{"id":506,"date":"2020-09-14T17:23:21","date_gmt":"2020-09-14T16:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/?p=506"},"modified":"2024-08-31T17:05:52","modified_gmt":"2024-08-31T16:05:52","slug":"professor-chris-woolgar-fellow-of-the-british-academy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/2020\/09\/14\/professor-chris-woolgar-fellow-of-the-british-academy\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor Chris Woolgar, Fellow of the British Academy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In this year of pandemic and distancing,\nthe Southampton history department is united in pleasure and appreciation at\nthe election of our colleague, Professor Chris Woolgar, as a Fellow of the\nBritish Academy. This is a rare and high honour, which is given to a few of the\nmost influential, original and admired academics internationally across the\nfields of the humanities and social sciences each year. It recognises how each\nfellow has contributed to a subject or subjects through published work of the\nhighest quality, through creative and innovative scholarship, and through\nconsistent service. These attributes can be seen throughout Chris\u2019s career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Professor Woolgar enjoying a sunny day during a trip to Kyoto, Japan.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Chris is a Southampton graduate, and holds\na BA in History and Archaeology. On graduating, he chose to train as an\narchivist, and worked for a few years cataloguing the archives of some of the\nOxford colleges. While there, he catalogued large quantities of rolls surviving\nfrom the middle ages\u2014estate account rolls, manorial court rolls, and so forth.\nSome, however, did not fit into the usual categories, and so were hard to\ncatalogue; it was not clear how they were made, who made them, or what they\nwere for. Chris continued working on these after his return to Southampton and\na post in the university archives, and his study eventually turned into his\ndoctoral thesis. He was able to identify and categorise these documents as\nhousehold rolls\u2014records of the daily expenditure of the servant and others who\nsupported the aristocratic \u00e9lite\u2014and show\ntheir wider importance for social, economic and cultural histories. This was a\nbreakthrough of the first importance; it provided a key to open a new set of\nsources for study. The rolls illuminated the lives of the servants and\ntradespersons who served the aristocracy of medieval England, and they showed\nhow the household worked as an essential element of the infrastructure of\npolitics; they also indicated what great lords spent their money on, and so\nwere essential sources for thinking about consumption of all kinds, economic\nand social networks, food and cooking, and prices, among other matters. This\ngave rise to two volumes of edited Household\nAccounts from Medieval England <\/em>(British Academy and Oxford University\nPress, 1992\u20133), as well as the monograph The\nGreat Household in Medieval England <\/em>(Yale University Press, 1999), along\nwith an edited collection and essays and chapters in journals and books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chris\u2019s work developed along lines arising\nfrom these achievements. He wrote on food and cooking, starting with the\nevidence of the household rolls but ending up far beyond it, thinking through\nthe place of food and consumption in society and culture. This gave rise to\nanother major monograph, The Culture of\nFood in England, 1200<\/em>\u20131500 <\/em>(Yale\nUniversity Press, 2016), as well as an edited collection and essays. In this,\nhe was a pioneer, for the history of food and cooking is a relatively new focus\nfor research. Food inevitably involves consideration of taste and perception in\ntheir many dimensions, and led to a history of The Senses in Late Medieval England <\/em>(Yale University Press, 2006). This\nconsiders both the theoretical approaches to sense and perception that\ncirculated in late medieval England, as well as how the world was experienced\nand understood within that particular culture. It covers themes such as speech\nand holiness, and is a major overview of the theme that has tied together\nChris\u2019s work; the experience of daily life and the culture that shaped it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the University of Southampton, as curator\nof important archival collections of key figures including the papers of the Duke\nof Wellington, Lord Palmerston and Lord Mountbatten, Chris developed considerable\nexpertise in modern British history, publishing important essays on the first\nDuke of Wellington, and editing five volumes of Wellington Studies<\/em> (Hartley Institute, 1996-2013).  That the internationally important Broadlands\ncollection (comprising especially the papers of the Temple\n(Palmerston), Ashley, Cassel and Mountbatten families) is at Southampton owes a\ngreat deal to the extraordinary efforts of Chris, and his colleagues, to secure\nthem formally for the University in 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond his publications, Chris has\ncontributed massively to history as a subject, through his editorship of the Journal of Medieval History<\/em> for some\nyears, through the catalogues arising from his archival interests, through his\nengagement with public authorities on legal and financial issues relating to\narchive collections, and through examining PhD theses, among many activities.\nHe has also contributed considerably to the educational mission of the\ndepartment over the years, most notably through the reshaping of the MA\nrecently. Chris\u2019s election is a major personal accolade, but also underlines\nthe strength of History at Southampton, and in medieval history in particular. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this year of pandemic and distancing, the Southampton history department is united in pleasure and appreciation at the election of our colleague, Professor Chris Woolgar, as a Fellow of the British Academy. This is a rare and high honour, which is given to a few of the most influential, original and admired academics internationally across the fields of the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3768,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[96,98,100,99,75,97],"class_list":["post-506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes-from-the-archive","tag-british-academy","tag-fellowships","tag-food-history","tag-medieval-england","tag-social-history","tag-staff-accomplishments","column","threecol"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3768"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":512,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506\/revisions\/512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}