Last night [Wednesday, 3rd September] saw the last of the At Home in Scotland events this summer with 'PhD in an hour', held at Lovecrumbs on Edinburgh's West Port. As I chatted with visitors about my research on the jewellery craft in Scotland, a clear theme emerged on the idea of a sense of place.

The working lives of jewellers in Edinburgh - the historic and administrative centre of the industry in Scotland - played out in the streets and closes surrounding the West Port. The lives of these jewellers, and indeed of their fellow craftspeople throughout Scotland, looked very different at the end of the eighteenth century to how they did on the outbreak of World War I. New technologies brought about by industrialisation, the irruption of wealth, emerging groups of middle-class consumers and the decline of the aristocracy from the 1880s, saw the industry experience profound transformations.

Objects made by Scotland's jewellers - their materials, design, making and wear - can tell us about these changes. In addition, they can speak of much wider stories that take us across UK, Europe and across the world. In doing so, they represent a nexus of space and place concerning rural and urban, home and away.

The metals, gems and stones used in their production came from caves, mines, mountains and rivers in Sutherland, Montrose and the Cairngorms, as well as Africa, India and South America. The transformation of these raw materials into finished objects takes us through cutters and dealers in Amsterdam, and the centres of fashion in London and Paris, and back around to shops and workshops throughout Scotland.

But the life of a jewellery object did not end with the making of a crafted piece, fitted in its box or displayed in a glass cabinet, ready for sale. The biographies of pieces of jewellery intersected with the life-cycles of the individuals who bought, gifted, owned and wore them. They symbolised friendship, love, marriage and family ties. Owners carried their rings, pendants and brooches and bracelets on bodies, coats and dresses with little regard for geographical boundaries.

Thinking about the stories contained within jewels always brings me to a quotation from Sherlock Holmes in 'The Blue Carbuncle'. As Holmes surveys the rare stone, holding it up to the light, he says:

... just see how it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devil’s pet baits. In the larger and older jewels every facet may stand for a bloody deed.

Holmes uses the blue carbuncle to highlight how the timelessness of jewellery objects enables them to build histories of their own; to contain traces of the people, places and events of their past. His observation draws attention to the troubling, more brutal aspects of the British empire and reminds the reader that the stories contained within material things often concern death, the destruction of communities and landscapes, and the insatiable human desire for increased wealth and status.

Jewellery objects functioned not only as markers of money and status, but as expressions of self adornment and as a facet of property relations. At a time when women, particularly married women, had few rights to their own wealth or assets, items of jewellery were particularly important items of property as well as important personal possessions which symbolised their biographies. These ideas are evident in the memories contained within the jewels of Scottish author, philanthropist and advocate of women's rights and social reform, Lady Aberdeen, which were stolen during her honeymoon. In Lord and Lady Aberdeen's joint autobiography, "We Twa", written over 50 years after the theft, she speaks with striking clarity about the things that were lost, which included highly valuable family jewels and wedding gifts made by Scottish jewellers, as well as:

the articles of less intrinsic value but possessing associations which made them irreplaceable.  … a very pretty christening locket given me by my godmother, which I had worn continually as a child, and a lovely little old chatelaine given me by A. on our wedding day, in the form of an enamelled egg, inside which was a miniature globe representing the world, inside that again a blood-red heart. I had worn it till that very morning, when I put it back into the drawer, because a fastening was loose.

She describes the colours and form of these objects, and the deeply personal memories and attachments contained within them, with striking clarity. In doing so, she highlights how the things taken contained traces of the people who were special to her as a child; how they charted her journey through life; and how they symbolised her new status as a married woman. Thus, she highlights the different ways in which things contain both financial and symbolic worth and documents the life-stories of individuals and the traces of the people who have made, gifted and used them.

The work of nineteenth-century jewellers in Scotland's towns and cities tells us many different stories of home and nation, space and place. The objects they made, sold, altered and engraved contained layers of meaning, and individual and collective memories of real and imagined people and places. They tell us about gender and class experience, and illuminate details about the place of Scottish people and things in the wider world during a time of deep and wide-reaching economic, social and cultural change.

Sarah Laurenson  | @reformlane

Some reflections on the storytelling process

I don't exactly have what you would call a job description. I was thrilled to see that my name badge for At Home in Scotland's opening conference read 'Storyteller and Folklorist'. As I have faffed about, piecing together bits of work, the three main threads of storytelling, oral history, and reminiscence, have emerged. They're all about the unseen exchange of thoughts and ideas between human minds. They're all, when it comes down to it, just fancy names for conversation. I often feel uncomfortable with the idea of these things being somehow special, something you need to study, rather than something you just do. These activities are formalisations of what used to be the only way to exchange information - that is, through speaking and listening to one another. Storytelling, in particular, is a troubling activity to define - where's the line between traditional storytelling and stand-up comedy and spoken-word performance and chatting to your neighbour at the bus stop? Of course, there is no line except that drawn by our personal tastes, and one person's eye-opening raconteur is another person's insufferable show off.

For me, the most important thing defining traditional storytelling is the utter lack of a fourth wall. Although the audience (hopefully) aren't interrupting you in the midst of your narrative, you are in conversation with them. Their thoughts and reflections and reactions to your words are the only reason to do this. I once read a piece of advice to beginner storytellers saying you should practice in front of a mirror. No. Tell your story to a cat or a pot plant if you can't find or face a human audience yet, but tell it to something living. Because it's about the story, and the listeners. Recently I told a story on a stage, at Mareel in Shetland, and was immensely thrown by the lighting – it was set up so you couldn’t see the audience’s faces from the stage. I felt like I was speaking into a void, trying to feel my way by the laughter and silences.

Where to find your stories is another question with a thousand answers, all of them wrong to somebody. Does it dilute the tradition, to have taken your words from a page into the air? Or take them from – heaven forbid – such a vulgar thing as the internet? I can't help being prouder of the stories I learnt from hearing them, even though I know that's a bit silly. Songs and tales come on and off the page easily. The singer declaiming ballads from a cheap chapbook on a street corner, the Penny Dreadfuls spawning and reinforcing urban legends, the viral online hoax. All stories, all worth the telling. And all stories transform with each telling. It depends on your audience, your mood, the place. Allowing yourself to let go, to go with the story, is incredibly freeing – once you get over the sense of being in freefall. As a counterpoint to the mirror suggestion, some genuinely good advice: know the story, not the words of the story.

Scotland's traditional storytelling scene is in the midst of what you could call a revival. The dedicated Storytelling Centre, on the Royal Mile, has become one of Edinburgh's favourite venues. As well as young and not-so-young upstarts, we're lucky to enjoy the company of a number of tradition bearers, people for whom this seems to be simultaneously a lifetime's worth of painstaking dedicated artistry and as straightforward as breathing. In recognition of the time and effort it takes, the Centre operates the Scottish Storytelling Directory – having your name on this is proof you’ve put the time in, not just to learn stories but to deal with a range of audiences and their reactions – and as far as I know, it’s the only one in the world. I’m currently at the apprentice stage.

There are more questions – about the dangers of professionalising tradition (important to remember, on this point, that even ‘back in the day’ it took work – tradition bearers are not accidentally channelling the amorphous carrying stream which surrounds them, they are actively shaping and re-creating their stories with each telling), who ‘owns’ a traditional story, and how far you can change it before you’ve broken it – than can be addressed here. All I can say is, sometimes it’s better not to overthink things. Go and hear some stories, then tell some stories. It's good for you, and not necessarily bad for your career. I hear the Prime Minister of Greenland is a storyteller.

But why would you listen to me? I make things up all the time.

Erin Catriona Farley | @aliasmacalias

“Your ethnicity: mixed”, the man at the desk states confidently. Tania nods, but wonders which box she would have ticked herself. Her father’s ancestors were African and her mother’s ancestors were Indian. But she usually thinks of herself as Surinamese. What does that actually mean, to be Surinamese? Tania ponders over this question while the man continues ticking boxes that supposedly confirm Tania’s identities. Am I Surinamese because I live in Suriname? Half of the Surinamese population lives in the Netherlands. Is it about my passport? There are Surinamese with Dutch passports (rarely the other way around: a colonial legacy of inequality?) Is it about where I am at home, where I belong? Or perhaps it is about how others identify me? Ticking boxes may inform others about who they think I am, where they think my home is, or where they think I belong. But is that how I see myself? The man has finished his administrative duties. Tania leaves the building, greeted by the scorching hot subtropical sun and hungry mosquitoes – that’s my Suriname, my home. Perhaps self-identification is about the spaces we call home?

My friend Tania’s mixed African-Indian heritage coupled with her Surinamese self-identification stems from the colonial history of the transatlantic slave trade and mass migration to plantation work in the Caribbean and wider Americas. Across the Atlantic in Europe and Africa, mass movement of people has perhaps been more gradual, but questions of ethnicity and national belonging have also been complicated and open to dispute if not outright war – as the experiences of people in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s and at present the Ukraine painfully show.

Closer to ‘home’, Scotland has been concerned with self-determination for centuries. Scotland’s history remains important in the hearts of many Scots, and national recognition is particularly urgent now in light of the upcoming referendum. Regardless of the result in September, everyone living in Scotland is at the moment confronted with their self-identification. Are we Scottish? Are we British? European? Does it matter that some of us are foreign nationals, and that most of us are probably ethnically mixed in some way or another? As a Dutch national with a Scottish husband, a daughter born in Suriname and a son in Edinburgh, these are large questions.

Battles for and against independence are never fought over economic issues alone. They are also about a sense of home, of where we belong, the places and people we identify with. And about what and whom we do not want to be identified with. 

To me, a sense of home is imbued with the stories we connect to. Stories that give us a feeling of being there, of being part of it all. Stories of heroic historical as well as contemporary figures. Stories of people, of landscapes, objects and places. Stories give meaning to things that might be inexplicable otherwise. Stories offer an option of relatedness and shared understanding. A personal story can grow into a communal feeling of belonging when other people are able to transfer this story to their own personal context. Stories, thus conceived, shape to a large extent who we are.

As Dr. Williams so rightly pointed out during his storytelling workshops, stories belong to those who listen to them. Perhaps some of you will listen to Tania’s story, and make her questions ours. Are we ever challenged to question who we are, until we are seen as or reminded of being different?


Iris Marchand (Academia.edu)

Like several At Home in Scotland participants, I attended storytelling training sessions in May. The workshop leader, Dr Michael Williams, argued that storytelling was one of the best ways for researchers to communicate their findings, but I was not sure how storytelling might relate to my research. I study early nineteenth-century charities and spend a lot of time reading their administrative records. These records often contain ‘personal’ stories but there is something unsatisfactory about them. Reports of the Edinburgh Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick, for example, described the lives of the individuals aided by that charity, but these descriptions were limited, formulaic and sanitised. They were included merely to tell donors that the charity assisted the ‘right’ sort of people. The At Home in Scotland Project has demonstrated how storytelling can capture complexity and diversity, but nineteenth-century philanthropists often seemed more interesting in producing a single narrative, with little reflection on the individuality of those they aided. 

This somewhat bleak conclusion raises a question: why would I be interested in these organisations at all? Thinking about this made me realise how stories have been central to my research. My overall motivation and my specific research questions have been greatly influenced by personal accounts written by the recipients of charity. It would be naïve to think that personal narratives provide unrestricted insight into the ‘real’ experiences of their authors, but they do highlight the multifaceted nature of historical charities. They reveal the many interpersonal interactions among donors, managers, employees and inmates, which characterised these institutions. They also emphasise how charities often had a profound effect on their wider societies.

Bella Aronovitch’s little known memoir Give it Time, An Experience of Hospital 1928-32, is probably my favourite example of such a story, even though it is set almost a century after the time period that I study. It details the four years that she spent in London hospitals following a failed appendectomy. Aronovitch’s vivid descriptions of contemporary voluntary hospitals encouraged me to discover more about how these institutions functioned. I want to find out how charitable hospitals affected the lives of all those associated with them, including patients, administrators and medical staff. The hospitals’ reliance on voluntary contributions meant that their doctors were under severe pressure to discharge patients like Aronovitch, who were seen as a drain on resources. Give it Time highlighted the power that the hospitals’ lay governors exercised, it described the deference that they expected from both doctors and patients and it showed how individual patients could become problematic ‘statistics’. Being shuttled between five different hospitals made Aronovitch’s experience unusual, but this is what made it so valuable. It allowed her to provide a fascinating comparison of the standards of care in different contemporary institutions. Focusing on a single personal experience allowed the book to successfully communicate the gravity of the decisions made in these hospitals. Two of the institutions described in the book were former Poor Law infirmaries. They mainly catered for incurable patients, and their doctors almost decided that Aronovitch, too, was beyond help. Only her transfer to yet another charitable hospital led to her cure and eventual discharge. Aronovitch’s story deserves to be more widely known and I highly recommend Give it Time to anyone who wants to find out about healthcare before the NHS. It was through reading personal accounts like these that I realised that pre-Welfare State charities were fascinating, complex institutions that are worth exploring further.    

Give it Time, An Experience of Hospitals, 1928-32 was published in 1974 and can be accessed in the National Library of Scotland, extracts from it and from other accounts of hospital care can be found in Deborah Brunton (Ed), Health, Disease and Society In Europe 1800-1930: A Source Book (Manchester, 2004).  

Joe Curran (@JokeCurran)

Coins, shells, strips of cloth, family photos, notes, memorial cards and a host of other items are found around Irish holy wells. These collections are part devotion, commemoration and prayer. The leaving of votive offerings, as an intention or request, is an ongoing tradition at these sites. It is a practice that mixes Celtic customs, folk traditions and Catholic theology. Each of these items has a story; each of these items is a story. Part of my research is to attempt to tell the story of this practice and these objects.     

Holy wells are spread across Ireland and Britain, especially in formerly Celtic lands. Some of these springs have been the site of religious-spiritual activities since the pagan era, but were adapted to Christian worship. As a result, in Ireland, these sites are currently mostly associated with the miraculous deeds of Celtic saints. Prayer rituals and religious services are held at the wells in honour of the spiritual patron linked to the site. People take away the well water for blessings, protection and supplementary medicine.

I am researching holy wells as sites of contemporary pilgrimage, where people travel to seek reflection or for a particular intention. As a geographer, I look at the importance of these places that give solace, comfort, hope and space for contemplation. The leaving of votive offerings is one of the clearest examples of how holy wells have strong meanings and powerful attachments for people. Each token represents a visit, the actions of someone whose belief brought this person here for a reason that is personally significant.

Initial fascination with these objects is replaced by speculation on their purpose. While some of the intentions appear obvious, the meanings behind other items are shrouded from everyone except the believer, and the saint or spirit of the place. This is a rich cultural practice, but it is also people’s lives. Contained in these objects are dreams, despairs, anxieties, losses and a host of deeply intimate motives.

Each item is emotionally charged telling a story in its own way. Memorial cards of departed loved ones display long lives of parents and grandparents, while those showing young people hint at tragedy. Short notes contain messages for the saints or spirits: giving thanks, calling for intercessions or just expressing feelings, which may otherwise go unarticulated. The reasons behind certain tokens are clouded, their story obscure.

Stories are embedded in objects. Monuments tell national histories, souvenirs evoke hidden memories and childhood items are kept for prosperity. My research is concerned with the stories of the offerings left at holy wells. In my writing, I tell the stories of these objects in a general sense, but I am also deeply aware that each of these objects is a story, a story I do not know and cannot tell.     

                                                                                                                                                     
Richard Scriven (@CorkGeog)

Photo Caption: A collection of votive offerings at St Gobnait’s Well, Cork, Ireland. 

Muslims in Britain have a serious image problem. Always angry, isolationist and threatening, constantly thinking about ‘Islam’.

As one myself, I must confess it’s exhausting to be ‘Muslim’ like that all the time. Like everyone else we have other, more mundane, and private, aspects to our lives – worrying about our quality of life and the economy, getting our kids into good schools and, in the Scottish context, figuring out how we’re going to vote in the upcoming independence referendum! As such, whatever the media and others might have us believe, we simply cannot be – are not – 'angry' all the time. 
              
Hunkering down and getting on with it, however, is rarely an option. So contested and crowded is the discourse on Islam and Muslims that it is well nigh impossible to engage in it without being forced to take a side or to be pigeon-holed into one - 'good' Muslim vs 'bad' Muslim, moderate vs
extremist, Salafi vs Sufi and, of course, Sunni vs Shi'i. Willingly or unwillingly, consciously and unconsciously, Muslims and non-Muslims, people of faith, some faith, and no faith, are everyday confronted with images of a 'self' and an 'other' that is both somewhat alien and strangely familiar, like a bereaved relative you feel for but don't quite know how to reach out to. 
             
Take this music video of Happy British Muslims in April 2014, a memic homage to Pharrell Williams. On the one hand, it's a masterly response to David Cameron's 2011 assessment of "the doctrine of state multiculturalism" as being a failure. But it has had its academic critics and strident counter-video-responses. Clearly, these run the gamut from thoughtful reflection to ridiculous assertions that are downright offensive.

What is also clear is that these negative responses haven't stopped other Muslims in Muslim-majority countries from participating in the meme (see www.wearehappyfrom.com, which is compiling a running list of cities to map "the geographical spread of happiness"), which includes Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Turkey  and Iran. 
             
The Iranian case is particularly interesting not only because the happy teens were found and detained within hours of the video being put up on YouTube and subjected to a public ‘confession’ on state TV, but also because the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, also appeared to wade into the debate by tweeting "#Happiness is our people's right. We shouldn't be too hard on behaviours caused by joy."  All of the teens have since been released.

As this single issue on angry/happy Muslims exemplifies, there are competing responses to the
questions,  “What is Islam?” and “Who is a Muslim?” There is more than one Muslim story. And more than just two sides to even a single one. Indeed, storytelling in all its complexity is an integral part of the history of Muslim civilisations, from narratives in the Qur'an about Joseph (Yusuf) and Potiphar's wife (Zulaikha)  to Scheherazade and the Tales from the 1001 Nights. 

Some are the stuff of nightmares. Others, however, stories about mystical journeys, love, and art, and music, and wine, and poetry, evoking the likes of Farid al-Din Attar,  Jalal al-Din Rumi  (here’s an amazing operatic rendition with puppets), Omar Khayyam,  and so very many contemporary artists, poets, musicians, authors and filmmakers, inspire and manifest a radically different way of being Muslim, one that engages faith with intellect, addresses adversity with courage and grace, and relieves difficulty by accompanying it with humour. Let us create the space to hear them.

By Fayaz S Alibhai, @fayazalibhai

When on fieldwork, one of my participants expressed his mother’s concern with oral histories. She stated that a village was dead whenever oral histories were collected. This struck me, for I was in the middle of my own oral history collection. And it got me thinking. Does the collection of stories in our modern world mean that something is about to perish? And if so, can we change how and when we collect it, to seek not the final outcome of a story but the continuation of its unfolding?

First we ask, why do we gather stories? We gather these stories to: preserve a living memory of everyday life; understand a particular event through the stories of the people who lived it; gather alternative histories of a dominant narrative. Granted, many oral histories are used in collecting event histories like the collection of stories from the 9/11 attacks or the English coal miner’s strike. However, in many cases I have noticed that the collection of stories does come at a final point, a kind of last resort. The oral historian is seen as the person to get the story before the last people pass, or before a town is transformed or is removed, and so we end up speaking with the elderly or the last person who saw or experienced the event. Could my friend’s mother have a point?

In my research, I choose to use oral histories because they allow a broader and deeper understanding in the narratives of a rural place. They provide a non-linear and multi viewpoint approach to understanding the landscape as an assemblage of elements. In having my participants share their lives with me, I create my own narrative within the landscape. However, could I have subconsciously chosen to use it because I see the landscape at a point of decline and thus use the oral history as my best means of getting to the heart of the matter?

Stories and storytelling are important in our lives. They form the basis for so much of our identity and collective community. If the collection of these stories though is seen as something of a death sentence then perhaps we are going about the collecting all wrong. Perhaps story collecting should be inclusive, not just focus on the people who lived it, but also the ones who are living it. Focus not only on the past event, which is what the oral history is trying to recall, but also on the unfolding events that occur afterwards. Instead of a history, approach it from an oral tradition, an ever creating and making narrative of which we are all players within it. 


George Jaramillo

...And windows and doors, and books and papers, cutlery and crockery, needles and thread, hats and shoes, necklaces and rings, armour and weaponry, pots, pans, hats, gloves, trinkets, coins, stamps, postcards, mirrors, candles and all manner of ordinary objects from daily human life- if any of these very everyday objects could give voice to their existence, what many hundreds of stories might they tell? Of the many hands and lives through which they passed; of the many different adventures, whether upright or underhand; of the letters they wrote, the battles they fought, the scenes they lit and the bodies they adorned. And now, in a time more material than ever before, if our vast treasures of personal odds and ends could speak- what stories might they tell about us?

Certainly, there is a power to be felt in the presence of an object, no matter how seemingly mundane, when we know that it has a story to tell. We encounter coins upon a daily basis, and they are therefore nothing short of ordinary- but what of a coin exchanged in remuneration between an Edinburgh doctor his and murderous accomplices? Between a publisher and a soon-to-be famous author in exchange for their latest novel? Furthermore, objects are not only eternal ‘witnesses’- they frequently have a far more active and even pivotal role in the unravelling stories. What of the sword which sealed the fate of King Charles I so long ago- and changed the course of a nation’s history in its wake?

A great part of my doctorate research focuses upon the power of the object in the telling of stories- stories of time and of place, but most crucially, of people. I focus on one particularly eighteenth-century practice of material culture- the practice of antiquarianism- and through this antiquarian lens I explore the works of nineteenth-century Scottish author Walter Scott. Scott was an avid antiquarian collector himself, boasting in his expansive collection at Abbotsford House the sporran and skene-dhu of Rob Roy; a crucifix carried by Mary Queen of Scots on the day of her execution; an oatcake found in the pocket of a deceased Highland soldier after the battle of Culloden; the door of the Old Tolbooth prison and countless other relics and remains. Scott surrounded himself with these objects, most often objects providing a material testimony of a chapter of Scotland’s past, and through the contemplation of these threshold presences he entered a romantic world of Scotland’s past which he wrote into his many fictions. Indeed, amongst the pages of his poems, novels and scholarly writings are scattered the material relics and remains of Scotland’s past- and very frequently, those objects were artefacts which were in his possession at Abbotsford.

Yet I think that Scott’s enthusiasm for unravelling the stories deeply entwined in the material remains of the past is an instinct alive in each of us- from family stories and personal trinkets, to the great archaeological discoveries that significantly change our knowledge of a time and place- in each case, our desire emerges from a wish to know the story hidden away, which reveals something of the past to the people of the present. And a part of this desire perhaps too comes from the hope that one day, it will be the small and trivial, grand and monumental objects of our lives under a similar scrutiny for story.


Lucy Linforth

As you may have read on Alex’s post last week, recently we on the At Home in Scotland scheme have been attending and participating in a number of workshops designed around the idea of storytelling. We have learnt about the importance of landscape in our storytelling, explored the idea of quests and trials in stories (fairy tales and episodes of Emmerdale!), and discussed the benefits to be drawn from framing your research in a story-like way. However, the part that I found the most interesting (in a slightly narcissistic way) was the bit featuring me in a leading role.

One of the activities that we did in the storytelling workshop was based around the standard trope of many fairytales and myths: THE QUEST.

I was (obviously) the hero of the story. During my quest, I had to get through a series of ‘trials’ - gate keepers, monsters, and ogres (played magnificently by my fellow workshoppers) blocked my path to the Goddess and therefore to my transformation from everyday PhD student to…well I’m not sure, but I’m going to assume Goddess PhD student. The form of the trials: an interrogation into why I thought I had the right qualities and knowledge to continue on the path that I had chosen. The questions ranged from technical questions about my methodology to personal questions about my previous interactions with violence. Most of the questions revolved around why I thought that I should be the one researching this topic, and whether I had enough passion and resilience to continue on. It got me thinking…Why Me?

Firstly, it has to be said, I am no stranger to the ‘why’ question. Let me explain.

I am researching militant nationalism in the Irish diaspora during the nineteenth century - basically, why did some people in, for example, Chicago, decide that they wanted to use their money to fund armed rebellion and dynamite campaigns to try to intimidate the Westminster Government into giving Ireland political independence? And why did others, in my case in Melbourne in Australia, decide that the best option was to give money to political groups to find a peaceful way of achieving Irish independence?

If I was Irish, and possibly male, this subject probably wouldn’t raise many eyebrows. However I’m English – with few discernible blood ties to Ireland – and female. One of the first things people ask me is if my parents are Irish. Usually straight after this is ‘so what got you into Irish history?’ My motives are relatively dull - a rather vocal Irish community kept popping up whenever and wherever I studied history: British, American, Australian (okay, they didn’t get into the Japanese history that I studied but that’s not the point). I’d been interested in The Troubles when I studied politics at school, and this interest just continued to grow – and regress a century – with all the references to the Irish throughout my undergraduate studies. I’m not sure where the interest in violence came from, I don’t want to blame it entirely on ‘Criminal Minds’ and other such shows. Maybe it’s because, especially with political violence, for me since 9/11 it’s always been there. Lurking. For my parents it had been the IRA attacks. Before that the Cold War and the threat of nuclear warfare. Every generation in practically every country since the late nineteenth century has felt, even if it’s not an everyday worry, the backlash of political arguments played out in the streets - attacking civilians and public monuments. This age of the ‘terror alert’ is not new and it’s important to realise that.

I love listening to how people came to their research subjects - how did someone from Cork get into researching the music of East and West Germany? How did someone from North Carolina become so passionate about Medieval currency systems in Britain? Sometimes it’s just one overheard comment that spurred them on, sometimes it’s a personal experience that led them there, a story that they heard which made them want to dig deeper. We’ve joined this scheme to tell stories about our research, but I think it’s important to remember that the story that got you here can be truly enchanting too.



Sophie Cooper

(@SophcoCooper)