Previous Events & Workshops
Children, Work and Welfare in Historial Perspective Workshop 26 November 2011
This one-day conference organised by Dr Peter Kirby brought together scholars from history, economics, literature, geography, demography and public health to discuss the health and welfare experiences of children in the past. Dr Margaret Pelling (Senior Research Associate, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford) acted as Chair.
Download the Abstracts
Download the Child Occupational Health slides
Download the Child Mental Health slides
The Invisible Archives Workshop 24-26 June 2011
The Tricontinental Archive Project offers a website with an open user-interface designed to offer information about little-known archives for researchers working on the cultural and political histories of the global South, particularly Africa, Asia, Latin America, Australasia and the insular Pacific.
The workshop brought together researchers from a range of disciplines, as well as curators and archivists, with research interests in different media and geographical areas, in order to develop and launch the TCA website. Major themes for discussion involved questions of Technology and Interface (the technical aspects of developing the TCA archive as an open access database, including access in different languages, primarily focussing on different software capabilities), Content (kinds of material, texts, and images, to be uploaded, their scope and limits), Organisation of the Archive as an ongoing web-based institution, and best practice issues, including learning from other archives. Participants contributed to these four themes through round table discussion, and through discussion were able to define the parameters for the project, and to establish an executive committee to run the TCA website. The conceptual and technical parameters were then tested against the requirements of three specific archival projects, the Pitt Rivers/British Museum “The Tibet Album: British Photography in Central Tibet 1920-1950”, presented by Dr Clare Harris, the Afghan National Archives in Kabul, presented by Thomas Wide and Dr Amin Tarzi, and African ethnomusicology collections, presented by Dr Noel Lobley.
Visual Culture Workshop 15-16 March 2011
The first Princeton-Münster-Oxford workshop in early modern history met at the Research Centre of St John’s College, Oxford on 15 and 16 March 2011 to explore ‘Visual Cultures in Early Modern Europe.’ The meeting piloted a three-year international collaboration that will bring together faculty, graduate students, and early career researchers from the University of Oxford, Princeton University, and the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. The two day exchange experimented with a new workshop format by combining a theory reading group with a discussion forum in which graduate students presented their research and received expert comments from invited guest respondents from Oxford’s Faculty of History, History of Art Department, and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Download the full report.
Contact and Exchange in Later Medieval Europe Workshop
'Contact and Exchange in Later Medieval Europe' was a two-day workshop, organised in honour of Malcolm Vale, who had retired from St John's as Medieval History tutor in September 2010. The workshop was funded and made possible by the St John's Research Centre, and the British Academy. The project was conceived to explore the processes of movement and transferral of ideas, objects, texts and political thought and experience, across boundaries. It provided an opportunity to break down established historiographical paradigms of Europe in terms of distinct polities, and to achieve a more fluid picture where people and things were constantly on the move. The participants have reworked their articles for a volume to be published by Boydell: the volume will include a general historiographical introduction, and sectional methodological introductions, and promises to appeal to a wide-audience of students and academics, medievalists and non-medievalists.
Workshop on Evidence 27 November 2010
An interdisciplinary workshop exploring the nature of evidence brought together by scholars in different disciplines from the Fellowship. The four speakers were:
- Richard Allen (JRF in History, SJC) who presented a paper on ‘Extrapolation, Recommendation and
Speculation: A Brief Introduction to the use of Evidence by Medievalists’. - Jim Panton (Lecturer in Politics, SJC): who discussed ‘Evidence-based Policy and Policy-based Evidence’ in contemporary British politics.
- Simon Dadson (Lecturer in Physical Geography, SJC): who talked about ‘Flood Risk in a
Changing Climate: from Observations to Global Models’. - Rafael Perera-Salazar (University Lecturer in Medical Statistics): who presented a paper on ‘Best
Evidence for Medical Decision-making: Hierarchies of Evidence and Different
Shades of Grey’. (Download Rafael Perera-Salazar's PDF). - Alan Grafen (Fellow in Mathematical Biology, SJC) was the discussant.
Ethnomusicology Conference, 8-11 April 2010
The Research Centre generously provided £600 to support the British Forum for Ethnomusicology conference, held in college and the Faculty of Music at St. Aldates 8-11 April 2010, organized by Dr. Martin Stokes and Dr. Anna Stirr on the theme of 'musical knowledge'. This helped bring major keynote speakers and panelists to a conference that had over 110 papers by paper givers from universities in Hong Kong to California. The keynote panel comprised Professors Georgina Born (Cambridge), Suzel Reily (Queens, Belfast), Martin Clayton (Open University) and Marcello Sorce Keller (Mediterranean Institute, Malta). The keynote speech was given by Steven Feld, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music at the University of New Mexico, on the subject of 'Acoustemologies'.
Ethnomusicology Seminars, Michaelmas and Hilary 2009-10
The Research Centre helped support the ethnomusicology seminar series, along with the Faculty of Music and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, in Michaelmas and Hilary Terms 2009-10. Our visiting speakers over the year were Professors Allan Marett and Linda Barwick (University of Sydney), Professor Tom Solomon (University of Bergen), Professor Tim Cooley (University of Santa Barbara) and Professor Hans Weisethaunet (University of Oslo), coordinated by Dr. Anna Stirr, Mellon Career Development Fellow in Music, currently at at St. John's.
The Oxford Network of Peace Studies May 2009, 2010 and 2011
In 2009 the Research Centre contributed £2000 in matching sponsorship for a multidisciplinary international day-conference on 'The Serious Study of Peace', held in May 2009 at St John's. The organisers, chaired by Dr Liz Carmichael, Chaplain and Tutor in Theology, were an ad hoc group of academics and graduate students from various disciplines across the University, who wished to explore the viability of an ongoing project to promote the academic study of peace, peacemaking, peacebuilding and peacekeeping in Oxford.
Following the success of this conference, the ad hoc group became the Oxford Network of Peace Studies (OxPeace). A second successful day-conference, on 'Building Peace', was held at St John's in May 2010. Following this, OxPeace became associated, as a multidisciplinary project, with the Centre for International Studies (Dept of Politics and international Relations)
OxPeace is developing by holding events under its own auspices and in co-operation with already existing seminar and lecture programmes. It now has a steering committee, still convened by Dr Carmichael, and is developing a panel of advisers. To date, Desmond Tutu and Chris Patten have become Patrons. A conference on 'Media in Conflict and Peacebuilding' was held on Saturday 7 May in St John's.
For details of other conferences, workshops and seminars in earlier years, please see the Director's Annual Reports.
