Hazel Carby’s book Imperial Intimacies: a Tale of Two Islands uses the lens of her own family history to make a deep dive into the workings of patriarchal, racialized, and gendered power. She draws on that book for this year’s Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture, titled "Imperial Sexual Economies." Her lecture forms this episode of the History Workshop Podcast.

History Workshop Podcast

Hazel Carby on Imperial Sexual Economies

In 1910, a sixteen year old New Zealander named Lydia Harvey boarded a steamship bound for Buenos Aires in the company of a husband and wife who promised her a life of glamor and ease. What resulted was a journey into the world of commercial sex that took her from South America to London, where she turned the tables on her traffickers and became a star witness in their criminal trial. Up until now, that witness testimony constituted Lydia Harvey’s lone moment in the historical spotlight. In the sweeping historical dramas of migration, crime, and sexual commerce, she was, at most, a bit player, who steps fleetingly out of the shadows, speaks her two or three lines, and then disappears. In her new book The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey, the historian Julia Laite places Harvey’s story centre stage. The book that results is a riveting narrative history that puts complex human faces on stories too often told through stock characters: histories of prostitution, of policing, of criminal justice and moral panics. It also is a meditation on the politics of storytelling and the ethics of historical “rescue”, of historians’ efforts to give voice to the voiceless and to spotlight the neglected and obscure. In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, Julia Laite discusses her book with Marybeth Hamilton. Listen now on Soundcloud - Apple Podcasts - Spotify - Stitcher - or wherever you get your podcasts.

Stories of Sex Trafficking: Julia Laite on The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey

How can we write the history of AIDS activism so that all stories are equally important? In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, Sarah Schulman discusses how she navigated that challenge in her new book Let The Record Show: a Political History of ACT-UP New York.

Writing the History of AIDS Activism: Sarah Schulman & Let The Record Show

How can historians best document, preserve, and make accessible the voices and artifacts of refugee and migration experience? What kinds of materials would such a collection involve? How can archives respond, ethically and practically, to the challenge of conserving materials from under-represented communities whose lives remain so politicized and whose experiences raise such thorny issues of nationalism, immigration, identity and belonging? In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, Ria Kapoor speaks to four historians and archivists who are grappling with those questions: Paul Dudman; Heather Faulkner; Mezna Qato, and Peter Gatrell.

Creating Refugee Archives

How do we write the history of women’s lives when history itself has hidden them? In this International Women’s Day episode of the History Workshop Podcast, Christopher Kissane speaks to the Irish poet and writer Doireann ní Ghríofa about her book 'A Ghost in the Throat', winner of the An Post Irish National Book of the Year and the Foyle’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year. The book weaves together the stories of two women, separated by centuries: Doireann’s experiences as a young mother in twenty-first century Ireland, and the lost life of the poet Eibhlín Dubh ní Chonaill, whose lament for her murdered husband, Caoineadh Airt uí Laoghaire, has been described as the greatest Irish poem of the eighteenth-century. Finding Eibhlín Dubh’s story repeatedly obscured by her famous male relatives and an ‘academic gaze [that swiftly] places her in a masculine shadow, as though she could only be of interest as a satellite to male lives’, Doireann searches for the poet’s life with ‘the brazen audacity of one positioned far from the tall walls of the university’. Through research and imagination, between dropping her children to school and putting them to bed, she constructs a very different history. ‘This’, the book begins, ‘is a female text’.

Writing Women's Lives & History

In this episode on queer education, Elly Robson is joined by Syeda Ali and Nazmia Jamal to discuss how queer lives can be integrated into school curricula and cultures. The history of queer education in the UK has often been one of deliberate silence: a silence that was officially legislated between 1988 and 2003 by Section 28, which made it illegal for schools to 'promote homosexuality'. We explore stories of resistance and trace Section 28's legacies, including what lessons it might hold for teachers seeking to challenge the Islamophobic Prevent strategy today. To find out more about resources referenced in this podcast, check out - Nazmia Jamal's new LGBT+ poetry resource for the Poetry Society: https://poetrysociety.org.uk/education/learning-from-home/secondary-14-poets-for-lgbt-history-month-and-always/ - the Rebel Dykes documentary: https://www.rebeldykes1980s.com/ - the letter to the Independent in September 2019, titled "The government is hijacking LGBT+ sex education to bolster its counterterrorism strategy": https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/lgbt-no-outsiders-rse-birmingham-muslim-prevent-values-a9092781.html

Queer Education

In episode three of our four-part series on Queer Activisms, Laura Forster is joined by Ajamu X and E-J Scott to discuss public history, the queer archive, and what it means to queer the museum. Listen now to the conversation on the History Workshop Podcast.

Public History And The Queer Archive

In this four-part podcast series on Queer Activisms, historians, performers, educators and activists take a deep dive into existence and resistance in queer life – past and present. In our second episode, Marybeth Hamilton is joined by Matt Cook and Debra Levine to discuss AIDS, queer activism, and the politics of loss and grief.

AIDS And The Politics Of Grief

In this four-part series on Queer Activisms, historians, performers, educators and activists take a deep dive into existence and resistance in queer life - past and present.  In this episode on Queer Joy, Laura Forster is joined by Shay Shay, Tim Other and Dr Fiona Anderson. Together, these artists, activists and historians talk about performance and community, and how they relate to about precarity, gentrification and dispossession. Ranging from 1970s New York to Ru Paul's Drag Race, this episode considers where queer creativity is forged in the margins and asks how we can take up space. Introduced by Marybeth Hamilton | Audio Production: May Robson

Queer Joy: Taking Up Space

Are we living in an Age of Walls? Talk of walls is of course all around us, from heated political rhetoric about building a wall on America’s southernmost border to more amorphous references to the walls of our psyches or firewalls blocking the flow of digital data. In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, HWO's Laura Forster talks to historian Paul Betts, author of Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic.

The Age Of Walls

Dan Chatterton: a London walking tour by History Workshop

Dan Chatterton: a London walking tour

How might museum exhibitions convey the complex dynamics of black British history? In this episode of the History Workshop Podcast, co-curators Melissa Bennett (Museum of London) and Iyamide Thomas (Historical Researcher for The Krios Dot Com) discuss their work on "The Krios of Sierra Leone," a new display at the Museum of London Docklands that tells the story of Sierra Leone’s Krio people. In the process they have a broader conversation about Black British history in museums and community-engaged museum practice. Subscribe and listen now on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.

Displaying Black British History: the Krios of Sierra Leone

How might historical research into past abuse serve the ends of restorative justice? What kinds of challenges do historians face in gathering testimonies of traumatic experience? Katherine O’Donnell and Claire McGettrick are scholars, activists, and members of Justice for Magdalenes Research, an organization dedicated to unearthing the histories of the women and girls who passed through Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. Over the past decade they have worked tirelessly to gather survivors’ testimonies, to educate the public about the abuses endured, and to support survivors’ campaigns for redress. They discuss their work in this episode of the History Workshop podcast. Subscribe and listen now on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.

History, trauma, and restorative justice

Can the migrant detention centres employed by the Trump administration on the US/Mexico border be legitimately labelled “concentration camps”? What is a concentration camp? In what circumstances are the use of the phrase legitimate, and when does it obscure more than it reveals? Historian Dan Stone explores those questions in this episode of the History Workshop podcast. Subscribe and listen now on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.

Concentration Camps And Historical Analogies

How was our understanding of sexuality in history transformed by the liberation movements of the late twentieth century and by the challenge of the AIDS epidemic? The historian and activist Jeffrey Weeks explores those questions in the latest episode of the History Workshop podcast. Subscribe and listen now on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.

Sex, politics and society

The History Workshop Podcast explores the "history of the present" -- reflecting on the social forces that are changing our world, discussing new ideas and approaches to history, and talking with leading scholars, activists and writers about the histories and experiences that are often unknown and unseen. Welcome to our podcast channel.

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History Workshop Podcast

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