Practicing Historical Geography conference
Royal Holloway, University of London
4th November 2009

Briony McDonagh, HGRG Conference Coordinator.

The 15th annual Practicing Historical Geography conference was well attended, with more than 35 postgraduates and staff from 14 different UK and American universities. After a brief welcome from new HGRG chair Nicola Thomas, the day was kicked off by Luciana Martins (Birkbeck, University of London). Speaking to the title of  ‘Documentary film and photography in the making of historical geographies’, Luciana used a combination of still photographs and film clips to carefully interrogate the fascinating story of Alexander Hamilton Rice’s expedition to the Brazilian Amazon in 1924-5. In the postgraduate voices session, current PhD-student Lowri Jones (Royal Holloway, University of London) talked about her experience of archival research. Lowri held her audience captive with her account of some of the pitfalls and successes of her time researching the ‘hidden histories’ of exploration in the Royal Geographical Society archives. She also kindly answered questions on the practicalities and theoretical debates behind the ‘Hidden Histories of Exploration’ exhibition she organised in collaboration with Felix Driver and the RGS, supported by the AHRC (http://hiddenhistories.rgs.org/).

Before and after lunch, the delegates split into groups in order to attend two excellent workshops on using archival sources. The first was run by Ruth Craggs (St. Mary’s University College, Twickenham) and considered the possibilities and problems of ‘Capturing atmosphere and juice gossip’. The second on ‘Sounding the archive’ was led by Alasdair Pinkerton (Royal Holloway, University of London) and investigated music, radio and noise as sources for historical research. Later, the group reconvened to listen to HGRG 2009 dissertation prize winner Robert MacKinnon (Aberystwyth University, now at University of Birmingham) discuss his undergraduate thesis, ‘The Great Western Railway’s rural England: ways of ‘being in’ and ‘moving through’ the English landscape in Great Western Railway publicity materials, 1918-1939’. Judged by this year’s adjudicators to be an incisive and innovative piece of work, Robert’s project investigated both the representational and performative dimensions of the construction of rural landscapes in inter-war England.

The final paper of the day was from Keith Lilley (Queen’s University, Belfast), who offered a thought-provoking keynote on the title of ‘Mapping medieval geographies: putting the ‘historical’ back into historical geography’. Keith outlined the recent temporal narrowing of the sub-discipline, arguing that medieval topics have increasingly been abandoned in favour of more modern historical geographies. He made an impassioned call for geographers to take medieval geographies more seriously, an idea which prompted lively discussions both immediately after his paper and much later in the pub!

Many thanks to all the speakers and participants for making it such an informative and interesting day, and to Heidi Scott for co-organising the event. Keep an eye on the HGRG website and newsletter for more information about the next Practicing Historical Geographies conference, which will take place in November 2010.