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Television star Tristram Hunt to give lecture at University of L

Posted on 11/03/2009
University of Leicester

Tristram Hunt, historian and television star, will be talking to University of Leicester postgraduate students of Historical Studies and associated disciplines at their New History Lab on 13th March, bringing to a triumphant close the second semester of this innovative venture.

The New History Lab is a postgraduate workshop, running fortnightly sessions during term time by and for postgraduate History students. Events encompass varied formats, ranging from students talking about their own research, discussions on theoretical research and archivists talking about their favourite pieces.

The talk by Dr Tristram Hunt, historian at Queen Mary, University of London, expert on the Victorian city, and biographer of Friedrich Engels, will explore the changing role of Manchester in the development of Marxism.

Malcolm Noble, research student in the Centre for Urban History, commented: The session with Dr Tristram Hunt is our final session of the year, our annual lecture, if you like, and should see a good turn out. He is well-known, and has appeared on television, as well as writing in the Guardian on a regular basis.

The subject of his talk, Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto and lifelong ideological ally of Karl Marx, lived in Manchester from 1842-44 and 1850-1870.

Each period of residency proved instrumental in the development of Marxism. The first gave Engels an understanding of materialism, the proletariat and the function of private property all of which came to be expressed in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

His longer stay in Cottonopolis as a merchant in the cotton industry not only brought to light the troubling contradictions of Engelss bourgeois existence, but through Manchesters public culture of science helped turn his thinking in a markedly scientistic direction.

This proved the essential and under-appreciated intellectual preamble for Engelss far more scientific interpretation of Marxism in the 1870s and 1880s (Anti-Dühring; Dialectics of Nature) and much of what constituted official, 20th century Marxism.

As well as discussions and talks in-house, the New History Lab has run two successful trips, firstly to Stoke to look at potteries and primitive Methodism, and secondly to Sheffield, to read the city, and ask what happened here?

The expedition to Sheffield was led by two experts on the city, Dr Chris Williams of the Open University, and Gervase French MA, a former student of the Leicester Centre for Urban History.

The New History Lab harnesses Web 2.0 technologies, such as interactive blogging and Facebook to attract not only students within the School of Historical Studies, but those outside the department.

The Lab can be seen on the blog: www.newhistorylab.org;

and on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=40353716678&ref=ts The blog has received over 750 hits in the last month from several hundred visitors.

Professors Rob Colls and Norman Housley have been involved with the New History Lab. Professor Colls commented: This has been a hugely successful year. We wanted to take the formality and the fear out of papers and seminars; and we wanted to do what students wanted to do, and in the way they wanted to do it.

Scientists have their laboratories where they can meet and share ideas. Now so have we. The result has been exciting and different. I particularly enjoyed Professor Andrew Kings visit from the alien land of Physics. He crossed the campus territory and actually found History. More to the point, History found him. His talk on how scientists claim to know what they know was astonishingly relevant to what we do.

Mostly, like scientists, we just get on with it. But every so often, you have to think about your claims and the Lab allowed us to do that against the claims of other forms of knowledge. As he spoke you could have heard a pin drop (and thats GRAVITY, you know).

Malcolm Noble added: The New History Lab presents the most palpable aspect of a vibrant historical research culture at the University. It has fostered a great sense of community, with active participation from postgraduate and undergraduate students from Archaeology, Ancient History, History, Urban History, English Local History, Victorian Studies, Museum Studies and English.