We have moved! If you want to come back to Oxford to find the History Faculty (and you would be most welcome), our new home is in the imposing Schwarzman Building, behind Somerville College and the old Radcliffe Infirmary Building on Woodstock Road. This building is now the base for seven of the Humanities faculties, along with lecture theatres, a concert hall, a cinema, and a theatre, as well as a coffee bar and cafeteria. History is up on the second floor, looking inward into a large atrium, and outward across the familiar skyline of Oxford. After our former homes in the orientalist kitsch of the former Indian Institute, and the late-Victorian municipalism of the Old Boys School, the Schwarzman Building is a bit of a culture shock. It is the largest and most expensive building ever created in the UK for Humanities, and one funded in large part by private philanthropy. Vaguely evocative of an upmarket international hotel or a Dubai shopping mall, it cannot claim the same patina of historical resonance; but it has given us for the first time a building fit for our teaching and research activities. The IT works, the professional staff have properly equipped offices, and the teaching rooms provide spaces for seminars and classes. Above all, the range of libraries and research areas within the building give our community of graduate students and post-doctoral researchers a place where they can work and socialise. The building has been full – at times overly so – since it opened at the end of September, and the buzz of conversation gives it an indisputable energy.
But there is no point in having a new building unless you know what you want to do in it. And this Michaelmas Term has been, as always, a mixture of the familiar rituals of the arrival of new generations of students – graduate and undergraduate – and new events and initiatives which reflect the evolving character of the History Faculty. These included the inaugural lecture in November given by the Hillary Clinton Professor of Women’s History, Sarah Knott, as well as the launch in collaboration with Wadham College of the Koch Historical Centre, which for the first time gives us our own research centre, composed each year of twelve fellows from around the world working on a single theme across different periods and areas of History.
A major preoccupation for the Faculty this term has been how we should respond to the challenge of AI. Within a very few years, this has become a ubiquitous feature of academic life, enabling students to download a machine-written essay in a couple of minutes, or a summary of a book or article. This is easy to deplore, but impossible to prevent; and in response we have put in place new regulations regarding the submission of written work outside of a formal examination environment. But the real challenge is to learn how to turn these new tools to good effect (notably the opportunities it provides for data analysis), while also ensuring that students are not deskilled by becoming reliant on the bland texts that these tools generate. In all of this, our greatest ally is the students themselves, who are very conscious of the dangers of short cuts that destroy their originality, and who want to remain the authors of their own work. All of this requires education (of tutors, as much as of students), but we hope that we shall be able to integrate the new tools into the more familiar repertoires of scholarship and writing.
Alongside AI, our greatest preoccupation remains the funding of graduate study in History. Public funding of graduate work at the masters and doctoral levels in History has been decimated over recent years; and, working together with colleges, we have been creating a range of scholarships and grants to keep graduate students afloat. We have created a new structure of bursaries that we dispense to doctoral and many Masters students to contribute to their research costs, and are grateful to the many History alumni who have given generously to our graduate funding via www.campaign.ox.ac.uk/history
Through that fundraising, and our involvement in campaigns across the UK to protect university History departments from closures and downsizing, our central preoccupation must be to ensure that Oxford’s History Faculty remains a demonstration of the enduring value of a knowledge of the past. The buildings where we work may change, as may the technology we use. But History is a discipline that thrives on change, and it is by asking new questions about the past that we educate ourselves, those we teach, and the wider community.
Martin Conway
Chair of the History Faculty Board
martin.conway@history.ox.ac.uk
