La Trobe student visit
This July saw the 4th annual visit of students from La Trobe University in Australia, with a group spending time with the Humanities department for 2 weeks attending History lectures and visiting local places of interest. You can read the full account of the successful trip here.
National Drama Departments conference at the Performance Lab
Stage and Screen hosted the annual SCUDD (Standing conference of University Drama Departments), in the Performance Lab, at the end of June. It was a curated conference with invited speakers presenting their thoughts on topics such as the future of Drama in HE, looking beyond Brexit, de-colonising the curriculum and student well-being. It was attended by over eighty academics from all over the UK. Highlights were (we were told) the discussions, the location, the food and the performances (and not the atrocious weather outside). One of these performances was by Performance lecturer Dr Tom Payne, with a show he created for his Company Dopplegangster, called Everybody Loses.
Photo credit: Becky Payne
Visiting professor
Between 19 June and 26 June, the Department of Humanities at SHU hosted Kathleen Canning as Visiting Professor, the first of three annual week-long visits she will make between now and 2021. Professor Canning is a specialist in labour and gender history in the German and broader European contexts. She taught for many years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and is currently Andrew W. Mellon Professor of History and Dean of the School of Humanities at Rice University in Houston, Texas. During her first visit to SHU, she took part in a workshop with humanities postgraduates on building an academic career, led by Niels Petersson and Nicole Robertson, and in a two-day conference on women in the German revolution of 1918-19, organised by Matthew Stibbe. Professor Canning also met with the Head of Department, Head of Research Centre and department colleagues to share her extensive experience of designing innovative doctoral training programmes in the US. The Humanities Department looks forward to welcoming Professor Canning back in 2020 and 2021.
Annual conference of the Association of Business Historians
The Humanities Research Centre hosted the annual conference of the Association of Business Historians on 4-6 July 2019. John Singleton and Niels Petersson of the Humanities Department organised the programme. Seventy delegates came to Sheffield from as far afield as New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, and California to present papers on the theme of Business Transformation in an Uncertain World. Stephanie Decker (Aston Business School) presented the keynote lecture on ‘Dealing with Uncertainty: Multinationals in Sub-Saharan Africa from Decolonization to Structural Adjustment’. The Coleman prize for the year’s best PhD in business history went to Joe Lane (LSE) for ‘Networks, Innovation & Knowledge: The North Staffordshire Potteries, 1750-1851’. The conference included a workshop for PhD students and a development session for early career researchers. The event was rounded off with a trip to Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet.
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