It’s been a busy few years for publications for Liverpool Historians. We submitted 81 outputs to the REF, ranging from single authored monographs and articles to co-edited collections and scholarly editions of translated works. Our REF outputs represent only a fraction of the diverse work that we publish for a wide range of audiences.
Got a long train journey ahead? Why not pick up Dr Roland Clark’s monograph Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania , which won The Society of Romanian Studies Book Prize. After a shorter read? You could try Dr Max Skjönsberg’s article on ‘Edmund Burke, the French Revolution and the Battle for the Soul of the Whig Party’, winner of the Parliamentary History Essay Prize. For something about Liverpool, there’s Dr Sam Caslin’s Save the Womanhood! Vice, Urban Immorality and Social Control in Liverpool, c.1900-1976 . Or for further afield, there’s Dr Andrew Redden’s bilingual critical edition of The Collapse of Time: The Martyrdom of Diego Ortiz (1571) by Antonia de la Calancha [1638] detailing the conquest and evangelisation of Peru or Dr Junqing Wu’s Mandarins and Heretics: The Construction of “Heresy” in Chinese State Discourse from the 14th to 20th century.
We believe that inclusive, democratic, and informed societies need historical research that is open to all, so we’ve also worked on projects and publications that help create an open research environment and support people’s research skills. Dr Jon Hogg led on Using Primary Sources an exciting open access research training project, which presents digitized sources from colonial records to architectural plans and instructional picture books about animals. The collection provides guidance to help students and researchers to use these materials and carry out their own independent research with primary sources. We’ve also created significant new open-access research tools, like TEMPEST a publicly searchable database of information on historical weather events extracted from letters, diaries, church records, school log-books, newspaper cuttings, and photographs, and the Digital Panopticon database of millions of records relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey. Lots of what we publish reaches audiences outside of academia, from Dr Damien Kempf’s illustrated book of Medieval Monsters to Professor Andy Davies’ City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster.
What’s next? It continues to be an exciting time for publications and especially for monographs. Since the REF census closed in 2020, we’ve celebrated the publication of Dr Chris Pearson’s Dogopolis: How Dogs and Humans Made Modern New York, London and Paris, Professor Deana Heath’s Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India and Dr Alex Buchanan’s Digital Analysis of Vaults in English Medieval Architecture (with J. Hillson and N. Webb). This is just a snapshot of our publications and projects; you can find out more about what we’ve published on our staff pages.