BGRS Doctoral Researchers in Archives seminar
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Central
This is the first of a series of doctoral research seminars.
At each session, two Birkbeck doctoral researchers will be invited to give 20-minute presentations, followed by questions. The aim is to provide an informal and supportive forum for doctoral researchers to share aspects of their research, to gain presentation experience, and to meet with others beyond their department or research group. The format of these sessions will be in person and after the talks have taken place there will be the chance to continue conversations over tea and coffee.
The session will be chaired by Professor Jen Baird.
Speakers
The following students have volunteered to speak for 15 minutes each on doctoral researchers in archives, followed by 5 minutes of questions.
Jane Hibbert-Nicolov, PhD History, Part time (SSHP, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology)
The archives I am researching concern the collectivisation and de-collectivisation of agriculture in Bulgaria. The predominantly small private farms were collectivised between 1947 and 1965. When the Communist government collapsed in 1989, commissions liquidated the state farms and returned land to the owners or their descendants. Records are distributed across regional archive centres and local cadastral registers.
Issues include:
obtaining permission to access records in different provincial centres
residual caution of archivists and local government officials towards Western foreigners
incomplete files, carelessly maintained
records all in Cyrillic and often hand-written
reading between the lines of communist-speak.
Mukesh Bhatt, PhD Law, Part time (School of Law, Department of Law)
Experience of applying for funding from various sources for online and in-person archival research in the UK, India and Canada. This will include consideration of what is required for the funding application, the ethics involved, the budgeting and logistics of the trip, official approvals required and finding relevant material in multiple languages and centuries at different sites in the same country. I would also address the difficulties encountered as a result of disability and the frustrations of barriers to access and relevant but missing material in often coherent and incomprehensible filing systems.
Malcolm White, PhD English and Humanities, Part time (School of Arts, Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing)
I'm researching an extinct feature of books called the catch-word. Catch-words once aided the compiling process but they flourished in an abundance of forms, including playful decorations, which seems intriguingly at odds with their function. My research question is: what is the prevalence of catch-words in manuscripts and early printed books in England, and what do they reveal about late medieval and early modern book culture? My primary methodology was a laborious counting exercise in which I audited 3,279 catch-words in 314 Harley Collection manuscripts in The British Library.
Contact name: Ian Magor
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