History at Southampton

Fly like an Eagle

My Study Abroad Year at Temple University in Philadelphia by Tom Golebiowski When I first applied to study history at the University of Southampton, the idea of going on a year abroad hardly crossed my mind. I was coming to Southampton for the fantastic course, the exciting social life and the amazing campus: I couldn’t picture being anywhere else. Continue reading →

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 →

Dr Charlotte Riley Wins Prestigious Prize

History’s Charlotte Lydia Riley has won a very prestigious award from the American Historical Association. The prize is for her the American edition of her book, Imperial Island: An Alternative History of the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2024). The prize is the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize for an author’s first book in European history from 1815 through the 20th century. The Awards ceremony will take place in Chicago, January 2026. Continue reading →

Escape Room in a Box and Digital Humanities by Stephanie Barter

Blog Post – An Escape Room in a Box Last November, I began a Digital Humanities internship, investigating the possible uses of their Museum in a Box (MiaB) which had been previously rarely used. The project involved the Museum in a Box – an acrylic box designed to play audio clips when a programmed NFC is placed on it. Continue reading →

Synagogue attack: the Manchester I know – by antisemitism researcher and Mancunian Jew

Department of History Colleague, Professor Tony Kushner, writes an important piece on the recent incident in Manchester for The Conversation: https://theconversation. Continue reading →

Maritime Britain Conference

Maritime BritainHow did Britain become a global trading nation—and what can the lives of sailors, merchants, and coastal communities tell us about that story? On 16–17 September, the Maritime Britain team gathered leading voices in maritime history at the University of Southampton to explore these questions and to showcase a bold, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) -funded project that is redefining our understanding of Britain’s seaborne past. Continue reading →

Why Japanese American memories of US internment during the Second World War are stirring up protests in 2025 (a piece in The Conversation by Dr Rachel Pistol)

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit (ICE) is detaining thousands of people on orders of the Trump administration. Despite claims that only the most violent of criminals are being arrested, in reality, many individuals have no criminal convictions and some of them are US citizens. The Japanese American community in California has been quick to draw comparisons between the alleged targeting of Latino communities by ICE and their own treatment during the Second World War. Continue reading →

Political Witchcraft

On 13 August, Southampton University hosted ‘Political Witchcraft: Magic and the Politics of Representation,’ an evening of public talks exploring how magical beliefs and practices have been researched, debated, and distorted by various interested parties at different times and places in history. Continue reading →

The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany

Professor Neil Gregor has just published The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025), a study of how German musical worlds were remade – and remade themselves – under conditions of Nazi dictatorship. To accompany the book he has curated a Spotify playlist that seeks to open up the worlds of performing and listening that the book describes. He writes: In the 1930s and 1940s the recording of orchestral music was still very much in its infancy. Continue reading →

Unpacking Jewish Dis/Connections: A Mediterranean Journey of Memory, Identity, and Mobility

by Dr. Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah (University of Groningen) This blog was originally published on Past and Present. From April 6-8 2025, the historic halls of the University of Warsaw became the vibrant meeting ground for sixteen scholars from across Europe converging to rethink and reframe Jewish histories through a Mediterranean lens. Continue reading →

British Museum exhibition exposes hypocrisy of new loan agreements for looted objects

On February the 15th the British Museum opened Rediscovering Gems, a new small exhibition displaying a range of prized ancient Roman and Greek artefacts. The prompt for this exhibition stemmed from an announcement last year which revealed that numerous pieces from the museum’s collection were missing, stolen or damaged. Some of the gems exhibited are among those previously classified as missing. Continue reading →

Maud Cunnington (part 1)

In this blog post, Maddie Watson, a finalist Modern History and Politics student at the University of Southampton, introduces their work on Maud Cunnington as part of their Beyond Notability Internship, run by Southampton Digital Humanities. In this part, Maddie discusses their encounter with Maud via linked data and their exploration of her work as an archaeologist. The second part of the blog can be read here. Continue reading →