was a party in Corpus Christi College to celebrate the 10^th birthday of the European Research Council (ERC). In case it has passed you by in all the noise about the Brexit vote, the ERC is the EU’s pioneering research funding agency. In the past decade, it has disbursed E12 billion and created jobs for 50,000 researchers, with a distinctive focus on blue-skies, excellence-driven research questions – the UK has been the most successful of all EU member states in winning these fiercely competitive grants, and the single institution which has won the most ERC funding is Oxford University.

            So it is no surprise that, as we gathered to toast the ERC’s next decade (or century!) the UK’s Brexit vote was the ghost at the feast. We watched a video birthday message recorded by Oxford University for the ERC: somewhat bitter-sweet. Grant-holders, post-docs and senior university staff enjoyed canapes and drinks beneath the portrait of Corpus’ founder, Bishop Richard Foxe (d.1528), fittingly enough a patron of the international scholarship of the European Renaissance. Presiding over the event was Professor Alistair Buchan, Oxford’s Brexit Strategy tsar. One of the key demands put to the UK government by British universities is that it preserve our access to the EU’s world-leading research funding programme: the current success of the UK’s top universities has been built with international talent and, in no small measure, with pooled European funds. This is a shared British and European achievement, across science, social science and humanities alike.

            The fears at the party were in part, of course, about money: we heard from heads of departments whose budgets risk (to use a current phrase) falling off a cliff if ongoing access to the ERC is denied. But it is about much more than money, as speakers at the party so passionately conveyed. ERC funding brings to Oxford and the UK a vibrant population of postdocs from all over the world; it enables us to ask cutting-edge questions without being forced to shoe-horn these into the often politicised agendas set out by national funding bodies; its grants are so large that their impact on a field, or in creating a field, can be transformative; in setting such high standards for new ideas, it raises standards everywhere, with a ‘halo effect’. 

          

        Research funding on this scale, of this ambition, is an obvious good in itself, generating knowledge, discoveries and international dialogue at an accelerated rate, to the benefit of very many people across the globe – there are ERC-funded British-led projects in the Amazon and Antarctica. But, to speak in different terms, the dozens of ERC grants which have come to Oxford have also poured millions in the local economy – creating jobs for researchers and administrators, creating business for local hotels, caterers and conference facilities, with all the people whom they in turn employ. I think of the voter I met on the streets of Oxford on June 23^rd, who was open mouthed to hear that the EU awarded so much money to the university, or that the UK won more money out of this scheme than we paid in.

            So at Corpus we thanked the ERC, and over drinks crossed our fingers that this door was not about to be slammed in our face – that this community of British, European and international talent in that medieval hall, in a small city near the middle of England, would find a way forward, would not dissipate or disperse, not allow the impoverishment of its intellectual vision and international horizons, not resign itself to an externally-imposed decline. One-to-one, we had conversations about managing uncertainty, contingency planning – and about speaking truth to power, whether loudly or sotto voce. Because if we do not, who will?

Arriving at Somerville: Ten Years On

           

Somerville: you can walk on the grass, but please don't drive across the quad.

          Yesterday marked ten years since the day in January 2007 when my husband and I loaded all my books into a car, and drove it illegally (unwittingly) across the paths of Somerville quad to my new office and job, pursued by shouting porters. In Oxford terms, a decade is a mere blink of an eye. Nonetheless, here are a handful of tentative reflections, from just one college tutor and university lecturer’s perspective, on how life at Somerville and the Oxford History Faculty has evolved in this past decade.

            The college itself, graced with award-winning new buildings, with more designs by the same architect in the pipeline, and major academic initiatives in the form of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development and Margaret Thatcher ScholarshipsTrust, feels shinier, more confidently outward-looking, with an ever clearer sense of a shared college purpose among the Fellows – all of these years in the making. Watching this academic community coalesce more fully has been educational in itself, and timely as Governing Body at the start of this New Year embarks on the election of a new Principal. For our undergraduates, who seem cleverer every year, the world after Somerville is however seemingly getting tougher: compared to 2007, more of those graduating in History choose to do a Masters, often to maximise their employment chances, and always at great financial cost. It is now rarer for students to take Finals in Trinity and start a secure ‘milk-round’ job with the civil service or in the City three months later. Instead, since the 2008 financial crisis, we tend to hear about periods of unpaid internships, more opaque pathways into careers, and longer waits for a permanent contract.

            The History Faculty, in its recent reforms to the BA syllabus, research strategy and appointments, has also become even more outward looking with its embrace of global history. In 2007, to work on Poland was still regarded as weirdly exotic by some colleagues; today, there is an expectation that historians in their overall intellectual panorama will look further afield, beyond Britain’s Atlantic shores, beyond Europe. Another significant change in how we conduct historical research has been the growing importance – intellectually and financially – of the major external research grant, from British, private or (most generously) EU funding bodies. In 2007, entire funded teams of history researchers working on funded projects (such as Robert Gildea’s 1968 project) were rare as hens’ teeth; today, the Faculty hosts at least 5 European grants each with a value of over £1 million, employing clusters of top postdocs from around the world. This kind of collaborative research (long of course the norm in science and social science) is thus becoming a more common experience for Oxford historians. This change is, in turn, further complicating the rapidly evolving role of the traditional college tutor, a role which even since 2007 has grown more variegated, accumulating competing demands.

Perhaps it is no surprise that, from the particular vantage point of January 2017, one can look back on that grey and nervous January day in Somerville quad a decade ago, and detect in both college and the Faculty the trends which dominate public discourse and global politics today: the ongoing legacies of the 2008 financial crisis, but in particular the paradoxical twins of growing uncertainty, and growing international inter-connectedness.

Academia and the End of Polite Neutrality?

The Scholar in their Study...
St. Jerome, Antonello da Massina, National Gallery.

  

It transpires, then, that you can spend quite a lot of time teaching and writing about History, and it can still turn around and bite you on the nose. Politics (read: history) has swept into Oxford, into our cafes, venerable college halls, our committee meetings and strategic planning. As I explained to a visiting colleague from Prague, until six months ago, at Somerville College lunches or with one’s students at Fresher’s Dinner, one might well discuss UK Higher Education policy, or immigration policy as it affected universities…. but rarely actual party politics. Perhaps a traditional British reserve, politeness and sense of good taste prevented it being otherwise (I was once told: no religion, sex or politics at high table). That set of mores was swept away overnight with the June 23^rd UK referendum on membership of the European Union, and again with the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. After the first result, the atmosphere in college was one of palpable collective grief, and after the second a stunned, sheer funereal silence.

            These events are rapidly redefining what it means, for an intellectual community, to be political. Before June 2016, a handful of historians in the university were openly active in party politics (addressing party meetings, leafleting for one party or another in city council elections). Yet with the sudden advent of xenophobic, anti-liberal democratic, anti-intellectual and populist politics, as if with the flick of a wand, the most basic things we do in this (or any) university have suddenly become highly political and partisan – catapulting us into the frontline of a culture war. When in tutorials we school young people in questioning and critical thought; when we lecture on how nationalism was constructed / invented in the 19^th century; when we speak up for continued access to the EU’s mould-breaking research programmes; when we defend the legal rights of our non-British-passport-holding colleagues, all of them top international scholars – all this, improbably, has now become politics with a capital P, setting us sharply at odds with the UK Government and its rhetorics, and liable to bring a torrent of online insults down on any academic publicly defending these things.

            The rules of engagement have shifted under our feet, with a bracing lurch. Academics are trained to deal in nuance, complexity, uncertainty, slow reflection and precision – skills which famously do not automatically translate into punchy public policy positions, or rhetorics. For academics – particularly those active in the publicly-visible world of social media – there are personal risks in speaking out on Brexit, xenophobia or Trump: of outright abusive messages online, or of being seen to use a university post to proclaim private political views. Yet not to speak out arguably carries a greater risk for us all, and what threatens the essential liberal values of universities is not a private matter for those employed to serve, staff and run these major national institutions. Earlier this year, Simon Schama spoke to a packed lecture theatre in Oxford’s Natural History Museum about ‘public history’: he urged Humanities scholars to be bold, and intervene in public debate to defend our values. Simon Schama gave that talk, prophetically, well before the June referendum.

            The (hostile) politicisation of our university life by external forces is unfamiliar to this generation of UK academics, but none of it is new. Down the centuries, scholars and writers have found again and again that, against all their wishes and private inclinations, they get pulled personally into big and dangerous political struggles: one need only look at the life of Niccolo Machiavelli, or Erasmus of Rotterdam. Our sources have been telling us all along how painful, frightening, and disorientating this situation is. Perhaps we have not been listening to those early modern voices as well as we thought we were; perhaps we did not, after all, entirely hear or recognise until now what they were saying. That intellectual freedom, although practised from within the quiet space of the Academy, cannot be quietly defended.

Open Days

Like a village fete?
Photo by Vieve Forward 

On September 18th, the flags and bunting will come out as Oxford University hosts the last of its 2015 Open Days. For many years, each college had its own schedule of Open Days, which did not necessarily coincide with one another. Now, Open Days are bigger, fewer in number and centrally co-ordinated, with departments and faculties welcoming visitors too. This makes for a more efficient visit for prospective students (and gridlock on Oxford’s roads and pavements).

            Exactly what a college tutor is expected to do on an Open Day varies. Somerville for a while assembled its tutors in a big hall, where we stood behind little tables, handing out leaflets about our subject to the passing crowds – a bit like a village fete. We now have a more congenial model, where visitors are able to visit tutors in their college rooms, see them in their natural habitat, and get some feel for the environment where tutorials take place. (Or a hastily tidied version of that environment.) Prospective students can drop in at any point over a two-hour period, and we sit and chat – for five, ten, fifteen minutes.

            So what do we talk about? I’m usually asked about the course: what options one can do in the first year, are they taught in college or not? I’m asked too about how the admissions system works, which involves taking a deep breath and explaining the different elements on which we assess a History application: GSCE marks, submitted written work, History Admissions Test, scores from 2 separate interviews (all of which we look at together, to form one big picture). I’m asked what would-be Oxford historians should be reading over their summer holidays, what in my opinion caused the English Reformation, or the unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, or for my views on post-modernism. But most of all, I’m asked a wise and cunning question: as a tutor, what advice would I give an Oxford History applicant?

            That too involves a pause, and a deep breath. I say things such as: if you are applying for a joint school (e.g. History and subject x), be very sure that you passionately want to do both those subjects, and are genuinely gifted in them both – don’t do it if you simply can’t choose between them. If you are specifying a college in your application, it’s a really good idea to go to an Open Day there and talk to the tutors who will be teaching you – it’s nice for them to meet you, but more importantly it will give you a chance to see if these are human beings you can and want to work with over three years. If you are specifying a college on your application, do a little bit of research on it. And then I shake their hand, and say a sincere ‘good luck!’.

Often, I never see these bright and engaged interlocutors ever again. Sometimes, they return as Freshers a year later; some of them I remain in touch with for many years...

Professor Paul Langford

On returning to Oxford from holiday, I was very saddened indeed to receive an email from Lincoln College stating that Paul Langford, former rector and my undergraduate tutor had died. Paul Langford was a highly distinguished historian of eighteenth-century England, a Fellow of Lincoln College from 1969, and a Fellow of the British Academy, well known in particular for his book A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783 (which I was spectacularly impressed, as a student, to find in paperback in airport bookshops).

            I first met Paul Langford on an exceptionally bitter winter evening in 1994, in his room in Lincoln College, for my undergraduate admissions interview. There was a ticking clock, an extraordinary panelled Oxford interior, and four imposing figures seated in a row, one of them smartly dressed, serious but friendly, whose leg tapped away in rhythm to my answers. I completely lost my thread half-way through one answer, and was seized with terror that all hopes of an Oxford place had gone. Paul Langford then smiled and said: ‘To be honest, I can’t remember my question either’, and the entire situation seemed much more human, and retrievable.

            There were many tutorials in that panelled room, with that same intimidating clock, reading out essays on eighteenth-century Europe. Paul Langford was a quiet but intense presence in a room: a tutor who was not afraid of silences in which you were made to sit and think. He was genuinely kind to his undergraduates: tactfully helping us to arrange entertainment in college for speakers we’d invited down from Westminster, treating us to a splendid post-Finals lunch at his home in Berkshire. Towards the end of my degree, Paul Langford talked about my plans to do research. I explained that I was interested in working on Polish-English ties in the 18C, or (more tentatively) on Renaissance Poland. He gave me then some of the best advice I’ve had, which I now often repeat to my own students: study what you are absolutely most passionate about. He seemed sure that, even at the very earliest stages of research planning, everyone knew deep down what that really was.

            I shall very much miss seeing Professor Langford walking through the streets of Oxford, carrying off his distinctive mixture of gravity and joviality, immaculately attired, often looking (to my mind) just a little bit like the eighteenth-century squires he wrote about. I shall miss the knowledge, which I and his fellow students had for so many years after leaving Lincoln, that whenever we walked down Turl Street, he was somewhere behind those walls, such an intrinsic part of the college’s life and identity. Paul Langford, like Vivian Green (also former History tutor and former rector), is a scholar who made a profound mark on both Lincoln College and on his own historical field. And, like a true Oxford tutor, Paul Langford touched the lives of generations of students in so many ways, that even the ablest historian would struggle adequately to record them.

Dolphins in the Bodleian

After a long, busy autumn term of teaching and running a research project (hence the gap in blog posts, apologies), last week I finally ventured back into the Bodleian Library, and found a new exhibition in the entrance hall. Aldus Manutius:The Struggle and the Dream marks the 500^th anniversary of the death of the pioneering Venetian Renaissance printer (c. 1450-1515), who created distinctive editions of classical texts treasured by humanist scholars across Europe, and in the process set a new standard in the printing of learned books. The exhibition is curated by my Somerville History colleague, Dr. Oren Margolis, with assistance from current Somerville History undergraduates Jennifer Allan, Anna Clark and Qaleeda Talib, whose own work on Aldus will be showcased at an event at the Bodleian in February.

At a time when academic publishing is again going through a major metamorphosis, and experiencing another technological revolution, it seems apt to reflect on the printer Aldus and his legacy. The Bodleian exhibition stresses that Aldus’ Venetian workshop gave the world the italic font: the display includes the first printed books in which it was seen. Probably few of us, when pressing Control I on our computers, know or think of the great copyright squabble which the discovery of printed italic triggered between Aldus and his punch-cutter, Francesco Griffo. The exhibition includes too a Roman denarius from 80AD, showing a dolphin and anchor, which Aldus adopted as his own device. Modern academic publishers must surely remain envious of the little surge of delight, the flash of excitement, the joy of possession, which the sight of Aldus’ dolphin logo seems to have instantly provoked in the learned 16C reader.

Aldus printed for the republic of letters, for those anywhere in Christendom who, at the turn of the 15^th and 16^th centuries, were serious about scholarly and beautiful books. So it was a particular pleasure for me to see in The Struggle and the Dream an Oxford copy of Aldus’ Erotemata, by Constantine Lascaris, a key text for those learning ancient Greek. I’ve been working for some years on Piotr Tomicki (d.1535), bishop of Kraków and a key advisor to the Polish Crown. In Kraków’s Jagiellonian Library, I have examined Tomicki’s own diligently, neatly annotated copy of Aldus’ Erotomata, which he had purchased as a student in Italy, very far from home, and kept throughout his life, even once he was a great statesman. Aldus’ volumes – whether in Venice, Kraków or Oxford - still have the ability to make people, now as in the sixteenth-century, feel they are holding in their hands very special books.

Invigilating

Academic dress: your examiner might look like this...
Photo by Matthias Rosenkranz

This term, I’ve been invigilating Oxford History Finals for the first time. Invigilating isn’t perhaps the right word – the setting up, distribution of papers, handing out of booklets and general military-precision oversight is carried out by the Examination Schools staff. Academics attend in the role of ‘examiners’: if you sit on a Finals Exam Board for your subject, you have to don full academic dress and be present for the first half hour of an examination. Examiners stand at the front of the hall, and are there in order to answer any queries which might arise about the academic content of the papers. Half an hour in, they process out of the examination hall in semi-stately procession (clutching mortar boards, rucksacks, cycle helmets), and leave everyone else to it for another 2.5 hours.

I’ve found invigilating a deeply strange experience. This is in part because I haven’t witnessed a formal, large-scale University examination since I sat my own Finals, over 15 years ago. But it was also strange because the contrast between the Victorian world of the Exam Schools and the busy world outside seems to have become sharper; the dissonance has grown.

Oxford is famed for the formality of its exams. Students have to arrive in ‘sub fusc’ academic dress, or else they are ineligible to sit their papers. Tourists are keen to take photos of students in their gowns, black ribbons and carnations, or of examiners in their billowing red hoods. Exams here are highly ritualised, and perhaps fetishized. The papers the students sit are still a gold standard, in terms of academic rigour and challenge. The contents of the papers reflect the very latest trends in scholarship and research. Yet the external trappings of our exams culture are very obviously Victorian, and from another era: the vast 19C Examination Schools designed by Thomas Jackson (‘an exam palace’, as a Polish visitor once described it), the archaising dress, and 300 students sat writing by hand for 3 hours at a time. This scene feels rather weirder to me now than it did in the 1990s; in a world of digital, ubiquitous and increasingly socially penetrating technology, the frozen-in-time staging of Oxford exams risks looking anachronistic, and bizarre rather than quaintly traditional. I have a lot of affection for these Oxford traditions, but I do wonder if – when invigilating in, say, 2019 – I will, dressed in black gown and red hood, be surveying a room full of laptops, rather than pale students clutching fountain pens.

Teaching-led research?

Not just the students who are learning...

This term, I’ve been teaching courses and giving lectures which I’ve not offered for a couple of years – a lecture series on ‘Renaissance and Reformation in Central Europe’, and first-year introductory papers on art history and historical anthropology. After even a brief interval, it is always disorientating how unfamiliar once familiar material can seem; and also how different it can start to look, in light of one’s own on-going reading and research.

I’m coming to realise how deeply courses which I’ve taught in the past have shaped my current thinking and research – especially those which were not in my own core areas of expertise, and (it must be said) those which I least enjoyed teaching when I first came to Somerville. These papers have powerfully insinuated themselves into something like an intellectual subconscious, and exerted a real influence even while seemingly lying dormant.

In particular, I’m now aware of just how deeply indebted my new European Research Council Research project is to the courses I teach in a typical Oxford Hilary term. In the ‘Renaissance and Reformation’ lectures, I’ve found very early versions of the questions which frame the project, about Renaissance dynasticism, elective monarchy, etc. – reading the original lecture notes is a form of intellectual archaeology. The ‘Approaches to History’ course, which is meant to showcase interdisciplinary ways of studying the past, has shaped the ERC project just as much. Many colleges make ‘Approaches’ compulsory for first years, so that students get a panoramic sense of how art history, anthropology, gender studies and sociology have influenced historical research. The project applies these all at once to an early modern dynasty, to see what emerges.

At Oxford, as the University continues to defend its tutorial teaching model, one often hears of the virtues of ‘research-led teaching’: the idea that students benefit from being taught by scholars at the cutting edge of their fields. However, the reverse is also surely true – that the experience of teaching a broad range of Oxford undergraduate courses can inform and shape our research agendas in surprising and fruitful ways. It forces you to look for the bigger picture. When I first started (with a certain trepidation) to teach historical anthropology, the then Regius Professor Robert Evans said: ‘It will be good for you’. More recently, I heard an eminent Oxford historian say that nothing you do in your career – no task, no matter how frustrating or seemingly fruitless at the time - is ever wasted. This term has been about realising how right they were.

An Evening with Thomas Wyatt

Thomas Wyatt, by Hans Holbein the Younger
Wikipedia Commons

One of the most interesting events I attended last term was a slightly belated book launch (viewable here) for the Wolfson Prize-winning Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest, by my former undergraduate tutor Susan Brigden. It was organised by a new institution which has rather burst upon the scene here – TORCH, or The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities, an interdisciplinary enterprise based in the refurbished 18C Radcliffe Infirmary.

Events relating to new books normally take one of two forms in Oxford – seminar or party. At a seminar, the author presents a précis of the work in a formal academic setting in the form of a paper, and is then politely grilled by an audience of peers and students. At a party, plenty of wine and nibbles are served in some smart college room, discounted copies of the book made available, and brief speeches made by a bashful author and an eager publisher.

TORCH has however been pioneering a new kind of book event, which steers a middle way between these two models. At the Heart’s Forest evening, in a rare assembly of historical talent, a panel consisting of Diarmaid MacCulloch, Chris Stamatakis, David Starkey and Susan Brigden herself sat on the stage in St. Anne’s auditorium. The panellists each gave a speech – something in between an encomium and a personal reflection on the nature of 16C England. Susan, in her response, talked frankly about the intimacy with which a biographer lives with their subject (his loves, spiritual crises and felonies), and reflected on what she might change in the book, having finally achieved ‘closure’ on Wyatt. The panel – three of them once fellow doctoral students under the legendary G.R. Elton – then launched into an informal but eye-opening discussion about why Tudor England mattered, and how strong our grasp of that period is. Starkey saw in Henry’s court the heroic origins of a modern English identity; McCullough insisted that Tudor England was still entirely on the margins of Europe; they argued about the role of Reformation theology and of loyalty to the Tudor dynasty. And then we all had a glass of wine.

It is hard to entice academics into a space where they can address the big questions in their field, speak about the personalities who have moulded their own careers, articulate something of the emotional rollercoaster of writing a big book, and reflect on cutting-edge interdisciplinary methodology – let alone all at once. Perhaps by innovating with the form and shape of academic meetings, organisations like TORCH can also encourage new patterns of thought, and provide new templates for scholarly conversations… without losing the celebratory conviviality of the traditional launch party.

Splitting Down the Middle

        

Sliced in half... Photo by Anan Zeevy

        Over summer, while sitting in a 19C cognac-estate manager’s house on holiday, I casually checked my email and found that a major research project on the Jagiellonian dynasty which I had proposed to the European Research Council had been selected for funding. This happy news stunned me even more than the French sunshine, and the local liqueur, Pineau des Charentes.

            The grant agreement paperwork is still being prepared in Brussels, but the most immediate effect of the ERC grant offer is that I need to calculate how to chop my Oxford History tutor & lecturer job in half, right down the middle. It is a condition of ERC Starting Grants that Principal Investigators (i.e. project leaders) spend at least 50% of their working time conducting research towards and leading the project. This means that the college and university will appoint a historian to a 0.5 post, and that – for the next 3 years - I will be sharing the job I’ve done for the past 6 years with somebody else.

            An Oxford tutorial fellowship is a strangely diffuse thing, once you start to look at it closely. Beyond the formal duties – tutorial teaching, lecturing, examining, pastoral work, sitting on committees, research – there is a penumbra of activity which builds up slowly and organically around the postholder, some of which shades into the voluntary… meeting with school groups of prospective undergraduates, talking with alumnae when they return to Somerville, attending development events in London. It’s been useful to step back and appreciate how diverse, multi-faceted and constantly surprising academic life in a college environment can be; how hard it is to write down a complete list of what we do.

            The idea of acquiring a professional partner in this job, a surrogate, is strange but appealing. Academic posts are in some ways pretty solitary, and come with a lot of de facto autonomy, so doing the job collaboratively will surely offer fresh perspectives; watching someone else do parts of this role, articulating what it involves, discussing its parameters and the execution of tasks, hearing someone else’s perspective day to day, will I suspect teach me a lot I didn’t know, or hadn’t thought of, about teaching and administration in Oxford.  Job shares are common in many other professions (and indeed in academic administration), but still very rare among Oxford humanities academics, so we will all have to learn as we go along. Innovations like this can, I suspect and hope, bring all sorts of unanticipated benefits to individuals and institutions. So, if you are a historian of early modern Europe or Britain, and would be interested in sharing my job for the next three years (entering the world behind the blog, like Alice through the Looking Glass!) do get in touch... 

Educating for what?

           

The Oxford spires
Photo by Tejvan Pettinger 

 Last week, the academic Fellows at Somerville College were asked to think about the qualities they believe that we as an institution should be nurturing in our undergraduate students. With Finals season drawing to a close, and another generation of students about to graduate, this seemed an apt time to be asked.

            We are used to talking about the skills which students should possess – there is an official list of the skills we are looking for in potential History students at admissions stage, e.g. historical imagination, enthusiasm, originality of thought. When dons sit with big piles of exam scripts before them, there is also a Faculty mark scheme which lists the skills which a good script will show evidence of – precision, originality, analytical power, range of issues addressed etc. Skills and qualities overlap, but not completely. So what I jotted down in my response to the survey of college tutors, on a train whizzing through the Chilterns, was this… When my students graduate from Oxford, I would like them to have, or aspire to, these qualities:

·        -   imaginative & innovative thinking
- questioning, iconoclastic mindset

·         -  ability to formulate new ideas, insights & visions.

·         -  ability to really hear & take on board alternative viewpoints

·         -  thoughtful about the wider implications of their ideas/actions on society, & thoughtful more generally about -      their engagement with society

·        -  committed to the pursuit of excellence

·         - ambitious to make the most of their talent

·         - thought leadership, seeing things other people don't see & explaining them in a compelling way

·         - clarity of thought & expression, as a way of inspiring others

Maybe that list is simply the Finals mark scheme rewritten in more general terms, or interpolated with implicit moral and social concerns. The question of what we are educating our young people for has always been a political one. In the Renaissance republics, which constantly looked to the ancient world, education was preparation for active, responsible citizenship; in Renaissance principalities, it was there to equip you to serve the prince and /or commonweal. Oxford humanities education is risky in so far as it doesn’t seek to teach specific values, loyalties or beliefs (which might helpfully hold a society together), but rather encourages their rigorous challenge – a society testing itself.

Brainstorming that list of qualities on the train, I wondered what kind of job it might be a description for. Strategy consultant, army officer, school teacher, politician, academic? Do Oxford dons themselves, as a professional group, live up to these same aspirations? I await with interest to learn what my Somerville colleagues put in their lists.

Twitter (II)

Inscription above the Bodleian entrance - a 21C Republic of Letters?
Photo by summonedbyfells

It is several months since I nervously ventured onto Twitter, and now’s as good a time as any to reflect on what it’s been like stepping inside that noisy room. So here are some interim observations on that strange new world.

1) As someone who’s published on the printing revolution of the 15C, one of the striking things about Twitter (or twitter, as it seems to be losing its T) is how self-referential and self-conscious a medium it is. You can, like the great historian of printing Elizabeth Eisenstein, scour the pages and prefaces of early printed books and struggle to find much comment on, or reference to, the new medium in which they were produced. That’s why historians have to work so hard to tease out the contemporary meanings of early printing. The voices on Twitter, however, very often seem to be talking about Twitter itself. 

2) Twitter has also refined and expanded my sense, at least, of who the audiences for academic history might be; of whom we can and should be talking to from the virtual ivory tower. It’s a place to talk directly with young artists interested in Renaissance images, documentary makers, or the wide range of people in the UK (and beyond) with an interest in Polish history. It reminds you what a curiosity there is about what we do; and how open it is to challenge.

3) Twitter can enhance the sense of academia as a community. The inscription above the entrance to Oxford’s Bodleian library reads: 'to you, and the Republic of Letters’. The republic of letters, from the 15C to the 20C, was a physically disconnected, slightly virtual community of scholars and writers, but Twitter can knit it together in new ways. It lets historians from different universities around the world, with different research interests, converse together about how we write books, how we teach, and so on. This effect is perhaps particularly powerful locally, in Oxford’s famously fragmented institutional environment. The History Faculty here has over 100 postholders (or faculty), and there are simply no opportunities to meet collectively, far less debate, with the great majority of one’s departmental colleges, scattered as we are across our different colleges. But Twitter allows me, at last, to eavesdrop on what my fellow historians in St. John’s, or St. Catz, are thinking about. (@redhistorian, @katheder, @CraigClunas)

4) Finally, one of the more unexpected networks which Twitter seems to be creating is one of Somerville historians past and present – tutors, current students, and former students. This started to become clear this month, when my colleague Benjamin Thompson (@HistorianBenj) acquired a Twitter account. Twitter can, potentially, allow all these generations of Somerville historians, in Oxford and beyond it, to talk directly, regularly and spontaneously to one another for the first time. This communications revolution starts to dissolve the barriers between Fellows, those studying here now, and those who studied here 5 years ago. So, if you can block out the white noise of social media, this is what twitter at its best can achieve – to turn imagined communities (to cheekily borrow a famous phrase from the history of nationalism), into closer, more tangible communities.

Our Speaker Tonight...

A chair's eye view...
The Class of 1968 Seminar Room in the Weigle Information Commons at UPenn's Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center
Photo by Weigle Information Commons

     From an early stage in most historians’ careers, they find themselves being asked to chair seminar papers or conference panels. As with most things, nobody tells you how to do this; you’re meant to learn the dos and don’ts through observation alone. Chairing is meant to be straightforward compared with the greater intellectual challenges of research and teaching, but it’s not that simple.

       The chair of a History paper is a mixture of game-show host, compere and master of ceremonies. They are meant to be welcoming and witty, to inject a bit of energy into proceedings and keep the show on the road, but also to act as a mere facilitator, a warm up act, for the guest speaker/s. As chair, you have to introduce the speaker, by giving a précis of their career which they will approve of and recognise. By convention, the chair asks the opening question in the post-paper discussion, so during the talk there is pressure to think of a menu of possible lines of enquiry. Even if the audience starts to flag or fidget or yawn during the talk, there is a moral responsibility to look attentive, encouraging and fascinated, as if to set the audience a good example. If the speaker speaks for more than their allotted time, the chair has to stop them, but has no real tools with which to do so. You’re caught between the sense that it’s very rude to interrupt someone, to bluntly and publicly ask them to stop talking, and the sense that that is precisely what the audience keenly expect you to do. With the overrunning speaker, one can start with subtle cues: leaning towards them attentively as if they are coming to their concluding sentence, adopting an anxious body language, and of course slowly pushing your watch back and forth across the table.

Photo by smaedli

     

   There is a risk that, after the paper, the audience are not inspired to ask more than a couple of desultory questions, and then it falls to you to engage in a spontaneous, public, unprepared tutorial-style dialogue with the speaker, on a topic about which you may know almost nothing. As for the speaker, you don’t want them to respond to questions at too much length, using them as an opportunity to quote whole paragraphs they had earlier edited out of their paper, seeing the discussion as simply a chance to continue with their delivery in extra time. Equally, you don’t want the speaker’s answer to be too short, meaning that the precious store of communal questions gets used up too quickly. As a chair, it can feel like a personal failure if the session ends obviously early.

     

   But despite all the potential intellectual and social pitfalls, while chairing you’re always aware of how much harder it is to be in the speaker’s seat - where, at a conference, you might well find yourself sitting in about 20 minutes’ time.

A Noisy Room

Disco party in the Hague, photo by David Domingo

It’s no secret that one of the big stories in the careers of historians of my generation is going to be the impact of new technologies on our professional activities, as researchers, authors and teachers. Over the past couple of weeks, in the spirit of exploration and discovery, I’ve tentatively dipped my toes into two forms of social media which are new to me.

The first is academia.edu, best described as 'Linked In' for academics, which I recently became aware of by accident, although some of my Oxford colleagues have been using it for a while. Academia.edu is a global database on which academics register themselves, and it enables you to search for specialists in specific research areas, e.g. ‘Polish history’, ‘Crusades’. You can opt to ‘follow’ the work of people whose research or careers interest you (e.g. receive updates), and they can opt to follow you. Within 3 hours of creating my page on academia.edu, dozens of late medievalists, early modernists and historians of the book had registered as ‘followers’ – early career and senior scholars from Uruguay to Russia, via western Europe and North America. I was initially bemused, then amazed, and finally slightly panic-stricken. Here was a cluster of historians whose work I had in 90% of cases not previously been aware of, but which was directly relevant to my own past, present and future research. After just a few hours on academic.edu, my already daunting mental ‘to read’ list grew three-fold.

A few days ago, I attended an Oxford University training session on ‘Twitter for Academia’, after which I signing up incognito (for now!) to follow university presses, major libraries, museums and leading history departments on Twitter. Within 90 minutes of doing so, my screen had been flooded with c. 60 tweets, a blizzard of incoming messages, some 40% of which consisted of nuggets of genuinely valuable information – about new history books, exhibitions, publishing technologies. It was like briefly popping your head, unsuspecting, into a room where an incredibly loud party is taking place.

In the past - or, in my professional past, until last week – academics learnt about relevant events, or publications, or about scholars working on similar areas in different cities or countries, through email mailing lists or by word of mouth. Word of mouth is a highly haphazard communication system, but at least it limits the stream of information; it is like listening for occasional echoes from afar. But academia.edu and Twitter amplify and accelerate word of mouth in the academic community, in a way which is hugely energising, sometimes inspiring, but which also threatens to be unmanageable. We’ll all have to develop sophisticated listening strategies, and a finely-tuned sense of judgement about which leads to follow, if we’re not going to just flounder pleasantly but helplessly in a sea of stimulating, psychedelic noise. 

Take Your Seats

The canons' favourite house - the Erazm Ciolek Palace, Cracow
Photo by Ansomia

As the new academic year gets under way, and Somerville welcomes a number of new Fellows and lecturers, members of the Senior Common Room (i.e. academic staff of the college) have been sent an email explaining the etiquette of seating at lunchtimes, when we eat together in our 19C, high-ceilinged, wood-panelled hall. SCR seating conventions vary between colleges, but at Somerville good manners consist of early lunchers taking a seat on the left-hand side of High Table, and of later arrivals sitting in the next free place thereafter. If you’re reserving places for guests or colleagues with whom you’re having a working lunch, you normally head for the ‘lower high’ tables (i.e. the overflow area).

When I first worked in the archives of the Cracow diocese, as a graduate student, I spent several weeks reading the minutes of the Cracow cathedral chapter from the late 15^th-century (in an archive located in a gatehouse on the Wawel hill, which scores of tourists passed beneath every hour). I was surprised, and slightly disappointed, to find that these very senior and educated clergymen – who assisted the bishop in the running of the cathedral and diocese – did not spend much time at their meetings discussing what we would think of as religion. Instead, they were much preoccupied with regulating and organising their collective collegiate life. They argued about which canon got to occupy the best houses in Canons’ Street, at the foot of the castle, about who should be excluded from their common table/shared meal-times for bad behaviour, and in particular who should sit and stand where… in cathedral chapter meetings, in public processions, and during church services. Behind the finely tuned conventions, the oft-reiterated rules and the occasional squabbles, one could detect a clear vision of how the shared, communal life of a late medieval cathedral chapter should look, and a strong belief in that ideal.

Somerville may be a 19C foundation, but like all Oxford colleges it has inherited certain medieval social conventions. It is a secular institution, with a high percentage of female academics, with scholars working on everything from the influenza virus to 19C discourses about democracy. In all this, Somerville as a collegiate body would have been scarcely imaginable to the 15C canons of Cracow, except perhaps in some apocalyptic vision of their late medieval world turned anarchically upside down. But the SCR email about high table seating is something they would instantly have understood. 

Republic on the Isis?

Palace for committees?
Photo by ell brown

Over the past couple of weeks, Somerville has been conducting interviews for a new Treasurer, to oversee the college's finances and physical fabric. As with interviews for academic jobs, the candidates’ timetables include plenty of time to have coffee and lunch with current members of Governing Body (i.e. the committee of Tutorial Fellows and top college officers which is the sovereign decision-making body of any Oxford college). Over Greek salad, quiche and chocolate tart we’ve had the chance to chat about our work, about the everyday life of the college, and the character of Somerville. In particular, I’ve found myself trying to explain how the college’s governance functions. I sometimes think the best analogy is an early modern European one – that Oxford colleges, and indeed the University itself, are best understood as a Renaissance republican city state, perhaps 15C Venice.

When I started teaching the Renaissance Special Subject some 5 years ago, I gained a slightly better understanding of how Oxford's hugely complex governance works, at college and university level. In Renaissance Venice and Florence, the republican liberty of citizens (academics) was of paramount importance - freedom from external domination/occupation (government) and freedom from internal tyranny (powerful administrators?). This liberty was embodied in the Grand Council, or Venetian assembly, a body perhaps akin to Congregation, Oxford's famous 'parliament of dons'. The Venetians tried to defend their liberty by creating a fabulously complex structure of overlapping committees - a system designed to be so baffling that few could grasp it (let alone dominate it), where some committees were genuinely powerful and other only appeared to be so. To prevent chaos or statis, there was a Doge - officially only a ceremonial figurehead with strictly limited authority, but in practice often the only person who understood the system, and who was able to provide leadership. In this kind of republic, power was everywhere and also nowhere. I don't know what last week's candidates, with their diverse career backgrounds, made of our explanations of Governing Body. Living in a republic, in a consensus- and committee-driven system, can certainly have its frustrations. But, like 15C Venetian patricians, I've come to agree (on most days!) that these are ultimately a price worth paying for liberty.

Going for Gold

Will she make it?
Photo from Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games

Earlier in the week, BBC 3 broadcast a programme called Girl Power: Going forGold, which over 9 months followed three athletes as they fought to get selected for Team GB’s Olympic Women’s Weightlifting squad. Weightlifting is not a world I’m particularly familiar with, but it was compelling watching Zoe from London, Helen from Devon and Hannah from Birmingham settling into life at the national training camp in Leeds. It was interestingly difficult to predict who would win those coveted Team GB places – whether natural talent, ability to perform under pressure, single-mindedness or simple number of hours spent in the gym would win out. But what I kept muttering to myself as I sat in front of the TV was: “why an earth are you doing this?” Why would you sacrifice everything else (e.g. your A-levels), move far from home, devote 3/5/10 years of your life and train 6-10 hours a day, when the odds of getting an Olympic team place are poor? Six contenders, two places.

But, of course, academia is exactly the same, and in some respects worse. You invest 4-5 years of your life doing a Masters and a Phd/D.Phil, possibly struggling to find the money to pay for this, working long hours, often abroad and far from home… and when the thesis is done, you hope to be selected for a postdoctoral position. The classic, coveted Oxbridge post-doc is the JRF (Junior Research Fellowship), and these can easily attract 300 applicants for each advertised post. For even a one-year temporary History lectureship, you’re typically looking at 1 winner out of 60+ applicants. Like trying to break into top-level international sport, academia is high risk and high reward. Up-and-coming weightlifters and historians alike do it because they are passionate about their work, and believe (rightly or wrongly) they are talented enough, or lucky enough, to get the chance to compete at London 2012, or to join the Senior Common Room of an Oxford college. Winner takes all – it’s a great system if you’re one of the winners, a pitiless one if you’re not.

Class List

Ready for your results?
Photo by aprilskiver

Today, we’re expecting the results of the Oxford first-year History exams, Prelims, to be published; Finals results came out at the end of June. The publishing of the so-called class lists is a major Oxford ritual (and rite of passage), but one which has changed substantially in the past five years or so.

For generations, it was the case that results were printed out on a stark white sheet and one master copy pinned up in the Examination Schools, looking much like a legal notice in a UK polling station. To find out how you had done, you had to make a trip to the cavernous entrance hall of the Schools, and identify which of the scores of giant sheets on the walls related to History. This was all very well if you were still in Oxford when your results came out (which most students were not). I received my Prelims results over a pay phone on a cross-channel ferry, desperately trying to hear what the man in the Exam Schools was saying, over the din of engines, slot machines and the duty free shop. I learnt my Finals results standing in my future mother-in-law’s kitchen in Scotland, calling the JCR President of Magdalen on his mobile, the only person I knew still with a college room in Oxford, who had nipped across the road to look at the lists for me.

That ritual has now gone – for a while the class lists were published on-line in PDF form, so you could scan the grainy image on your screen to see how your students had fared. Now, as a tutor, I don’t see a class list at all. Instead, I log onto the university’s massive student database, OSS, and search for results by individual student’s surname – it may be less glamorous, traditional and heart-stopping than standing in front of an A3 sheet of paper in a Victorian lobby, but I can at least see for the first time what all students (including those I taught from other colleges) scored on individual papers, without having to ask their college tutors. I do nonetheless miss my annual pilgrimage to the Exam Schools, which added a sense of occasion and solemnity to the whole process. But the thrill, satisfaction, pride (and, sometimes, relief) you feel when students whom you taught get Firsts or Distinctions is still the same. 

Over the Garden Wall

Yesterday, on a balmy Oxford evening, I spent an hour in the pretty gardens of the Rector’s Lodgings at Exeter College. Oxford is full of secret, semi-private and extremely private gardens hidden behind medieval walls, and I’d gained entry to this one because I was attending a reception organised by Andrew Hamilton, the Vice Chancellor, intended to bring together people from across the University who attempt to engage a wider community with their research.

Anthony Gormley sculpture, roof of Exeter College
Photo by failing angel

I think I was invited because of this blog, so the reception gave me an opportunity to raise a small and appreciative glass of white wine to its many loyal readers around the globe – thank you! It also gave me the chance to talk to people in this enormous and highly devolved (or fragmented, delete as appropriate) university whom I wouldn’t normally meet. There was a leading professor of psychiatry, whose podcasts for laypeople on the ‘New Psychology of Depression’ have attracted an astonishing number of hits. I heard about the Young Lives research project at the Department of International Development, which follows the childhood of 12,000 children in 4 developing countries, and makes its considerable body of data publically accessible via its website. And I got to chat to my History colleague Steve Gunn, whose project on Tudor accidents has unearthed all sorts of remarkable stories (e.g. a possible inspiration for Shakespeare’s Ophelia), which have been widely reported on the BBC and beyond.

Academics still party and celebrate behind high walls, in secret gardens (I remember the open-mouthed wonder of a Little Clarendon Street shopkeeper when he entered Somerville's garden quad, just behind his shop, for the very first time…). It’s become a truism that social media and the internet are transforming academic research. Last night’s gathering brought home to me, however, just how porous the walls of the university have become (and will yet become) as a result of new technologies – that brings great opportunities, considerable risks, and arguably a whole new arena of moral, professional and institutional responsibility.