“After completing a BΑ in history and archaeology and an MA in Black sea and Eastern Mediterranean studies, at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and at International Hellenic University of Thessaloniki respectively, I was awarded the 25th anniversary scholarship on Greek diaspora studies, to pursue a PhD at Royal Holloway. On September 2019 I moved to the UK, where I am discovering a top-level University and a very welcoming college, which provides great research, studying and teaching experience. I really admire, embrace and get motivated by the cooperative spirit of everyone in the college, from Professors to administrative staff and students. Putting aside any kind of discrimination the college has become a wide multicultural community, where you can live, study, work and excel and I am grateful for that.

My research explores themes around socioeconomic and cultural changes that occurred inside the Greek and Greek-Cypriot diasporic communities in several cities and towns in Egypt, after the establishment of the British rule in 1882. I am looking at archival material including institutional, public and ego-historical documents of Key figures of the time. The variety of nationalities and peoples is what makes in my opinion this research distinguishable, in combination with the fascinating British imperial-colonial history and the cosmopolitanism of the late 19th century Eastern Mediterranean. The indissoluble bonds and the mutual support between the Greek and Cypriot nation states and their diasporic communities, along with the investigation of similar to current situations events,  gives a topical and essential character in this history dissertation.  Currently I am preparing a paper in title: "The 1882 British bombardment of Alexandria and the foreign communities' response. Reconstruction and Philanthropy" for a workshop in Cairo called:Diasporas, charity and the construction of belonging: a connected history of practices of ‘goodwill’ in Egypt during the imperial age (19th–20th centuries)”

I thought it a useful exercise to engage myself with answering this question as final year rattles onwards, slowly creeping towards the inevitable conclusion of long hours of research and writing that is the dissertation. In order to achieve my best work, surely it would be beneficial to know why I enjoy history, and why I study history to find an approach and question which best reflects my interests and what I want to get to know more intimately– put more concisely, what makes me ‘tick’ and trigger my academic engine. While I do know, deep within my bones (what a cliché), what I like, being able to articulate it will hopefully bring it into sharp relief. That being said, why do I do History? Firstly, and most simply, it was what I did best at in high school. I initially wanted to study physics or chemistry, but with grades not quite there, I fell back onto history. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy history, it’s just that as a naïve high schooler, history was not necessarily a ‘cool’ subject to go and study at university – how wrong I was! Then within first year, I was rather close to pulling the plug and going to study music at a conservatoire, until my parents suggested it wise that I finish what I have started and stop being so fickle. After studying, for what will be 4years of UG history, history has become a passion that is almost all consuming, where everything read or watched leads to analysis and a desire to explore further questions. I often catch myself while in a park, village, looking at a photograph (5yrs ago or 100yrs ago), and trying to imagine the exact feelings, sensations, ideas, philosophies of the people who lived in that time. I try and immerse myself in the question what did the world look like to this person/these people? It’s this compulsion which drives me towards an approach heading towards sensory history, focusing on how music shapes understanding and is listened to within various contexts, and exploring how intrinsic perceptions of sound production and reception of that sound is to understanding history. Often left unexplored, but thankfully becoming utilised more now, music and sound offers a unique look into societies and movements that written sources do not allow. Music is not constrained by time the same way as written texts are, with a performance of, for example Mozart’s opera ‘Die entführung aus dem Serail’ (1782), still being performed nowadays with the same orientalist tropes on display but understood and listened to with different ears and world perceptions. Sound is not an innocent bystander to time, put continues to flow and morph into new things, carrying new ideas and perceptions with it. History, for me, is foremostly the story of mankind’s life, and we the historians are the gatekeepers to this past, interpreting, manipulating (sometimes) and attempting to understand the complexity of this past. It is this responsibility that historians carry, as whatever people say, the past is not just simply the past, and it is this responsibility and care for our past that for the most part keeps me going within history.

“It may be surprising to some that when I came to Royal Holloway, I was initially studying psychology after studying politics, history and psychology at A Level.  I was struggling to settle into my course and one morning in late October, I woke up and realised that I needed to switch to study history, it was a light bulb moment and never in my life have I felt more at peace with a decision. ‘To be a historian’, I thought, ‘what a wonderful thing that would be’. So, fast forward two years and one month, and I am a third-year history student, thoroughly enjoying my degree.

I study history because it is the essence of humanity. I am fascinated by the rhythm and sequence of events that take place, the culmination of complex factors that layer to produce unique outcomes that are perfectly imperfect. Social history in particular is something rather captivating for me, to be able to gain insights into the lives of people in the past, learning always about how social constructs within a given society have changed and evolved overtime. To see how it was before, allows us to see clearly how it is now, therefore allowing us to project forward into the future – only by learning about how it all came to be, can we shape the future. From anthropology and sociology, to politics, art and migration – it is all intertwined in the multi-disciplinary work of history.

Over my degree I have studied many different modules, from the Russian Empire, to European history, to Ancient Rome to modern British history. What I have found is that history is all around us, how you and I think, feel, act and interact with one another is a product of our own history, and the interaction between them. Thus, I completely disagree with Rawls’s ‘original position’, because the lens from which we see the world is shaped by everything we know and all we have experienced. We must never understate the power of experience. Our lens may not be rose tinted, but it is undeniably shaped by history, and isn’t that something interesting to explore!

History shapes our morality and our morality shapes history. History provides identity and identity influences history. History helps us understand society and with that understanding our society is shaped. History helps us understand change and the importance of our own lives...do you see where I’m going with this? I find the concept of morality and power most interesting. For example, if you look at John Thomson’s archive, ‘London street life’, whereby Thomson is capturing the lives of the lower classes, you’ll find a power play between the photographer and its subjects. You will find that the narrative created is an interaction between this relationship, and the vision the photographer intended to create. Illuminating photography as a socially constructed, culturally constituted and historically situated practice – perhaps it is art with a modern agenda?

So, I do what I do for a multitude of reasons, but George Santayana’s quote that I saw at Auschwitz-Birkenau will always remain clear in my mind, ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’.

Historians are knowledge keepers, word-finders. We articulate answers to the questions of our time about people and events of the past. We turn simple stories into complex issues. We are nay-sayers, killjoys, spoilsports.

We keep a record of the human world across time and space. Together, we create the polyphonic voice of history, regardless of the size of our audiences (sometimes small) or our readership (often limited).For the next generation, for democracy. This is why I do what I do.  

In short, for Fun!  I am a (very) mature student at Royal Holloway, taking up an entirely new field of work after a lifetime in the law.  I had studied history for O level and A level back in the 1960s (when the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust and the Second World War were recent events and not regarded as history for studying in schools!) but my mother advised that the law would pay better than history – she was definitely right!  I first went to university (actually, a specialist law college in Holborn) in September 1968, almost 50 years to the day before I started at RHUL.  Having graduated in 1972 and been formally admitted as a solicitor in 1976, I pursued a career in the law but continued to read various history books.  When, in February 2018, I sat in a rather cold tribunal training centre in Northamptonshire watching the snow fall, which had been brought by the ‘Beast from the East’, I saw my 70th birthday and enforced retirement from my last role as a tribunal judge fast approaching. To prevent rapid deterioration of my elderly brain cells, something had to be done. I found details of the MA in Medieval Studies at RHUL, was attracted by the, then, emphasis on medieval London (the city where I was born), realised that it was not too far to travel from my home in East Hampshire and went along to an open evening where I met Peregrine Hordern, from whom I received nothing but encouragement.  I applied for a part-time place on the course, was accepted, gave notice to retire, finished my legal career at the end of August and entered, with some trepidation, the groves of academe. Now I approach the end of my second year and, hopefully, graduation, having had nothing but ‘fun’ along the way.  The emphasis on London has changed but it has brought me the Crusades (via Women, the Crusades and the Frontier Societies of Medieval Christendom 1000 – 1300) and the Anglo-Saxons (via Old English Riddles), as well as medieval manuscripts and their intricacies and medieval theatre, which should form the basis of my final dissertation.  I am immensely grateful to Peregrine, Jenny Neville, Clive Burgess, Helen McKee and Andrew Jotischky for all their patience, help and guidance. I have no idea what I shall do when it is finished, a problem that will have to wait until after the time of Coronavirus and social distancing.

In a nutshell, I am a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia, with a focus on what is today Pakistan. But for me, like a lot of us, being a historian has been driven by personal factors.  Growing up I was always interested in far flung places, something that was helped perhaps by me living in different countries at a young age thanks to my father being a soldier in the British army. Coming from a family some of whose members had worked in India also encouraged me to be curious about that particular part of the world. For instance, I loved old Edwardian children’s classics like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (the latest film version has just been made!) and The Little Princess (it helped in this case that the main character was another Sarah!), whose plots both involved girls returning to ‘boring’ Britain from what seemed like a much more ‘exciting’ place, India. Like Jonathan Phillips last week, I too was a big fan of The Silver Sword (being introduced to momentous historical developments through the experiences of children caught up in them really hit home). But the book that made the single biggest impression on me was Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. Through its exploration of who may (or may not) have been responsible for the death of the Princes in the Tower (it is framed as a detective story, which probably explains why I now enjoy this literary genre so much), it helped me understand from a relatively young age that history was all about competing interpretations of the past, and that it was often manipulated to serve the needs of those in power. Not huge revelations I suppose, but for a 11-year old it was pretty mind blowing!

And like many of you no doubt, I was extremely lucky to have great history teachers at secondary school, who between them whetted my interest further still.  One, Miss Young, would give us a 20-question quiz at the start of every history lesson to make sure that we were keeping up to speed on current affairs. (As I am pretty competitive, I always wanted to get as many of them right as possible …) The other, Miss Swain (a straight-talking New Zealander), opted for O and A level curricula (yes, we are talking about pre GCSE days ...) that included the histories of twentieth-century China, India and Southeast Asia, as well as different parts of Africa and Latin America (the Cuban Revolution for instance). A summer spent in India immediately after my A levels, followed by a gap year in Italy, gave me the confidence to take on new challenges, rather than gravitating towards more familiar ‘safer’ modules, once I reached university. 

But if I am honest, when I decided to study history (at Royal Holloway as it happens!), I certainly didn’t have a well thought-through long-term plan of action (after all, it was Thatcher’s Britain, with high unemployment and loads of uncertainty). And considering the kind of historian that I eventually became, I realise that I probably only did about three weeks’ worth of South Asian history in the whole three years of my undergraduate degree! My Special Subject, for instance, was on the Vietnam War.  So, the next logical step was an (interdisciplinary) MA in South Asia Area Studies at SOAS, with History as my major and Urdu and Social Anthropology as my minors. Again, I was lucky to have inspirational people teaching me, including my history tutor Professor Kenneth Ballhatchet, who had written about ‘Sex, Race and Class under the Raj’ (aka prostitution and venereal disease!) way before others started to do so in greater numbers. Following my PhD (which took me to Pakistan for nearly a year’s worth of fieldwork as I tracked down material in archives and tried to hone my language skills), I secured a three-year postdoctoral fellowship (working on the historical roots of ‘ethnic’ politics in Pakistan), so it was only when that finished that I finally ended up with a ‘proper’ teaching job.  This happened very fortuitously to be back at Royal Holloway, and here I have remained ever since... incidentally something that made Royal Holloway stand out from the crowd when I joined the teaching staff was that the History department boasted many more female colleagues than were to be found in most other History departments around the country - it was practically a 50:50 split!

My most recent research project was a collaborative one, involving colleagues at the University of Leeds and LSE.  Together we explored citizenship and the role of the everyday state in early postcolonial South Asia, looking at parallel developments on different sides of the new international borders that were drawn up at independence there in 1947. More broadly, we established a network of historians and academics from other disciplines with shared interests in how new states navigate the challenges involved in the transition from colonial rule to independence.  This collaboration also produced my most recent book (with William Gould) Boundaries of Belonging: localities, citizenship and rights in India and Pakistan, which we co-wrote using one voice.  Its publication in late 2019 coincided with the passing of (and reactions to) India’s highly controversial Citizenship Amendment Act, reinforcing for me just how crucial it is to have informed historical perspectives on contemporary developments.

If I were to sum up why I do what I do - which is researching and teaching history – it would be that for me robust and rigorous historical understanding is absolutely vital for making sense of the world in which we are currently living. It may be a bit of a cliché, but history doesn’t just provide us with answers about the past, it also teaches us how to pose very necessary questions regarding the present, and possibly the future too!

“My only formal qualification in History is a GCSE. I have a background in languages and literature and came to the study of Russian history through the works of great Russian writers such as Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. I’ve always been interested in questions of crime and punishment and how they reflect and shape political culture. So my work on theories of social and moral disorder, the spread of crime and terrorism and regimes of punishment from executions to exile has grappled from different angles with a central question: how do ideas about the law, rights and sovereignty develop in Imperial Russia?

The nineteenth century is a fascinating period because it’s a time when the structures and values of the old regime are beginning to crumble and there’s a fiercely fought contest over what should replace them. The shape of the modern world was very much up for grabs and that sense of limitless possibility is one that I’ve always found very compelling. Besides, it’s not difficult to discern a foreshadowing of our own unsettling present in a world in which the pace of change is causing massive disruption and dislocation.

My Further Subject, “The Russian Empire in the Age of Reform and Revolution”, and my Special Subject, “Europe, 1900: Cultures of Conflict and the Shock of the New”, both emerge out of my own research interests. They allow me to explore with students the questions and arguments that first drew me to the study of Russian and European history and that have kept me hooked on it ever since.”

“Despite being the daughter of historians, I didn’t immediately know that I wanted to study history. Having academics as parents did mean that although I grew up in the US, I spent several years of my childhood overseas while my parents conducted research. We lived in Seville for three years, where I wandered the narrow streets of the city centre, taking in the architecture that attested to the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities who lived there in the medieval period. Walks along the Guadalquivir river brought home Seville’s role as a major port city that had close connections to the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The city was steeped in the complicated legacies of colonialism – from the conquest by Christian forces of the Islamic city of Isbiliya in 1248 to Seville’s role as a center for mercantile and administrative activity that supported the expansion of the Spanish Empire. In this context, the massive cathedral bell tower, built atop the minaret of a former mosque, and the uneven steps of the House of Trade where enslaved people were sold at auction, posed unsettling questions that were often overlooked by the throngs of tourists on holiday.

At the age of twelve or thirteen, I was paying attention, but I also scoffed at my parents for how I imagined them spending their time - sneezing in dusty archives. I much preferred being outdoors. I planned to study biology or zoology but took a history class during my first year as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania that encouraged close contact between students and faculty, and interdisciplinary coursework. Madhavi Kale who was my professor in the course “The Historical Imagination: An Introduction to Global History,” inspired me to question received narratives about the past. Discussing Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History in her course opened my eyes to the ways that unequal power relationships can shape how histories are told. I also learned that archives, museums, and monuments can silence as much as they reveal about people who lived in the past. How sources are collected, catalogued, and labeled in archives – those multiple acts of selection and organization – can influence whose stories are remembered by future generations, or whose voices are silenced.

History students in their final year at Bryn Mawr write theses based on original research, and I was able to obtain funding from my university to spend three weeks in Spain researching my thesis about Moriscos (Spanish Muslims who converted to Christianity, often under duress) who were tried by the Inquisition for practicing Islam in secret. Before traveling to Madrid to consult inquisition records at the national archives, I stopped briefly in the Archive of the Indies in Seville which houses judicial and financial records concerning the Spanish Empire. The archivists quickly informed me that due to religious prohibitions on emigration, Moriscos never traveled to the Americas and I would find nothing. By this point in my coursework, I was aware of the extensive historiography on converts from Judaism who faced similar restrictions but nonetheless settled in Mexico, Peru, and the Caribbean. During my few days in Seville, I was able to locate a handful of thought-provoking sources that suggested Muslims and Moriscos did emigrate to the Americas. I became determined to return to the archives and find out more.

With the encouragement of my professors at Bryn Mawr, especially Madhavi Kale and Ignacio Gallup-Díaz, I applied for and was granted a Fulbright Fellowship to spend the year after graduation in Spanish archives researching a history of Moriscos in Spanish America. I arrived in Madrid on September 10, 2001. I spent the following weeks in shock, not only disoriented by jet lag and separation from family but trying to make sense of the rapidly unfolding aftermath of 9/11, the US led invasion of Afghanistan, and the surge in Islamophobia and hate crimes committed against anyone perceived to be Muslim. Each morning after reading the newspapers, I walked to the national archives where I read eerily familiar narratives about Moriscos in the sixteenth-century trial records and correspondence. As political tensions increased between Spain and the Ottoman Empire, Moriscos were cast as potentially disloyal subjects who could ally with the Ottomans and pose a security threat to Spain. Crown officials restricted their movement across borders and scrutinized their behavior for anything they associated with Islam. Even Moriscos who identified as Catholics and whose ancestors converted voluntarily to Christianity were regarded with suspicion. This had important implications for how people in the early modern Spanish world defined citizenship and eventually race in a rapidly expanding empire.

Struck by the contemporary relevance of the questions I was researching, the archives no longer appeared a remote, dusty place. The archives filled with the heaping files of trial records, immigration papers, and correspondence between Crown officials told a story about the interests of the various actors in the empire and I wanted to pursue the question of how labels such as ‘Morisco’ carried legal implications that could affect an individual’s social status and mobility. The following year I was accepted into the PhD program in history at Princeton University and the thesis I wrote there became the basis of my first book, Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America. I continue to be engaged in researching and writing about these issues and exploring them in conversations with students and colleagues.”

“The invitation to contribute to this rather confessional column is a welcome pause from the ever-fluid operational to do list which includes meeting the Government-mandated daily exercise quota, which I undertake along the Thames River, and then returning for the late afternoon BBC Coronavirus briefing. Thereafter I refrain from watching or listening to Coronavirus coverage but I do not go so far as watching Tiger King on Netflix to keep me current with the decline of humanity. The Coronavirus and its devastating effects are despairing enough.

Constant media coverage of the Coronavirus pandemic has made me rethink how we curate our daily lives of reading, learning, and interacting with the past. What features constitute an archive of the body in pain and resilience? We see it everywhere: the oral histories of suffering, the family loss, separation, and deaths in isolation. Conversely, technology has enabled the creation of new friendship groups, fundraising events, and global learning platforms that testify to the privileged age of virtual intimacy. How does this preamble translate to what I do and why I do it?

As a Holocaust historian, ruminating on the dark and difficult past is not just the centre of my professional life and teaching focus, it has been, also, and invariably, my constant companion. What I am doing at the moment, apart from reading about whether extroverts or introverts will ‘win’ the psychological war against confinement, is reflecting quite a bit on comparisons in the media about interpreting the lockdown with experiences of shelter and survival during the Holocaust (or germs vs. the Germans, as one friend put it).

These comparisons were all too apparent this past week when several major events of Holocaust commemoration took place. While I had never forgotten the Holocaust during the pandemic, I was really eager to watch two commemorative events about it: ‘Return to Belsen’, a documentary by Jonathan Dimbleby about the 75^th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp by the 11^th Armoured Division of the British Army on 15 April 1945, and the live streaming of the National Yom HaShoah UK Commemoration, the annual Jewish Remembrance Day for victims of the Holocaust. The theme of this year’s Yom HaShoah commemoration, ‘Remember Together: We Are One’ immediately elevated what is normally an uncomfortable historical comparison of survival, but which in these times, enabled a shared, if momentary, emotional space of resilience.

A highlight from the Yom HaShoah live stream was an interview between the TV judge and barrister, Robert Rinder, himself the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, and Mala Tribuch, a survivor of Bergen Belsen. With unreliable internet connectivity, it was Robert Rinder who was suddenly, if not uncharacteristically, quiet. Mala kept asking, ‘Robert, are you there’? She persevered into the silence. But he, like us, was there and listening. Mala motivates me to do what I do, mooring me to her history and what it can and cannot teach us in these unprecedented times. “

My usual response to this question (coming, as it tends to, from people I’ve only just met) is a somewhat wry ‘I don’t really know’. When pressed further, depending on who’s asking and how soon I want to get out of the conversation, I might skip to a version of my final paragraph below – because it satisfies our cultural expectations of academics’ overriding enthusiasm for their ‘life’s work’. But let me first elaborate on some other crucial, and rather uncomfortable, questions  here, which are also about cultural expectations.

My first, provocative, answer to ‘why I do what I do’ is that ‘it’s a job like any other’: and like everyone else, I need to eat and have somewhere to go home to. It’s important to remember this, because the cultural expectation or image I’ve just referred to – of the somewhat obsessed and absent-minded academic lost for hours in their research, that ‘higher calling’ of their ‘life’s work’ – is an image and expectation which now props up a culture of overwork, as well as  the (gendered, classed, and racialised) exploitation of casualised labour. So: first and foremost I do what I do because it’s my job. But why do I stay in this job, rather than the others I’ve considered? Beyond the fact that it is for me still reasonably paid and reasonably flexible, what keeps me here is the intellectual exchange with colleagues and students, and, yes, the time I get to spend doing research.

But the ‘Why?’ question can also have a certain charge (in both senses) for someone working within genocide studies. It is often assumed that I must be Jewish, or Armenian, or Bosnian, or maybe German. This is a highly problematic assumption which suggests that only people from ‘affected groups’ should, can, or would want to, study (their ‘own’) difficult or traumatic histories. This assumption also resolutely ‘ethnicises’ (and ‘nationalises’) historical events and atrocities which are, at heart, not really or not only about ethnicity or race or ‘nation’, but about politics – by which I mean the way we as human beings choose to organise, and hierarchise, our societies and political systems.

What interests me then is precisely these politics and processes of genocide – the mobilisation of populations, the weaponisation of fears and fantasies, the intent to remove or destroy a group of people because they are thought to stand in the way of power or resources. The urgent, imperative nature of these politics means I’m highly sceptical about the possibility of genocide prevention, even though we have no choice but to keep on trying. But as a historian my field is (evidently) the past, and as a historian of genocide it’s the same as for any other of my colleagues, so I use my particular methodological skills, comparative empirical knowledge and conceptual understanding to explain and communicate the sheer complexity of what has happened,  to my students and also to a broader audience/readership out in the world. And helping people understand the complexity of the past,  the challenge of comparison, the cultural specificities of each case and how that inflects the nature of the violence is all part of seeking to steer people away from simplistic takes on the past which can have damaging consequences in the present, out there in the real world, so a worthwhile task for sure. So there’s no special or overriding biographical or activist reason why I do what I do: I am intellectually engaged by it, it’s useful and, not least, I enjoy it (added to which, and to return to the economic point I began with, it also keeps me in chocolate).

When I was a child, history was everywhere. At school, we were told the legends of Cúchullain and Deirdre and the Fenian warriors, and they seemed to belong as much to the furniture of everyday life as to an ancient mystical past. Modern history was very much alive too, and, throughout my boyhood, the names of men and women who had done extraordinary things within living memory were constantly in the air. Indeed, older people often spoke of Pearse and Connolly and Markievicz and the other heroes of the 1916 Rising as if they’d known them personally. I was greatly influenced by this popular passion for the history of my own country, but I also devoured British comics that brought the fighting men of the two world wars vividly to life. And later, as a teenager, a love of jazz and soul music led me to explore the African-American experience of the twentieth century through the memoirs of Richard Wright and Maya Angelou.

At university, then, it seemed like a natural move to take a degree in history and philosophy. But I was by no means a brilliant student and it certainly wasn’t obvious that I should try to pursue a career as a historian. After graduating and working for a while as a barman and a DJ, however, I thought writing a doctoral thesis would be challenging and rewarding. So, off I went to Trinity College Dublin to research the grand theme of religion during the First World War. To begin with, I really struggled to make sense of the art and science of historiography, but I reached something of a turning point, and realised that ‘history’ was something I could do professionally, when I started working as a historical walking tour guide. As I spoke to groups of tourists while I led them through the streets of the city, I felt I could communicate ideas about the past at least well as my former lecturers and the historians I sometimes saw on television.

I also really enjoyed the challenge of bringing the past to life for a general audience and, after a couple of years as a post-doctoral fellow, I moved to the UK in 2011 to become the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s first historian. This was an extraordinary opportunity for a cultural historian of the First World War, and by the time I joined the Department of History at Royal Holloway in 2013, I felt I had formed a vision of the past that was worth imparting to students and to my peers in the field. As a historian, then, I suppose I think I have something meaningful to offer the world and I do what I do because I really can’t imagine myself doing anything else. At its best, being a university lecturer is a pretty enviable way to make a living and interacting with and learning from students is definitely at the heart of what it makes it so worthwhile. There is no richer reward for a teacher than the privilege of watching a student grow and gain confidence over the course of their degree which, I’m happy to say, occurs often enough to make my job very rewarding indeed.

My interest in History was kindled by a mixture of things. Growing up in Bristol but with family in South Wales meant numerous trips to the castles at Chepstow, Goodrich and Grosmont; great places for kids to play and to use their imagination. A few books really stuck in my mind - very early on it was Ian Seraillier's Silver Sword, a story about a Polish teacher surviving first the Nazi regime and then the Russian takeover of Warsaw. More obviously influential on me was Ronald Welch's vivid and exciting Knight Crusader - the main character meets Saladin himself... and you can see where that went in the end... Finally, my maternal grandfather was a cartographer who ended up surveying the Lebanon in World War II. He walked the area around Mount Hermon and was looked after by the Bedouin; his tales of the campfire had an exotic tone and did much to conjure up a strong sense of the area and some of its people; I still have one of his hand-drawn maps from that time. 

“As an undergraduate at Keele University I took a Joint Honours History and Law degree with the original intention of becoming a lawyer (this was the Thatcher-era economic plunge and Law looked a safe bet for a job). One inspirational teacher later - Professor Peter Jackson who muddles through with just 14 languages and whose rigour and humour offered a wonderful blend of energy and engagement - Law took a dive and I wanted to keep going with History. After that, I came to RHUL to work on my PhD with Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, another inspirational figure who did much to shape the agenda for crusader studies from the 1980s onwards. His contagious enthusiasm, high standards and the presence of a group of four or five contemporaries quickly convinced me that I wanted a career in academia. To get there, a few things had to fall into place - not least because at school and as an undergraduate I was terrified of public speaking but the realisation that I needed to overcome this made me watch, learn, practice and then, thankfully, to start to enjoy lecturing. 

In essence, I think all academics are in the business of communication, and if we can't do it, then we have failed. That applies to the classroom, public engagement and to writing. Talking and teaching History is hugely enjoyable, not least in running new courses that - aside from the considerable work required - stretch you to deal with unfamiliar material and that is (usually) exciting. My new Medieval Queenship unit this term has pushed me to a lot of different areas and I have come to admire a number of fantastic books and articles, Lindy Grant's brilliant biography of Blanche of Castile being the pick of the bunch thus far.

I enjoy writing different types of book - 'crossover' trade/academic works, textbooks and more conventional academic volumes. Each demands a different tone and register and each gives its particular satisfaction: all are about the communication of ideas, images and information. The excitement of researching and trying to understand fresh material is a pleasure that I hope we all share. Writing The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin took me far outside my intellectual safety zone of medieval Western Europe, with the perspective of the sultan and his entourage and then extending down to the modern Near East; getting into nineteenth century Arabic drama, literature, art, newspapers and politics was not something I imagined would ever absorb me! So, new courses, new audiences and (eventually) more books - full steam ahead.

History has always played a big part in my life - when I was growing up, my parents were always taking us to visit museums. Yet as embedded as history was in my childhood, it wasn't until I started my undergraduate degree at Bristol that I realised being a historian was a possible career option. I assumed that I would follow in the footsteps of my siblings and go into law (given my hatred of maths I knew from very early on I would never follow my dad into accountancy!). Looking back, I can see my love of ancient history and archaeology began at school where I was lucky enough to study Latin. The opportunities this gave me of visiting sites like Pompeii encouraged me to do ancient history for my undergraduate degree.

I enjoyed ancient history at Bristol, but it was doing my dissertation on the Roman villa at Sperlonga in Italy that really cemented my love of Roman art and architecture, making me realise that I never wanted to stop exploring and researching antiquity - and I haven't! Over the years my research has developed in different directions but the fundamental questions for me, of how people use the domestic realm to display their status and identity, remain. Most recently I have become interested in how physical and emotional factors, such as comfort and well-being, community relationships and power dynamics, displacement and homelessness, impact upon perceptions and negotiation of ‘home’ and belonging across ancient and modern societies. Given how Covid-19 has forced our homes to become places of work, entertainment, education and exercise, it seems to me the study of how cultures past and present construct and perceive of 'home' could not be more relevant than now.

When it comes to why I do what I do, one simple but genuine response is ‘how could I not?’ I grew up in a politically engaged household, and my path to oral history began there, learning that ‘having a voice’ in society meant the difference between inclusion and exclusion. Later I realised that such platforms are not given freely to the marginalised. They have to be won. I went to school during the days of Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988), which prohibited the ‘promotion of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’ in state schools. So, in part I do what I do as an act of defiance against a political system and an education system that told me that my identity and my life were not as valid as other people’s. For me, oral history is a tool that breaks down barriers and builds communities up. It is a way in which we can speak truth to power. My research and my teaching are political acts. I do what I do because I am an activist and a scholar. Academia enables me to be both these things

I am from Taiwan. I teach modern Chinese history. My undergraduate degree was in journalism, but towards the end of my first year I became fascinated by western political philosophy, and spent most of the next three years reading the classic works in this field. It was this interest that brought me to England for postgraduate study. However, for my PhD I made another turn, to work on modern Chinese history. My perspective on this topic has been continuously evolving ever since my schooldays. At age eight or nine, we were told it was our duty to liberate our ‘poor countrymen’ in Mainland China because they lived in a condition of ‘deep water and hot fire’. As we grew older, our task was to memorise details of all the ‘unequal treaties’ inflicted on China, from the Opium Wars, to the Boxer Uprising, to the terms of the treaty of Versailles. Although I loved history, it was not easy to sit in the classroom and be confronted with this ‘humiliating past’, endured alongside a strong measure of nationalist expectation. But going deeper led me to another conclusion: that the 19^th and 20^th centuries are a fascinating period in Chinese history, and great fun to study. What changed? I think in part because I came to appreciate the drama that is an essential ingredient in what is an exciting story. Also, I have also come to appreciate that by being in the UK, I have space to engage more freely with this period in history. Observing friends in Taiwan and China, who face all sorts of external or institutional pressures to be mindful of particular sensitivities and use the ‘right words’ in their publications and lectures, I am glad I am here.  Intellectual freedom is a precious gift, something to be treasured and never taken for granted. Another thing I am very sure about is that I enjoy being in a Department of History alongside colleagues studying many topics across many countries and time periods; my knowledge horizon has expanded considerably.   My current research topics are the history of Chinese Post Office and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. In addition to sources written in Chinese, I read a lot of reports by foreigners employed by these two influential institutions in every corner of in China, written between the 1860s and 1949. Many spent decades in China and were fluent in Chinese, but still their perspective as ‘outsiders’ is valuable. As the saying goes, ‘the past is another country’, and their careful observations and rich, detailed descriptions of places and events can be very refreshing and informative, albeit with hints of ‘colonial gaze’ – a modern buzzword that has some value, but is not always entirely helpful in unpacking the complexities of the period. My first visit to China was in 2002. China then was very different to China today, and my own feelings towards the country have changed over the years. The current political regime has reduced academic freedom not only in China, but globally. I hope this situation is temporary.