Historia Lectures 2026
13 January 2026 - Studying Climate Change in the Past | Andrew McNey
Reading List
Bar-Oz, Guy, Lior Weissbrod, Tali Erickson-Gini, et al. ‘Ancient Trash Mounds Unravel Urban Collapse a Century before the End of Byzantine Hegemony in the Southern Levant’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 17 (2019): 8239–48. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1900233116.
Büntgen, Ulf, Vladimir S. Myglan, Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist, et al. ‘Cooling and Societal Change during the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536 to around 660 AD’. Nature Geoscience 9, no. 3 (2016): 231–36. https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2652.
Erdkamp, Paul. ‘A Historian’s Introduction to Palaeoclimatology’. In Climate Change and Ancient Societies in Europe and the Near East: Diversity in Collapse and Resilience, edited by Paul Erdkamp, Joseph G. Manning, and Koenraad Verboven. Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81103-7.
Fuks, Daniel, Guy Bar-Oz, Yotam Tepper, et al. ‘The Rise and Fall of Viticulture in the Late Antique Negev Highlands Reconstructed from Archaeobotanical and Ceramic Data’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 33 (2020): 19780–91. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1922200117.
Lantos, Sára, Guy Bar-Oz, and Gil Gambash. ‘Wine from the Desert: Late-Antique Negev Viniculture and the Famous Gaza Wine’. Near Eastern Archaeology 83, no. 1 (2020): 56–64. https://doi.org/10.1086/707483.
You should be able to gain free access to the books and articles listed above through your school or local county library service.
20 January 2026 - The Origins and Importance of the League of Nations | Ben Gladstone
Reading List
MacMillan, Margaret. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. 1st U.S. ed. New York: Random House, 2002.
Clavin, Patricia, and Dungy, Madeleine. "Trade, Law, and the Global Order of 1919." Diplomatic History 44, no. 4 (2020): 554-79.
Smuts, Jan Christiaan. The League of Nations : A Practical Suggestion. Hodder and Stoughton, 1918.
You should be able to gain free access to the books and articles listed above through your school or local county library service.
27 January 2026 - Policing the Past: State Control over the Archive | Rajaa Sahgal
Reading List
Barnickel, L. (1999) “Spoils of War: The Fate of European Records During World War II”, Archival Issues 24(1), 7–20. https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/archivalissues/article/id/10875/
Lowry, J. (2019) “Radical empathy, the imaginary and affect in (post)colonial records: how to break out of international stalemates on displaced archives” Archival Science 19, 185–203.
Mbembe, A. (2002) “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 19–27.
Stoler, A.N. (2002) “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance” Archival Science 2, 87–109.
Trouillot, M.R. (1995) Silencing the past: power and the production of history. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press.
Online Sources:
- British Film Institute, Colonial Film Database: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/
- Imperial War Museum Sound Archive: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/sound
- Endangered Archives Programme, British Library: https://eap.bl.uk/
- Map of Community Archives: https://www.communityarchives.org.uk/interactive-map
You should be able to gain free access to the books and articles listed above through your school or local county library service.
3 February 2026 - Normality & NASA: Culture and Sexuality in the US Cold War | Eszter D. Kovacs
Reading List
- Anna G. Creadick, Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010);
- Matthew Hersch, Inventing the American Astronaut (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012);
- Patricia Santy, Choosing the Right Stuff: The Psychological Selection of Astronauts and Cosmonauts (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1994);
- David K. Johnson, Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004);
- The Right Stuff, movie, Warner Bros, 1983 — watch with a critical eye!
You should be able to gain free access to the books and articles listed above through your school or local county library service.
10 February 2026 - Examples to live by Elizabethan Politics and Classical Rome | Ebrahim Hanifehpour
