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Meet the Department

To remember or not to remember: the Holocaust in Belarus

Dr. Claire Le Foll The Holocaust is not my area of expertise. However, I felt an urgency to write about it, and more specifically about the difficulty of remembering it in today’s Belarus. This urge resulted from a conjunction of circumstances: the foreword I wrote recently for the second edition of Bashert, a memoir by Andrea Simon on the fate of her family from the Belarusian shtetl of Volchin; a recent visit to Belarus; and recent news from the city of Brest. Continue reading →

Unit 31: Southampton’s Time Capsule

Last semester, Year Three History students and their tutors on the module, ‘Between Private Memory and Public History’ visited a Southampton space not usually open to the public, Unit 31. Unit 31 — sited on an industrial park between West Quay shopping centre and IKEA — is Southampton City’s Management Centre and houses some of the many objects that the city’s museums, including Southampton’s Sea City and Tudor House. Continue reading →

Interview with recent PhD graduate, Dr Louise Fairbrother

What was the subject of your research? My research looked in detail at how the town governments of Southampton and various other English towns organised their industry and trade in the sixteenth century.  It focussed specifically on the way in which they controlled the groups involved.  In Southampton’s case, this was by the use of devices such as licences, oaths and ordinances on the three groups of the burgesses, the freemen and the strangers. Continue reading →