Podcast Episodes

Elia Shipton and Heather Hind

Many arts and humanities PhD students use material from archives and museums in their theses—but how do we negotiate these spaces and their huge variety of material? In this episode Eleanor Shipton and Heather Hind discuss their experiences of working with archival material in person as well as online. They share their best and most weird finds, what they’ve been able to glean from scattered sources, and their advice to anyone who might be planning to undertake this kind of research.

Teresa Sanders and Jake O’Leary

The 1930s Popular Front was a unique moment in British cultural politics, which saw a politically diverse coalition of writers and artists using their work to create opposition to fascism. Teresa Sanders and Jake O’Leary discuss the Popular Front in relation to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, which acted as a focal point for cultural production by British antifascists.

Chris Freeman and James Watts

When Samuel Morse first cabled across America he asked, “What hath God wrought?” Seventy years later the continuing improvements in communication meant that the British Empire was increasingly interconnected. Improvements in communication could bring the colonies closer together, but it could also magnify their differences. This episode focuses on the relationship between communication and the British Empire through the newspapers and their imperial links, the spread of the telegraph and the Imperial Wireless Chain. James Watts and Chris Freeman discuss broader communication developments as well as the different methodological approaches employed by both speakers.

Steve Bull and Samuel Gillis-Hogan

In this episode, Sam and Steve discuss faeries from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Whether conjured as a magician’s familiar to to teach hidden knowledge and find treasure, or encountered by questing knights in Arthurian legends, faeries were mysterious figures existing on the borders between reality and fiction, our world and the otherworld, and balanced precariously between good and evil. Sam and Steve consider how different texts and sources attempted to define and understand faeries from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, and how that image has changed over the years.

Tabitha Stanmore and Henry Marsh

Tabitha and Henry discuss magic in late medieval British chronicles. From hungry dragons in Suffolk to summoning storms in Wales the chronicles were filled with the mystical, mysterious, and magical. In this episode our speakers explore the pervasive belief in magic; its use as a political tool; and the reality of magical practice in fourteenth and fifteenth century English society.

Imogene Dudley and Caitlin Naylor

Films, television shows and novels remain the most popular mediums which influence public understanding of the medieval period. From Philippa Gregory to the Pillars of the Earth, Robin Hood to The Last Kingdom, Imogene and Caitlin discuss medievalism in the media, the argument for historical accuracy and the delicate balance between education and entertainment.