James T Palmer on the Early Middle Ages and Other Things
My department at St Andrews has a job opening for a fixed-term (3-year) lectureship in medieval history. (Details here). Although there are many good ‘how to’ blogs about applying for such posts, there is never any harm repeating good advice again. The bottom line is always: the institution wants someone to do a particular job,… Continue reading Yet Another Blog on UK Academic Job Applications
The town is bustling; there are new faces everywhere. It is the beginning of semester in St Andrews – a good time to reflect on what it is I’m actually trying to teach my students. Medievalists are often haunted at least a little by the ghost of ‘relevance’. Guy Halsall at York was more than… Continue reading Teaching Power and Identity After Rome
"It would not be difficult to argue that we should be better off if we could scrap our histories of Europe and free our minds from their myopic concentration on the West… The questions we have to ask have changed." So wrote Geoffrey Barraclough in the TLS in 1956 in a statement which seems as… Continue reading The Challenge of World History
On Monday nights, St Andrews has its medieval research seminar. We have 11 (!) of these a semester (the most recent listing being here), with a broad variety of subjects covered by people from around the world. And last night Bryan Ward-Perkins came up from Oxford to finish the year off with a paper on… Continue reading Bryan Ward-Perkins on East and West
What was penal slavery for in the Middle Ages? Dr Alice Rio came up from KCL yesterday, through the snow, to St Andrews to our rather bustly Monday research seminar to talk about precisely this. It is a 'neglected topic' so there is not a lot of historiography to fight against here, bar the odd… Continue reading Alice Rio (KCL) on Penal Slavery
