DHeritage Invites Applications for September 2021

DHeritage is a unique professional doctorate in heritage, hosted by the School of Humanities with the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire. Now entering its eight year, DHeritage provides an academic context for heritage professionals, whether in the private or the public sectors, in planning, museums, archives, community history, archaeology, and social and cultural sustainability, among other fields

Typically, DHeritage students will have been working in the heritage field, broadly defined, for a minimum of five years and often much longer, 12-20 years. So, in addition to providing each student with a supervisory team of two and sometimes three expert supervisors, we also provide a suite of training workshops on campus to facilitate a return to higher education and ensure a cohort learning experience. The bespoke DHeritage workshops are supported by the Doctoral College events and particularly the Researcher Development Programme, which delivers a series of 70+ research skills training sessions for doctoral students across the University.

DHeritage is unique:

• It is currently the only professional doctorate in heritage of which we are aware
• We provides a cohort experience through bespoke training workshops
• DHeritage is distinctively interdisciplinary; the programme is housed in the School of Humanities with the School of Creative Arts and we draw on staff expertise from across the University
• Students benefit from the University’s excellent Heritage Hub and UHArts, our multi-disciplinary arts and culture programme for the region
• DHeritage is available as a part-time programme intended for completion over 6 years to fit around students’ professional work, but it can be completed in 4+ years depending on successful progression assessments
• In addition to a dissertation, students submit a portfolio which can take a number of forms, from a series of published works, an exhibition and catalogue, a documentary film, a policy briefing, code of practice, or a teaching pack, among others
• DHeritage is offered as a campus degree and as a distance learning degree. All students are provided with an online managed learning environment and online equivalents to the campus-based bespoke DHeritage workshops.

The University of Hertfordshire is based in Hatfield, Herts, 25 minutes by train from London and with good rail and road links across the country. The campus is within easy reach of both Luton and Stansted airports.

Fees and Funding

Fees for the DHeritage are published on the University’s website here with options for UK students and overseas students.

For September 2021 entry, DHeritage is able to offer a competitive fees-only bursary and study allowance. The bursary provides fees funding for six years, subject to successfully completing the standard registration and doctoral progression assessments. Please indicate in your application if you wish to be considered for the fees-only bursary.

Next Steps

• Discover more about DHeritage on our webpage https://www.herts.ac.uk/courses/doctorate-in-heritage where you can also access our Programme information sheet

• Learn how to apply here and download the application form

• Contact Doctoral College Admissions with questions doctoralcollegeadmissions@herts.ac.uk

• Discuss your research proposal with the Programme Director, Professor Dr Grace Lees-Maffei g.lees-maffei@herts.ac.uk and request our Guidelines for Preparing a DHeritage Research Proposal

Apply Now

To apply for a place on the DHeritage you will need to email your application, comprising a research proposal, completed application form, qualifications, references and supporting documentation to DoctoralCollegeAdmissions@herts.ac.uk

• Applications are due by 7th June 2021.

• Interviews will take place on 21st June 2021.

  
  

  
  
  

  
  

Applications now open for DHeritage, the Professional Doctorate in Heritage!

Applications are now invited for prospective students to join DHeritage, the world's only Professional Doctorate in Heritage. DHeritage offers an opportunity to reflect on and explore in-depth an issue arising from your professional work in a way that creates an original contribution to the global heritage community.

This broad-based, flexible qualification was developed in association with experts from across the heritage sector and is aimed at professionals who work in, or desire to work in, the heritage field broadly defined, whether in the public or private sectors. It interests those who are employed in tourism, planning, museums, archives, community history, archaeology, social and cultural sustainability and any area of work which engages heritage. DHeritage appeals to practitioners who want to reflect on and contribute to the latest thinking in what is a dynamic and ever-changing sector crucial to many economies and to local and national identities.

DHeritage is part of the School of Humanities and draws on expertise from across the University

Students follow the programme as part of a cohort, supported by a series of regular bespoke training workshops, generic research training and supervision shaped to their particular needs from across the disciplines of History, Education, Digital Humanities, Creative Writing, Creative Arts, Law, Business, and Tourism, and beyond. The programme integrates scholarship on a range of interdisciplinary themes, including professional ethics, sustainability, cultural memory and heritage policy. Students select their topic and training according to individual needs and interests, and current developments in the field. On admission, successful candidates are allocated a Principal and one or two Co-Supervisors based on the research area they have set out in their research proposal and at interview.

DHeritage is offered part-time only, as typically our students work full- or part-time in the heritage sector. The degree usually takes 6 years to complete, but it is possible to complete it in 4-6 years depending on successfully passing the phased assessments. The programme is available through a campus registration or as a distance-learning route - in either case campus-based workshops are supported with online equivalent workshops using Canvas Studynet, our web-based managed learning environment. Fees for part-time home and EU students were £2,300 per annum in 2018/19 (different rates apply for overseas distance-learning students).

Senior Visiting Fellow Judy Faraday with Dean of Humanities Prof Anne Murphy and DHeritage student Helen Casey

You can find about more about DHeritage on our website https://www.herts.ac.uk/courses/doctorate-in-heritage or via the University's world class Heritage Hub (or by clicking the DHeritage tag on this blog).

Apply by sending a completed application form (available here), research proposal and supporting documents (qualifications, certificates etc.) via our Doctoral College doctoralcollegeadmissions@herts.ac.uk by 10th May 2019. A guide sheet to help you prepare a research proposal is available from Prof Dr Grace Lees-Maffei, Professor of Design History and Programme Director for DHeritage. If you have any questions about the programme or want to discuss it further, please contact Prof Lees-Maffei or the Doctoral College. We look forward to hearing from you!

The De Havilland Aircraft Company is an important part of the University's Heritage

Between ‘Revere’ and ‘Remove’

Students on the DHeritage programme at University of Hertfordshire met for one of the regular programme of workshops on 14th May 2018. Convened by Professor Sarah Lloyd, the programme for the day focussed on the concepts of ‘Remembering and Forgetting’.  It brought together students and staff at UH involved in the DHeritage with several external speakers addressing issues of ‘memory’ within their research. The day covered issues of migration (Dr Eureka Henrich), slavery (Dr Jessica Moody) and the heritage of tomorrow (Dr Esther Breithoff) in addition to contributions from students dealing with these questions in professional practice.

By chance, the workshop coincided with one of a series of evening debates organised by Intelligence² and Historic England and held in Westminster Revere or Remove? The Battle Over Statues Heritage and History’. This discussion, led by historians and journalists, addressed the subject of memory, and how such a contested concept is dealt with publicly, particularly in the multicultural and multi voiced 21st century context.

Managed by Jonathan Freedland, Guardian columnist and author, the Panel comprised Peter Frankopan, Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford; writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch; author Tiffany Jenkins, Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh; and David Olusoga, Historian and Broadcaster.  Each presented a position statement generated initially in response to the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign (https://rmfoxford.wordpress.com), which has recently campaigned to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College in Oxford, and the decision to remove a statue of confederate general Robert E Lee from a park in Charlottesville, USA.  In many ways the responses and positions described were personal and reflected the experiences of the speakers.  Olusoga spoke with passion about the statue of merchant and slaver Edward Colston in Bristol, contrasting his own confidence in dealing with such memorials with that of others without his depth of historical knowledge.  He deconstructed the purpose of such statues and demonstrated both their erroneous portrayal of history and the changing nature of their meaning in contemporary society.  He urged the removing of Colston to a different site where his legacy could be debated in a context based on learning, not on the reverence that is hard to avoid when a viewer is physically required to ‘look up’ to a statue.  Jenkins took the position that relocation of statues simply relocated the issues. She noted the poor aesthetic quality of many such memorials and invoked the concepts of current relevance and the passing of time as determinants of the appropriate actions and responses to memorials.  As the contested statues are primarily in public places, her position was to leave responsibility with the public.  Where memorials are wanted they will be cared for, where no longer relevant they will be neglected and decline.  This approach reflects an emerging debate within the museum and heritage world regarding the potential for ‘managed decline’ of objects and places which are difficult to maintain for a range of reasons.  The need to forget as well as to remember was referenced although in a situation where the issues which some statues symbolise clearly continue to remain unaddressed, it seemed premature to move directly from ‘revere’ to ‘remove’ without further consideration.

All of the panellists at some point found themselves at risk of entanglement with the intricacies of this debate.  Hirsch urged the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes but also described the importance of monuments as part of the relationship of the present with the past.  Frankopan offered the view that the ‘winds of history’ mean that all statues will eventually fall, and that indeed, it is their ultimate function.  All felt that there should be some critique of each circumstance and a greater understanding of the history that each monument represents.  While an obvious response to the situation under discussion, this led inevitably to a discussion of the limitations of history teaching and public knowledge and to the fact that many statues are symbolic reductions of complex situations.  Their original meanings may have been lost and may be of limited relevance for the majority of those who view them today.  While some statues have little meaning at any one time, some have disproportionality significant meaning, becoming symbols of contemporary concerns. Olusoga pointed out that the Bristol statue of Colston was erected two hundred years after his death.  In this situation is the statue more realistically considered as something of the 19th rather than the 17th or 18th century?  Jenkins in particular cautioned about the dangers of being ‘enslaved to the past’.  If Bristol was provided with a statue of Colston in the 1890’s as part of a battle for power within the city’s merchant class, then it seemed entirely possible by the end of the debate that by removing it, Bristol could be signifying a sense of itself for the future, not seeking to remove an unpleasant figure and an unpalatable sense of its past.

Edward Colston, Bristol ©Barbara Wood

Reflecting on the workshop and the evening debate it seems as if the issues of both were less concerned with the meaning of statues and memorials at the time of erection and more about their function in establishing new identities for places and for society for the future.  A contributor from the audience, part of a campaign group aiming to remove the Colston statue spoke about the fundraising to establish a memorial to the 32000 people who died because of Colston’s’ activities and a museum of slavery in Bristol.  Meaning changes and develops even within living memory. Centuries after they were established, many of the remains under discussion seem inconsequential in themselves. It was their currency in the present that was important. It is surely our opportunity and responsibility to erect statues and memorials to what is important today, if - as Frankopan pointed out - anybody is interested enough to do that. 

Barbara Wood

Doctoral Candidate (DHeritage Programme)

@CuratorSW 

References

DeSilvey, C. (2017) Curated Decay Heritage Beyond Saving. University of Minnesota Press.

Jenkins, T. (2016) Keeping their marbles How the treasures of the past ended up in museums and why they should stay there. Oxford University Press. 

DHeritage Professional Doctorate in Heritage Recruitment Now Open for September 2018!

DHeritage, the University of Hertfordshire's unique Professional Doctorate in Heritage, is now in its fourth year. Our programme enables heritage professionals working in the public and private sectors to reflect on the industry, broadly defined, and make an original contribution to knowledge and understanding in the field based on their professional practice.
Our students work across the heritage area, and are engaged in impactful heritage studies research on topics such as authenticity and authority, dark tourism, conservation and restitution, digital heritage and how museums serve and represent local communities, to name a few. Read about their research here: http://tvad-uh.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/DHeritage 

DHeritage is hosted by the Department of Humanities with contributions from world-leading staff working in History, Philosophy, Education, Creative Arts, Hertfordshire Business School and the University’s flagship Heritage Hub, among others, and including Prof Sarah Lloyd, Prof John Styles, Dr Susan Parham, Prof Jonathan Morris, Dr Nika Balomenou and Prof Grace Lees-Maffei. DHeritage is offered part-time and is delivered through campus-based workshops and online equivalents. This doctorate is available for home (UK and EU) and international students. The University of Hertfordshire is twenty minutes from London by train, and is served by national rail and Luton, Stansted and the other London airports.

**New for the 2018 entry is our distance-learning registration, which provides a complete suite of online workshops in addition to some campus participation.**   

We are now recruiting students for the 2018/19 academic year. Applications are invited by Monday 28th May for a September 2018 start:

Read more about DHeritage here: http://www.herts.ac.uk/courses/doctorate-in-heritage and on the Heritage Hub site here

Contact mail Programme Director Professor Grace Lees-Maffei for more information about DHeritage, a guide to preparing a research proposal and an application form: g.lees-maffei@herts.ac.uk 

Apply direct: http://www.herts.ac.uk/apply/how-to-apply-for-a-course#directly

We look forward to welcoming you to DHeritage at the University of Hertfordshire!

Where to Publish? An Interdisciplinary Guide

When research is externally evaluated, and even when it isn’t, the choice of venue for your research publications could hardly be more important. The journal you choose, or the publisher you contract with, determine the readership for your research writings, and – to some extent - determine, in addition, the quality ascribed to your work. Whether or not this is as it should be is a separate issue to that of having to respond (a) to the fact that different journals and publishers have diverse strengths and weaknesses, and (b) that hierarchies of judgement will be applied to your work on publication.

In my field, design history, there are only a handful of dedicated journals. The Journal of Design History is world-leading, while Design Issues and Design and Culture each relate to design cultures in distinctive ways. Beyond this small group, many of the journals in which design historians choose to publish are either design journals, more broadly defined, or journals representing the large number of neighbouring or other fields which connect in various ways with the diverse subject of design and its histories. The former group includes The Design Journal, and more specialised journals such as Interiors, Fashion Theory etc.

See the following on design journals:

• ‘Design Research Journal Ranking Study: Preliminary Results’ by Ken Friedman, Deirdre Barron, Silvana Ferlazzo, Tania Ivanka, Gavin Melles and Dr. Jeremy Yuille (2008).
• Ranking of Design Journals Based on Results of the UK Research Excellence Framework: Using REF as Referee, Neil J. Mansfield, The Design Journal 19:6 (2016): 903-919.
• ‘Quality perceptions of design journals: The design scholars’ perspective’, Gerda Gemser, Cees de Bont, Paul Hekkert, Ken Friedman, Design Studies 33: 1 (January 2012): 4-23.

Beyond design, there is a wealth of resources available to colleagues wishing to make an informed choice about which journals, or presses to publish with. Some other rankings for specific disciplines that TVAD researchers may be interested in are:

• ERIM, the Erasmus Research Institute of Management which ranks journals in management through its ‘ERIM Journals List (EJL) 2016-2021’ (updated 29 January 2016).
• AACSB International—The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) publishes a ‘Journal Rankings and Indices of Research Productivity’ which covers mostly business. 

More broadly, a standard resource is the European Reference Index for the Humanities and the Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS). It was produced by the European Science Foundation (ESF) in 2008. It is now maintained by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data. Initially it covered the humanities only, but now it also covers the social sciences.

Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature across the sciences, arts and humanities. It offers ‘CiteScore’, ‘essentially the average citations per document that a title receives over a three-year period’.

The most well-known indicator in the JCR is the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). This provides a ratio of citations to a journal in a given year to the citable items in the prior two years. Journal Citation Reports® (JCR) published by Clarivate Analytics (2017) offers a combination of impact and influence metrics from 2016 Web of Science source data covering more than 11,000 journals from 81 countries.
 

Eigenfactor was set up in January 2007 by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West to use ‘recent advances in network analysis to develop novel methods for evaluating the influence of scholarly periodicals, for mapping the structure of academic research, and for helping researchers navigate the scholarly literature.’ It focuses on sciences and social sciences.

Princeton’s Wendy Laura Belcher has worked with some Princeton students on this digest of ‘Reviews of Peer-Reviewed Journals in Humanities and the Social Sciences’ (Princeton 2017) https://journalreviews.princeton.edu/ranking-peer-reviewed-journals/ This blog reviews more than 70 journals. Belcher recommends her own book Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success (SAGE 2009) and the introduction and chapter one can be downloaded from the SAGE website.

Judgments about journal quality can directly inform perceptions of a researcher’s worth. See David Adams', Publish or Perish v. 5 (2017). Consider also this promotion document from the London School of Economics: http://www.lse.ac.uk/intranet/staff/humanResources/reviewingAndRewarding/promotionAndReview/pdfs/JournalsLists-16-17.pdf

The information is arranged by subject area, including some interdisciplinary topics such as gender studies. The journals regarded as the best are shown for each field. The document also advises on academic publishers with some surprising results: Palgrave Macmillan may not be so closely associated with the group of university presses by everyone who expresses an opinion. Conversely, Bloomsbury Academic is a relatively new addition to the Bloomsbury publisher which may not yet have made an impression on the compilers of such lists.

*

Prof Grace Lees-Maffei with Dr Veronica Manlow.

Last call for 2017 applications for DHeritage!

Last call for 2017 applications for DHeritage, the Professional Doctorate in Heritage at the University of Hertfordshire! DHeritage is a unique professional doctorate for heritage professionals who wish to undertake original research related to their professional concerns, and to contribute knowledge and understanding of heritage, broadly defined. DHeritage is hosted by the Department of Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire, with contributions from staff working in History, Philosophy, Education, Creative Arts, Hertfordshire Business School and the University’s flagship Heritage Hub, among others. The doctorate is offered part-time and is delivered through campus-based workshops and online equivalents. The deadline for applications is Monday May 15, and interviews are scheduled for Wednesday 14 June.

• Read more about DHeritage here: http://www.herts.ac.uk/courses/doctorate-in-heritage 
• Application is by application form and research proposal: http://www.herts.ac.uk/apply/how-to-apply-for-a-course#directly 
• Contact DHeritage Programme Director Dr Grace Lees-Maffei for advice on preparing a proposal: g.lees-maffei@herts.ac.uk 
• Read about some of our students’ ongoing research here: http://tvad-uh.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/DHeritage 
• Visit the Heritage Hub website here: http://www.herts.ac.uk/heritage-hub   

Please circulate this opportunity to potential applicants in your network, thank you.

Round Table with Catherine Bertola and Rachel Rich

At a recent UHArts panel discussion, Catherine Bertola was joined in discussion by Rachel Rich, senior lecturer in history at Leeds Becket University. Bertola and Rich are currently benefitting from a Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residency award that has enabled them to share ideas related to the domestic interior. The panel discussion was an opportunity to examine Bertola's past and current work in relation to 19th Century cookbooks and domestic advice manuals, and for staff and students at the University of Hertfordshire to respond with their own questions and observations about Bertola's work.

Much of the discussion focused on the staging of domestic spaces, in their original, domestic use, and when preserved for display, as in the Bronte Parsonage Museum, where Bertola created a series of photographs entitled Residual Hauntings (2011). Bertola is critical the staging of historical spaces, noting the inauthenticity of the objects and decor that are often used in such staging, as well as the artificiality of preserving a space as if frozen in any one particular time. Rich draws parallels with the staging of domestic interiors in the 19th century, and the performance of hospitality that was advised by domestic advice literature of the time. Publications including Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management propagated the idea of the home as an "enterprise" that could be "run for the success of the family unit", and presented an impossible ideal against which Victorian women could measure the success or failure of their domestic activities.

Residual Hauntings, 2011

Rich relates some of Bertola's past works to the ideals advocated in these manuals, including the "act[ing] out of their leisure time as a job". Bertola's Killing Time (2011) shows the artist superimposed into photographs of domestic interiors, sipping from a teacup as if caught between domestic chores. Bertola's work with images of domestic interiors seems not to clearly differentiate between images of labour and leisure. It is interesting to consider Rich's reading of Bertola's work in relation to the writing of Erving Goffman. In his explorations of the “presentation of self in everyday life”, Goffman (1959, p. 69) identifies “backstage” events and locations, in which individuals engage in private activities in preparation for the everyday performance of self. The home is divided into spaces that are, to varying degrees, public or private. Bedrooms and bathrooms are distinctly private, drawing rooms more public, and hallways, Bertola notes, "transition between public space and private space". Rich observes that time spent in, and caring for, those domestic spaces is also divided into public and private time. "Backstage" activities that are the work of the domestic labourer are conducted in private, as a means of preparing for the public presentation of a space.

Killing Time, 2011

The preparation of Bertola's work has often involved private labour, in isolated spaces, leading up to the time of completion when the public are invited into the space. Working on After the Fact (2006), she necessarily worked alone, in an abandoned building, sweeping dust from the floor to recreate patterns from eighteenth-century wallpaper. As she swept, she recorded the sounds of her labour in an audio track that now exists as a public record of her "backstage" activities. For an earlier work, Scratching at the Surface (2001), she spent 2 weeks at the top of scaffolding, isolated from the street below, scratching through layers of paint on the exterior of a building in Newcastle upon Tyne. These private preparations are intentionally similar to the "backstage" labour that takes place in domestic spaces, incorporating sweeping, dusting and cleaning, and consciously isolating, drawing on the "idea of being trapped" that she associates with domestic labour. She develops a sense of ownership during her temporary inhabitation of these spaces, and must relinquish her ownership when the work is complete and the public come swarming into her erstwhile private space.

Scratching at the Surface, 2001

After the Fact, 2006

She has found that there is more privacy in the production of site-specific works than in galleries. Works produced for galleries, such as the work currently on display in the In and Out of Sight exhibition at the University of Hertfordshire, can require her private processes to be transformed into public performances. While creating her current work on the wall of the Art & Design gallery, Bertola was exposed to passing visitors, students and the other artists with whom she shares the exhibition. It is interesting to note that the subject of this work is a photograph of a private domestic space, made public through a photograph that has been published in a readily-available publication.
Bertola and Rich's conversation often turned to the subject of time. Many of Bertola's works have involved reviving old images, revealing surfaces lost to time, or bridging the gaps between periods. Bertola describes her work as "fleeting". Her site-specific work is necessarily temporary. It often has a "fragility", like the dust of After the Fact, that can be swept away. Rich describes her "heartbreak" at imagining how easily Bertola's work can be brushed away. She draws parallels with the domestic labour that can be undone so easily, as clean spaces gather more dirt, and "the entrapment of women" in the neverending cycle of domestic chores (a cycle that is referenced in Bertola's Round and Round, 2016, in which the artist is shown endlessly setting and unsettling a table). It was unusual for her to preserve her images by placing them in a frame, as she has done for Sad Bones (2013-14), giving them a permanence that is not often present in her work.

Preservation, and the effects of time, were foremost in her thoughts when Bertola created Everything and Nothing (2007) at the V&A. In this setting she became very aware of the rituals surrounding the presentation of collected artefacts, and the distinctions made between the labour of those who cared-for those artefacts, and those who cared for the museum's interior. She observed a hierarchy of cleaning, topped by the conservators responsible for cleaning the artefacts, skilled cleaners who are permitted to clean the plinths, and unskilled, "invisible" cleaners with responsibility for the floors. It is the unseen labour of the latter that is most directly referenced in Bertola's work, and that most fascinates Rich.

Everything and Nothing, 2007

Reference
Goffman, E. (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Anchor Books.

DHeritage student successes at History Department Annual Conference

The DHeritage Programme at the University of Hertfordshire is now in its third year, with three cohorts of part-time students working in heritage roles professionally and working, too, on new research into heritage-related issues for their professional doctorates. Campus-based DHeritage students meets for four or five bespoke heritage workshops during each academic year, and in addition they are encourage to attend three residential programmes: the Spring and Summer Schools hosted by the Doctoral College's Researcher Development Programme, and the annual History Department conference held each year in February at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park. This year, DHeritage was very well represented at the conference and what follows gives a flavour of the proceedings.

Dorney Court at dusk, February 2017.

We began with a pre-conference tour of Dorney Court, kindly organised by third-year DHeritage student Helen Casey. Dorney Court is one of England's finest Tudor manor houses and remains in private ownership. Our tour guide explained the layers of history and material culture contained within this extraordinary family home and the problems of upkeep. The tour offered a special glimpse into an often hidden world and a life very different to that of most of us.

The academic sessions began with Prof John Styles' talk ‘Fashion to a Timetable: The Origins of the Modern Fashion System’. Prof Styles opened by noting that writing on fashion has proliferated as a result of Berg’s (now Bloomsbury's) publishing activity, and that much of this writing has focussed on identity. He traced this intellectual tendency back to the influence of Stephen Greenblatt’s book Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980). Identity is not the only lens through which to view fashion, however. Another way to think about the history of dress and textiles is as indicative of fashionable change based on innovation and trade in textiles. Fashionable change in western dress of the early modern period is perceived as being in contrast to a sense of staticity in the rest of the world. The amount of choice allowed even to poorer women is indicated by, for example, the c. 1000 printed cottons in the Foundling Hospital collection for the years 1758-9 alone. There were annual changes in woven silks in Lyon, c. 1700 and annualised fashion made timing crucial for sales success. In 1681, the directors of the East India Company were aware that European women would prefer to buy and wear inferior silks than last year’s silk, while making a single silk could take more than four months.

The annualised fashion cycle arose in the 17th century for three reasons:

1. Mercantilism - Colbert promoted French manufacturing in three ways, including the removal of tax barriers, and capturing foreign markets with monopolies with the intention that Lyon would supplement Italy as the major fashion centre.
2. Court Dress - Louis XIV's ceremonial approach to dress involved a court dress code, rituals such as the levee and the couchee, and an insistence that members of the court bought French goods. Staff who kept the King's wardrobe were interested in fashionable change because they sold the king's old clothes for personal profit.
3. Magazines and the fashion press - It was expensive to print images, although they were the best medium for the dissemination of fashion.

Next, Dr Ceri Houlbrook presented her fascinating project 'Concealed Revealed: Material Objects Hidden in Walls':

A hidden shoe up a chimney breast. A mummified cat in the roof space. A child’s cap in a wall cavity. A horse skull under the floorboards. These are just some of the secret objects people have discovered when renovating their homes – undoubtedly quite surprising finds considering the odd (indeed, sometimes quite disturbing) nature of the objects, coupled with their unusual locations.

Read more about Ceri's research in her project blog: https://theconcealedrevealed.wordpress.com 

Saturday morning began with two presentations, Emma Battell Lowman & Adam J Barker's 'Writing History in the Settler Colonial Present' and Paul Lynch, ‘Behind the Curtain: A Glimpse of Life in East Berlin.' Paul's talk ranged from details of the complex security of the Berlin Wall, to amazing archive of photographs taken by the Stasi so that after searching people's homes, they could put the things back in the same places and erase any evidence of their searches. Photographs in this archive include a Western coffee maker, which was at once grounds for suspicion and a source of refreshment, a US serviceman’s coat, posters of the pop star Madonna, and an unmade bed. Lynch also discussed the Oscar-winning 2006 film The Lives of Others, writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's story of Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler. 

The presentations continued with Simon Langsdale's 'St Albans is dying in a blaze': Bribery, Corruption, Theft and Embezzlement in a Hertfordshire Market Town 1835 - c.1853' and Bridget Long's, 'London Asylum for Girls (Asylum for Orphans and other Deserted Girls of the Poor) and their needlework training in the second half of the eighteenth century.' Long began with the observation that the weaver could weave thread faster than the spinner could spin. Spinning was therefore the biggest occupation for women in early modern England, occupying 1.5 million women. Impoverished girls taken in by the Foundling Hospital were taught to spin, while their male counterparts were sent off to the Navy. Economic historians have had difficulty quantifying the amount that spinners spun, and we don’t know how well they were paid. Trimmer, writing on the 'oeconomy of charity' had a school of industry in which industry meant spinning.

The Spinstress, 1782-6, by George Romney, of Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton, Lady Nelson

Saturday afternoon saw two DHeritage sessions punctuated by Dr Friedrich (Rudi) Newman's talk '"Hoy, Hoy, Where are you coming to?" – The Great Thames Disasters', in which he shared research which forms a chapter of his new book and made the audience concerned about the safety of their own excursions on the water!  

Memorial card for the Princess Alice which sank near Woolwich, September 3rd, 1878

Four DHeritage students presented their doctoral research in the final panel of the day: first years Sarah Buckingham and Janine Marriott, second year student Charlotte Reynolds, and Helen Casey, who is in her third part-time year of study.  

DHeritage students (L-R) Charlotte Reynolds, Helen Casey, Janine Marriott and Sarah Buckingham

In her presentation, 'Public Engagement with and attitudes to sites of memorial, death and remembrance. A toolkit for Public Engagement' Janine Marriott explained how sites of burial, memorialisation and remembrance have long been associated with learning and public engagement, from the Victorian Garden Cemetery and its ‘improving influence’ through to modern day visits to battlefields for enthusiasts, or school trips to Auschwitz for study of world history. Although increasingly popular and acceptable heritage destinations, such sites are not always included when research is undertaken or studies are published in the heritage field. These sites are not traditional heritage venues like stately homes, museums, galleries or archives but often comprise elements of these and heritage models can be partially applied to them. Increasingly sites of remembrance such as cemeteries, battlefields, prisons, former concentration camps, or even places where an event like the September 11th attacks occurred, are becoming firmly established as part of the heritage landscape.

Janine's study of a range of memorialisation sites seeks to gather together the different ways that people learn and experience these sites and how they interact with what can be extremely challenging and provoking places. Such places are often labelled ‘Dark Tourism’ or ‘challenging history’ because death is a major theme and is regarded as taboo. Among specific heritage communities there is, therefore, a growing array of experience and learning, but no pooled body of knowledge. Janine will explore a number of case studies, and produce resources and research that can be used to advise and support such venues when engaging the public.

Sarah Buckingham asked 'How might the major crisis for heritage in Syria prompt a reconsideration of both our principles and practical approaches for major interventions to rehabilitate heritage sites in response to war, natural disaster or following extensive abandonment or dereliction?' The question is posed with particular reference to the involvement of traditional trades and crafts in rehabilitation works, and how that might affect concepts of authenticity and integrity. The debate prompted by the destruction of major monuments and world heritage sites in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East by the “Islamic State” or as a by-product of conflict has the potential to prompt a significant reconsideration of contemporary approaches to heritage and its conservation, raising questions as it does particularly about the concept of 'authenticity', and how that influences its treatment. Questions of whether to reconstruct destroyed or partially destroyed sites rest heavily on the issue of authenticity – that is, it is implied, the importance of largely or wholly original fabric in something like its original disposition. Where sites have been blow up and cleared by bulldozer, the argument goes, authenticity can lie only in the fragmented remains. Many historic buildings and places, including key archaeological sites in Syria, have often been the subject of considerable interventions both historically and in the more recent past and the apparent authenticity may be in part illusory – this is not always factored into this argument.

Helen Casey's research explored 'Digital decisions – lessons from the recent past about using the technology of the future'. Around 2000, Helen told us, heritage writers made predictions, positive and negative, about the digital future. Some argued that heritage would be democratised through access to all. Others despaired that we are creating a digital black hole into which all of our data will disappear. Gordon Reid's article 'The Digitisation of Heritage Material' (2000) is apposite here. Writers compare the advent of the internet with that of the printing press. Helen reviewed the ideas of Peter Haddad, director of the technical service branch of the national library of Australia (2001), Ross Parry's 'Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change' (2007) and Dr Ruth Taylor of the National Trust, writing in Alison Hems and Marion R. Blockley's edited collection Heritage Interpretation (2006). Helen has a raft of questions about digitisation: Have people cooperated or worked in their own silos? What has ended up online – democratisation or black hole? What about interpretation, what information surrounds the digital objects? Are virtual visitors the same as real ones when museums still need footfall. Factors determining digitisation include cost, time, expertise, fear of obsolescence, etc. She plans a series of semi-structured interviews with heritage professionals and her method will blend grounded theory with narrative analysis, and policy analysis.

This panel closed with a presentation by Professor Rebecca Houze, TVAD Research Group Visiting Researcher for 2016-17. Prof Houze shared her research into the US National Parks Service. This project examines the European origins of the US National Park Service Rustic buildings within a broader context of industrialization and travel, looking specifically at the transatlantic relationship between Europe and North America that developed in the nineteenth century. It takes as its model and point of departure art critic Rosalind Krauss’s influential 1979 essay, 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field,' which seeks to understand Earthworks, such as the large-scale environmental projects by Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and others during that period, as a new form of sculpture. Likewise we may think of the lodges, camps, train depots, trails, roads, gateway entrances, and other structures in the United States National Park Service Rustic Style, built between the period of the turn-of-the century lodges and the modernizing upgrades of the Mission 66 program after World War II, collectively as an 'open air museum.' The key characteristics of the open air museum are its self-conscious situation and dramatic presentation in the landscape in the form of architecture and staging of transportation routes; its deliberate juxtaposition of primitive with civilized, above all, through the evoking of a lost or disappearing indigenous past, signified by native flora, fauna, and peoples; and in the US context, its didactic, mythologized narrative of American national identity by constructing and dramatizing the landscape as antiquity and place of origin.

Prof Rebecca Houze discussing the visual presentation of the US National Parks

The project identifies common structural features of the open-air museum, particularly in its manifestation as National Park in the United States. It begins with a meditation on lodges and camps as places to stay within the parks, and their broader relationship to other dwelling types, including the log cabin, rural farmhouse, and tent. The best-known rustic lodges were developed after the prominence of grand resort hotels in the last part of the nineteenth century, many of which were modelled on aristocratic Victorian prototypes. The early twentieth-century examples, by contrast, incorporated native building materials, and forms appropriate to the cultural and climatic traditions of the regions that they represented. The lodges of Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, Mt. Rainier, and the Grand Canyon explore a new American architecture with roots in the Shingle and Stick Styles, as well as the British Arts and Crafts tradition. These modes are related both to a nostalgia for the log cabin, associated with the self-sufficiency of the pioneer against hostile nature, as well as with the moral and intellectual achievements in American political life, as in the case of President Abraham Lincoln’s own humble beginnings in his childhood log cabin. While connected to the log cabin on the American side of the Atlantic, the lodges also draw upon romantic European perceptions of the wooden farmhouse, and in particular the Scandinavian and Alpine chalet, which had been popularized as a charming, fanciful form of building in both Europe and North America for much of the nineteenth century. This association, easily seen in the many treatises on landscape architecture and domestic dwellings published during that period by Andrew Jackson Downing and Henry Hubbard, is complicated by the fact of European immigrant carpenters who were employed to construct and furnish the new lodges in the park, suggesting possibly closer connections between the European and American structures. Much less is known about the workers themselves than the architects who designed and concession companies who financed these buildings.

The day ended with a screening of Tim Slade's powerful film The Destruction of Memory (2016), introduced by Sarah Buckingham, who also chaired a group discussion afterwards. The film includes interviews with the Director-General of UNESCO, the Prosecutor of the ICC, and international experts across various disciplines. The following group discussion centred on what is worth saving, hierarchies of value, and authenticity and inauthenticity in reconstruction processes.

Robert Bevan in The Destruction of Heritage, dir. Tim Slade

On Sunday morning some members of the group attended services at the Royal Chapel in the grounds of nearby Royal Lodge while others participated in a practical workshop on writing and publishing academic articles followed by a postgraduate student talk on completing and submitting your thesis. In the final session we played the 'impact game' which encouraged us to think about new ways to engage different audiences with our research. 

DHeritage staff and students closed the weekend with a short walk around the Cow Pond, and looked ahead to next year. The History Department conference this year saw a wealth of information shared about material culture, not only in the papers presented by DHeritage students and by Prof Rebecca Houze for TVAD, but also by the members of the History Dept. who are not directly involved with the DHeritage Programme. The material turn is apparently in full effect at the University of Hertfordshire!

Prof Rebecca Houze, TVAD Visiting Researcher 2016-17, Returns!

This week is a busy one for TVAD as we welcome our Visiting Researcher 2016-17, Professor Rebecca Houze, back to the University for her second visit. Prof Houze will engage with staff and students at all levels during her visit, including experiencing MA students' work at ‘The Light Fantastic’, our Postgraduate Interdisciplinary project exhibition opening in the Art and Design Gallery on Tuesday 7th February 2017, and working with first year undergraduates on the Graphic Design and Illustration BA Hons programme as part of the Critical and Contextual Studies module. Rebecca will also talk about her research on US National Parks in a panel presenting heritage-focussed research from the Professional Doctorate in Heritage (DHeritage) students at the History Department annual conference at Cumberland Lodge. We look forward to another enriching visit and thank Prof House sincerely for taking the time out from her commitments at Northern Illinois University, USA to work with us in Hertfordshire. 

PROGRAMME
TUESDAY 7^th FEBRUARY 2017

6 pm – ‘The Light Fantastic’ PG Interdisciplinary project exhibition opening, Art and Design Gallery.

WEDNESDAY 8^th FEBRUARY 2017
10 am – 12.45 pm – Prof Rebecca Houze to join Level 4 Graphic Design and Illustration for a workshop about her monograph New Mythologies in Design and Culture: Reading Signs and Symbols in the Visual Landscape (Bloomsbury Academic 2016).
12.45 for 1 pm, lunch provided. TVAD Talks series. Femke de Vries, HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, (www.FemkeDeVries.com) ‘DICTIONARY DRESSINGS: Clothing definitions decoded and translated towards alternative fashion perspectives’. Respondent: Professor Rebecca Houze, Northern Illinois University.
Dictionary definitions are generally experienced as factual and rational and in the case of clothing show no connection to the mythical character of fashion. They describe the characteristics of the items, the modes of use and/or the relation to the body but fashion or style is not mentioned. For example: “Handschoen: bekleding van de hand” (Literally translated to English as Glove: covering of the hand). It becomes clear that a hand can be covered by putting it in a pocket, by bandaging it or by sitting on it, turning a pair of trousers into a glove for they cover the hand and therefore suffice to the definition.In this on-going project the nature of the dictionary definition as a ‘zero condition’ of a piece of clothing is used not to find a general truth of a piece of clothing, but to re-read clothes and explore an alternative fashion vocabulary. This vocabulary will take the shape of an image archive, theoretical and design-led approaches by experts and students brought together in a publication, website, workshops and catalogues of these workshops.

THURSDAY 9^th FEBRUARY 2017

10 am - Workshop with Eva Sopeoglou and the First-Year Interior Architecture BA Hons students.

3 pm to 4.45 pm, TVAD Reading Group. Session with TVAD and School research staff and PG students focussed on supportive peer review of work in progress. If you wish to participate, please send texts for circulation to the other participants to Dr Grace Lees-Maffei g.lees-maffei@herts.ac.uk

5 pm – Design Talk: Jim Heverin (Zaha Hadid Architects Director). Convened by Julian Lindley. A154 Lindop.

FRIDAY 10^th to SUNDAY 12^th FEBRUARY 2017

Department of History Annual Conference, Cumberland Lodge, Windsor Great Park, convened by Dr Katrina Navickas, School of Humanities (k.navickas@herts.ac.uk). 

SATURDAY 11TH FEBRUARY 2017

4.30pm - 5.45pm - SESSION SEVEN - DHeritage workshop - presentations and discussion by the DHeritage students. 

Panel convened by Dr Grace Lees-Maffei, at which DHeritage students briefly present their work in 15-minute slots. Prof Houze to discuss ‘The Open Air Museum From Ethnographic Village to National Park’. 

8.30pm - SESSION NINE - Film showing, 'The Destruction of Memory', and discussion.

The film will be introduced by Sarah Buckingham. It includes interviews with the Director-General of UNESCO, the Prosecutor of the ICC, and international experts across various disciplines. http://destructionofmemoryfilm.com/

For more information, contact the TVAD Research Group Leader, Dr Grace Lees-Maffei g.lees-maffei@herts.ac.uk