On Friday morning, 11th November, the University will be holding a two-minute silence at 11 a.m. to mark Remembrance Day. I shall be leading a gathering in the entrance foyer of the Owen Building at City Campus, and Professor Karen Bryan will lead a parallel event in Heart of the Campus at Collegiate. I’m told…
The bicycle transformed life in the nineteenth century. The idea that early bicycles were inefficient bone-shakers is for the birds: by the later nineteenth century, efficient bicycles with pneumatic tyres and ball bearings were common. One J.C. Skeffington toured southern England in 1858 for three weeks and, without avoiding the hills, averaged more than 26…
Sheffield Hallam University is at the heart of its city and its region; I’ve written before that this shapes our purpose and mission in powerful ways. But it is also an international university. It connects the world to Sheffield and Sheffield to the world, both through the students it draws to Sheffield and through the…
You don’t have to be a football fan to remember it. In the 1990 World Cup semi-final England played West Germany. The game was even after extra time and went to a penalty shoot-out. The Germans dispatched all of their penalties but Chris Waddle blazed the final spot-kick over the bar to seal England’s fate.…
Winston Churchill called it his ‘black dog’. Stephen Fry has spoken openly about his suicide attempts in 1995 and 2012. J.K. Rowling has written about how her experiences of depression shaped her descriptions of the soul-sucking Dementors introduced in the third Harry Potter book. These accounts – increasingly familiar to us – are simply well-known…
James Morris was born in 1926, and was educated at an English public school and Oxford before serving in the Queen’s Royal Lancers toward the end of the Second World War. In 1953, he was the journalist attached to the expedition which conquered Everest. His account of Hillary and Tenzing’s historic ascent was memorably published on…
The campuses blossomed into new life last week – like the sudden arrival of spring – as our students arrived and returned. By the end of Friday, 23 September, 11,019 (that’s 96%) of our new students had fully enrolled, and 14,890 returning students had re-enrolled (that’s 91%). The sheer numbers involved are remarkable, and the…
In very early photographs of towns, villages and cities, something appears to be missing: there are almost never any people in them. There’s a technical reason for this. Due to the long exposure time, many individuals who walked the street were not in place long enough to make an impression. The first photograph to capture…
It’s the beginning of a new academic year. Malcolm Bradbury’s novel, The History Man – itself a vicious satire of 1970s university life and morals – opens at the beginning of a new academic year with a few sentences which catch the sense: “Now it is the autumn again; the people are all coming back. …
The French Emperor Napoleon, or it may have been Frederick the Great of Prussia, famously commented that “an army marches on its stomach”. A Clearing operation is sustained by bacon and sausage sandwiches. By 7am last Thursday, thirty minutes after the Hallam Clearing and Adjustment lines had opened, the food outlet in the Owen Building…