King's History Lecturer at UNC
Dr Paul Readman, Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at King’s, visited the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) earlier this month to deliver a public lecture on the history of British mountaineering.
King’s and UNC became strategic partners in 2005 and their alliance has now expanded to one of the most fully-fledged, ambitiouspartnerships to date between a UK and US university, based on a shared research vision and excellence that contributes to high-quality teaching and learning programmes.
The public lecture entitled: ‘Reassessing British Mountaineering in the Age of Imperialism: Masculinity, Modernity and the Natural World, c.1870-1914’ took place at UNC’s Hamilton Hall on Wednesday 12 September and was keenly attended by an audience that included members of Faculty from UNC’s History Department.
Dr Readman used the example of William Cecil Slingsby (1849-1929), one of the leading alpinists active before 1914, to reassess the development of mountaineering in Britain in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernity. His paper argued that the motivations of British alpinists, even in the age of high imperialism, cannot be reduced to interpretations that emphasise masculine and imperialistic factors above all others.
Dr Readman said: ‘It was a great pleasure to present my work to colleagues at UNC Chapel Hill. During my visit, I also got a chance to participate in the UNC leg of the regular King’s-UNC postgraduate workshop, at which I gave a talk on the academic job market in the UK. In addition to this, I met colleagues with whom I am working on a number of projects, and also led a seminar session for first-year undergraduate Honours students. All in all, it was a very successful and enjoyable trip!’
This lecture follows a series of collaborative events between the History Departments at UNC and King’s including a conference hosted in London last October entitled: ‘Borderlands as Physical Reality: Producing Place in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’. This conference was jointly organised by Dr Readman and UNC colleagues Cynthia Radding and Chad Bryant who are working collaboratively on a subsequent publication: ‘Borderlands in World History, 1700-1914’, which will be published in paperback by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.
Future UNC-King’s History events include a major joint international conference and postgraduate workshop on War, Demobilisation & Memory: the Legacy of War in the Era of Atlantic Revolutions. Organised by Dr Michael Rowe (King’s) and Professor Karen Hagemann (UNC) in collaboration with the History Departments of King’s and UNC, as well as the War Studies Department at King’s, this event will be held at King’s between 30 May and 1 June 2013: http://wdm.web.unc.edu/. In addition to this, there will also be a UNC-King’s conference on the history of walking in the nineteenth century, which will be held at UNC in September 2013.