- Members of the public and all staff and students are welcome to IPUP seminars.
- The talk will last 40 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of Q&A.
- We will have drinks and refreshments throughout and afterwards until 7pm.
The Talk: 'Everyday Public History'
Say “public history” to someone, and it will most likely conjure up an image of something that “happens” in familiar places at particular moments in time under the watchful eye of a “professional”: a museum exhibition, a heritage site, a public talk, a historical documentary. In this talk, however, I want to argue that public history is – and, in many ways, has always been – far more than this. The past, I suggest, is something that suffuses everyday life as people construct histories meaningful to themselves in diverse everyday spaces and through diverse media and sources, often quite independently of professional historians. Drawing on my research in oral history, digital ethnography, and “ethnokafenology”, I present this “everyday public history” as diffuse, noisy, messy, often confusing, sometimes troubling; but never singular, straightforward, or authoritative. Everyone’s present is saturated with the past, whether they take a self-conscious interest in history and its recognisable sites or not, and this has the potential to be a major asset for professional history
Speaker Biography
Dr Huw Halstead is Lecturer in Public History in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. He works on public history, memory studies, and the history of everyday life, with a particular focus on the Mediterranean world. He is author of Greeks without Greece (Routledge, 2019) and has written for the journals Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies; European Research Quarterly; History; History & Anthropology; History & Memory; Journal of Migration History; Journal of Modern Greek Studies; and Memory Studies. He is founder and co-host of the Miniatures podcast.
Accessibility
The event room is on the second floor and can be accessed via stairs and lift. However, the closest lift is currently being replaced and is out of order until 15th October. The closest lift access is via Language and Linguistics (Vanbrugh C) - please contact victoria.hoyle@york.ac.uk if you require assistance.
