COMMUNITIES OF KNOWLEDGE-MAKING IN BRITAIN: THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES BEFORE AND BEYOND THE PROFESSIONAL ACADEMY, C.1750-1950
Tuesday 25 June 2024 – book here
As part of BRLSI’s Bicentenary celebrations, BRLSI is delighted to be hosting a one-day workshop organised by Dr Martha Vandrei (University of Exeter) and Dr Heather Ellis (University of Sheffield) aimed at historians, archivists, curators, librarians and local researchers.
Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, informal, sociable and community-centred organisations flourished all over Britain, from cities to small towns and villages.
Speakers from across the UK will explore the crucial role played by these organisations in the development of humanistic and social knowledge in modern Britain.
THE PROGRAMME:
9am-9.30am: Arrival and coffee/tea
9.30-9.45am: Welcome and introductory remarks – Ian Gadd, Heather Ellis, and Martha Vandrei
9:45-11:30am: Knowledge, Power, and Place
Ruth Slatter, The Victoria County History: A Community of Knowledge-Making and -Sharing from 1899 to the Present Day
Ewen Cameron, The Gaelic Society of Inverness: Scholarship, Polemics and Politics
James Watts, The Ladies Alpine Club, Women, and Imperial Geography, 1907-1939
Harry Parker, Collecting Culture: Fieldwork, Local Surveys, and the Making of a Domestic Anthropology, 1890-1940
15 minute break
11.45am-1pm: Libraries as Knowledge Communities
Mhairi Winfield, The Poverty of Dundee’s Intellectual Culture: Dundee’s Ancient Library and its Competitors.
Amber Flood, Creating and Policing Community in Enlightenment Subscription Libraries
Lois Wignall, The ‘Mechanically Literate Entrepreneur’ Reconsidered: Subscription Libraries and the Industrial Revolution
Lunch – included in ticket price
2:00-3:45pm: Friendship, Community, and Rivalry in the Making of Knowledge
Charlotte Mackenzie, Communities of Knowledge in Georgian Penzance
Linda Camidge, Two Antiquarian Sisters in Victorian Penzance
Laura C. Forster, Friends in the North: Reading Clubs, Rambling, and Revolutionary Fellowship
Julia Gustavsson, ‘A Domestic Pastime’? Lower Middle-Class Teachers and Rivalling Associational Cultures in London Child Study c. 1894-1919
15 minute break
4-5:30pm(ish): Round table with wine and nibbles, included in ticket price: The Present and the Future of Literary and Scientific Institutions
Representative (tbc), Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society
Michael Taylor, Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society
Ian Gadd, Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution
Join your own community of knowledge makers for what promises to be a fun and stimulating day.
To book, please go to this page of our website.
You may also like to join us for a talk in the evening (NB daytime tickets do not include the evening talk):
7.30pm-9pm: Heather Ellis and Martha Vandrei, Britain’s Literary and Philosophical Societies in Historical Perspective – book here!
