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The first topic on the early modern section of the course that I teach for Liverpool Hope is Renaissance kingship, and I like to start by getting the students drawing: first Henry VIII, then Henry VII.  The idea is that it brings home to them the power of the image – they all know what…

Originally posted on The Research Whisperer: This article first appeared in Funding Insight on 7 December 2017 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit http://www.researchprofessional.com. Photo by Wu Yi | unsplash.com For as long as I’ve been in academia, one of the staples of scholarly life has…

Over the last few months, I’ve been doing a lot of travelling around getting to work.  I’m not fond of driving, it’s never been something I particularly enjoy, but living in the back of beyond means that there’s really little alternative.  When I wrote Over the Next Hill, I thought I would be doing a…

I’m pleased to say that since the beginning of the year, I’ve been covering the Dawn of Modernity course for the first year history students at Edge Hill University.  It’s been great fun so far, and I must send a big thank you to Nicky Tsougarakis and all the staff at Edge for making everything…

The last session of teaching before Christmas on the Liverpool Hope Twentieth Century Europe course at Holy Cross College in Bury was on the Cold War.  It’s an interesting topic, and one of the primary sources set for the students to study is an extract from Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, delivered on 5 March 1946…

BBC News has just noticed that many people working in our universities are on precarious contracts at several universities, as well as doing other low paid work for which they are massively over-qualified.  Hardly a shocker for anyone working in the sector, but it’s presumably come to light because of the UCU strike, which has…

I’ve spent a lot of time since the beginning of the year recording ballads for this website, to accompany my new book.  This is the third in a short series of posts about what I’ve been up to. There are more than 30 musical examples in the book and my plan was to record all…

A small parcel of books arrived on Thursday lunchtime!  It’s quite exciting to see it in print, as it seems to have had the gestation time of an elephant (even though in fact it was relatively quick). Singing the News Flyer

I’ve spent a lot of time since the beginning of the year recording ballads for this website, to accompany my new book.  This is the second of a short series of posts about what I’ve been up to. Moving the ballads from scores to sound recordings has been an enlightening experience.  In some cases, there…