Archival Fragments, Experimental Modes in Oxford

This week brings together members of WGQ (perhaps the MSt cohort in particular) and participants in the Archival Fragments, Experimental Modes Collective, reflecting on what we have learned methodologically, conceptually and theoretically across the series.

*Contributors/Respondents:* Archival Fragments, Experimental Modes
Sara Johnson (UC San Diego, and AFEM) will be here in person.

Glut

Historian of Victorian childhood *Catherine Sloan* investigates what she does with boredom: how as the reader of a mass of Victorian magazines she has sat with the problem of repetitive sources, and developed new techniques of interpretation.

*Anthea Butler* is a historian of twentieth-century race, power and religion. She asks what we can learn from when there is a glut of archival material about women’s activities around reproduction, but historians focus unduly on white women and the right to the exclusion of work on the left. How do we weigh where to place our attention?

Remnants (in collaboration with the Rothermere American Institute)

Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid-to late-twentieth-century United States.

*Respondents:*

Susanne Schmidt (University of Basle / WGQ)
Grace Whorrall-Campbell (Oxford)
Ella Castanier (Oxford)

Dearth

*Meleisa Ono-George* is writing a public-facing book entitled _My Name is Amelia Newsham: Science, Art and the Making of Race_. To do so, she uses the sparse source material of an enslaved woman’s life to weave an intimate and nuanced history of race in eighteenth-century Britain.

Money in Modern War and the Blockade of Germany, 1914-18

President Franklin Roosevelt once said ‘no major war has ever been won or lost through lack of money.’ He was wrong. This paper explains why. It argues that as states struggled to finance the immense war efforts required by the two world wars, and to undermine their enemies, money became a crucial weapon. The UK and USA led the way in discovering new methods of using money to do both.
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