2 February, 2022 seminar on early modern history and its prospects

17:03:31 So I'm just going to start the recording now. 17:03:37 Brilliant Well, hello and welcome. It's wonderful to have you all here My name is Kate Smith. I'm the director of the Birmingham Research Institute for history and cultures. 17:03:47 We've organized tonight's session in collaboration with the Center for early for religious and early modern studies here at the University of Birmingham. 17:03:59 So brick, the Birmingham Research Institute history and cultures is here to really try and encourage interdisciplinary conversations and to champion the value of humanity's research and scholarship in academia, and beyond. 17:04:14 So a couple of housekeeping things just before I hand over to know a millstone who's going to be chairing tonight's event. If you could stay on mute, while you're listening in. 17:04:25 That will be great just to reduce the kind of interference and no will say some comments about how and when you can be asking questions and be part of tonight's discussion. 17:04:36 It's also really interesting at these events to see where people are dialing in from so if you have a moment to pop in the chat where you're calling in from, it will be great to see just the kind of global diversity that we have in the room. 17:04:50 So, without further ado, I'm going to hand over to nowhere to chat tonight's event. 17:04:57 Thanks, Kate. Thanks to everyone for coming out and thanks very much to our distinguished panel, which I will introduce in just one second. 17:05:08 So again we're from the Center for information in early modern studies here at the University of Birmingham, which is a multi disciplinary body of historians and literary critics and historians and people who do music and modern languages and we're really 17:05:23 grateful for people to come in and talk to us and we're delighted. 17:05:27 I would say ecstatic almost except that feels a little enthusiastic to welcome our three panelists who fortunately, Tara Hamlin couldn't be here today. 17:05:36 We have three extraordinarily distinguished panelists here to talk about the audience and early modern history and they all have distinctive perspective so I'm quite excited to put these together. 17:05:46 I'm going to introduce them and I'm going to say a little bit about how we're going to manage this evenings conversation so our three panelists are in order in which still be speaking. 17:05:58 First check absolved from the University of Southern California. California you see all the way, thousands of miles from Los Angeles. 17:06:05 California USC all the way, thousands of miles from Los Angeles. He is a professor of philosophy history and accounting. 17:06:10 He is a historian who's done a moderate amount of really interesting work, a lot of really interesting work but some of it's so interesting to me you can't believe it, and has a recent a book that's about to come out on the idea of the free market hasn't 17:06:25 come out yet, but Jake assures me he's finished writing it, and you can even buy it but you can't read it yet until it comes out in September, so look out for the free market. 17:06:35 Then we have Laura Saiga from the University of Exeter Laura Sonia is a senior lecturer and works on religious culture and early modern England. She's the author of angels and belief in England 1482 1700, and is the author as we will discuss at some length 17:06:52 or one of the authors and managers of a very influential and important blog, the many headed monster so we'll be hearing a lot about that later. And finally, Paul of Finland, who is also joining us from California though I think it might not be quite 17:07:10 so so yeah. 17:07:13 so Cydia to California, and she is the Baldo purity professor of history at Stanford University, and a great figure in the field of museum and history of science studies and somebody who's done a lot of work for early modern history at Stanford and has 17:07:29 to talk about a lot of different things. Um, so the way we're going to run this, is that our panelists have prepared statements or discussions that on the theme of tonight's panel which is work for the audiences for the laundry industry, who are we talking 17:07:45 to. Who should we be talking to that we're not And who are we talking to we can talk on, they have things to say about this is that we're going to go one by one. 17:07:55 After each statement, the panelists are going to have a chance to sort of respond to each other. So there'll be a discussion among them for a few minutes, and then at the end of those three presentations and that sort of in panel discussion, we'll open 17:08:11 it up to questions from the floor. If you have a question from the floor. 17:08:16 Please do not raise your hand or use the raise hand function on the zoom, I am incapable of tracking that and so don't do that please what you should do instead is use the chat function and say, I have a question, and I will use that as a stack and call 17:08:32 on people who have questions in the order in which they do. I believe that Kate is here to unceremoniously toss people out of the meeting if they become disruptive in some way but I assume that none of us will happen is they recognize many of you. 17:08:46 So recognize many of you. And I know that you're all people of good character so wonderful to see you and and I guess we'll Jake let's let's start with you. 17:08:55 Well, it's great to be here, and thank you for the invitation, and it's really good to see so many people I know. 17:09:03 If I don't know. Also it's really nice to be virtually in Birmingham I was before we all came online I was saying, what a rich and amazing history department, you have, and made me think a lot also as I started that made me start looking at the early 17:09:29 Britain us. Wow, that is really crazy because what I want to talk to you about today is what I think is the sort of profound ecological crisis, I'm going to use that metaphor. 17:09:39 In the American field of early modern studies and the collapse of our public and I'm going to do it in a way I think that you might not expect. 17:09:47 But I just want to start when I, when I was started graduate school in Paris. I remember Robert Darden came to give his whole shtick about Hamas and how the public sphere had one, and there was a kind of new liberal order that was going to sort of be 17:10:04 great, um, which didn't really work out, but he had just written a piece in The New York Review of Books, and Lamont was publishing all this work there was a huge public for early modern studies on those were the days that Bob could write bestsellers 17:10:20 Natalie Davis could write bestsellers early modern history sort of strode like a Colossus over the field of history, but it had this huge demographic. 17:10:29 And I remember about 10 years after that sitting with a book publisher, and the book publisher said to me Look, we are in a crisis so what was this this was probably 2000, and for. 17:10:47 Wait, no, sorry, 17:10:51 1994. 17:11:00 Take your quick like to start off with your 17:11:00 thing. Okay. 17:11:03 It was completely country. 17:11:04 There you go. I'm basically, sorry, 1994. I keep skipping this this decade that I don't want to exist. I'm 1994 a book publisher said look, our demographic is disappearing. 17:11:18 What we have is a series of high professionals lawyers in particular who have majored in history in English, and they are the reader for the kind of work that you're doing. 17:11:29 And essentially, they're disappearing, and what we're seeing at the university presses, is that the people, this outside public that used to bolster the field is going. 17:11:41 And so there's a real problem in the field, in order for them. They explained it at the time to publish a hardback book and make their money back they needed to sell 500 copies, and what they said was that that demographic was hurting them, because at 17:11:57 the time in the United States, public university libraries were slashing their library budgets, which meant that the expected. 17:12:06 Five to 800 books that they used to sort of expect in the 1990s had was dropping to about 300. 17:12:13 And they really were having a hard time covering the costs of public publishing a monograph. Now, that might mean all monographs but this we're talking about our field here. 17:12:24 So that sort of began a long time ago, and we've been talking about that and those in the publishing field, we're talking about that that the actual public on that was buying serious monographs was disappearing, and so are the libraries. 17:12:39 Add now by the way I just want to put a note in America, the if you then talk to a commercial editor that the reading public that will buy a book that has footnotes is around 30,000 people and, you know, footnotes is not completely high bar but it's a 17:12:59 a bit of a high bar. That's the same number of sort of advanced readers that Portugal has the biggest market for on readers who will buy serious printed books is actually in Britain had a bigger one and has a bigger one in the US, not surprisingly, but 17:13:18 Japan, people still read like in the 1970s they reprint they reprint newspapers that the biggest print newspaper reading public in the world. I do a lot of work in Japan, and I so I deal with this situation they read books in the old way. 17:13:32 And it's pretty amazing and when they buy books they don't even review them online they just read them. So, that old world still exists in Japan, but I'm in America it's remarkably tiny and that may not be surprising either right that a country have more 17:13:47 than 300 million people has around 30,000 scholarly readers for a general audience. 17:13:56 Now that's one way of thinking about what a public is, but I want to now switch registers and talk about something else. 17:14:20 for what had been the sort of premier field which was early modern Europe, including Britain. I'm still including Britain and Europe for at least a year until we make the transition 17:14:27 that there was a time for example when a university like the University of Iowa was filled with famous early models, Rocky Sarah Hanley Horowitz who did Tudor England was a constitutional expert, they used to teach a British constitutional history in 17:14:42 America, they don't anymore and it might not surprise you either. 17:14:48 That's okay. 17:14:48 That's a sort of terrified laugh. Um, but, um, this field of positions started drying up as well slowly. 17:14:59 And this has happened at a rate, which obviously is not the same case in Britain and in Europe, where there is still a large market for national histories. 17:15:15 The Dutch want to hear about their early modern period the British want to hear about there's France is actually not doing very well. That's a whole other case, Italy has its own ecosystem. 17:15:21 But the way the ecosystem works and it's, it's, we could call it an ecosystem with a C or with a CH and Paul you can speak to this because you're one of these people with these positions at one of these premier places in America, there, there were and 17:15:33 back. 17:15:41 I'm speaking in past tense now because I'm not convinced it's the case anymore, these sort of great centers these great natural parks of early modern history. 17:15:50 I was at Princeton for a while and what we had there was a huge number of graduate students, when I was a postdoc at Princeton, there were anywhere from 12 to 35 early modernist graduate students, or postdocs on campus. 17:16:06 There is the Davis center. There was there on the Center for human values. There was French there was classics Patrice Hagen a was in French and he was great, great early modern intellectual historian and literary figure on Princeton was filled with early 17:16:23 modernist I mean we literally had a softball game I remember, I remember Ted Rab like insulting people who weren't playing I mean, not that Ted Rob knew anything about softball if you even remember who Ted Rob was, it was so big this whole world. 17:16:37 Now, what did that world mean it meant that everyone on campus, it meant that there was an internal market for book references, all those people were citing the big people on the campus, all the big professors who brought them down, or the reason this 17:16:52 is not supposed to be working, and yet somehow. Sorry, my father's managed to get through even though it's on. 17:16:59 And so, um, there was a citation market. 17:17:02 And so the people on these bigger campuses had more of an access to getting citations. 17:17:11 This sort of vast world. 17:17:14 Also remember if you wanted to get one of these positions, if you wanted to place your student, if you wanted any interaction with one of these great parks of early modern studies, you would have to interact with the people who are are and where the gatekeepers 17:17:29 to that. On that world is now precipitously disappearing. 17:17:35 I don't know what's happening at Stanford but I hear that at Princeton, there were large numbers of early modern students graduate students. That number has gone down to next to nothing. 17:17:47 Okay, what does that mean well in my own case, for example, for many years, my books were put on the reading list at the big graduate schools, and with all those students, it allowed ones work to be read. 17:18:00 Why is that important. Well, in the United States, if you're going up for tenure of promotion, the number of times you've been cited actually does matter. 17:18:09 I mean the 10 year process has become. 17:18:12 I think a little, You know I don't think it's that interesting anymore. But the fact is is that one's career was very much affected by one's relationship to the centers. 17:18:21 Okay. 17:18:24 As the number of graduate students disappears, the numbers of postdocs disappear. The number of fellows in all these centers at USC we have an early modern Study Center, that will not disappear, but its nature will change, we have a huge center for early 17:18:39 modern studies here with USC in the Huntington at one time and another or another you will hear run into many people doing early modern studies that might not disappear but already are postdocs, the postdocs that we can take in slowly, there's resistance 17:18:56 to letting the early modernists have that place. So, what we're seeing here is a kind of. 17:19:05 How can I say a disappearance of a core public this internal public. Now, you might argue that that public was not necessarily fair or democratic or legit, in many ways, but it was really important. 17:19:18 And as it disappears, as the graduate seminars in the big centers in America disappear so conferences will disappear to in the way that they've been held budgeting will disappear. 17:19:29 This won't happen immediately because so many early modernists were hired, but I can tell you looking at administration's. 17:19:37 They don't care about us that much, and they're not that interested in what we do at this point. So, I guess what I'd like to do is sort of give you know the canary in the, in the, you know in in the mind to European is that the American public, for what 17:19:54 we do is going to be disappearing in a profound way that I don't think people have completely seen already the reader ships, look interesting I sit on a prize committee at the AJ one of the best selling books this year in history in America was a book 17:20:10 about the Habsburgs. So, what the field is interested in is not necessarily what the reading public is interested in that's already a disconnect. 17:20:19 but for me the most important thing is our sort of in, in our republic of letters this sort of vast world that we live in is changing in the United States, in large ways. 17:20:29 I'm really interested to hear and what I'm, I'm interested to hear sort of policy thoughts about this but I'm also interested to hear what people in Britain and around the world think about what will happen to our field. 17:20:43 If it and as it dries up and really starts to disappear as we knew it in the United States. 17:20:50 So that was kind of that was just a sort of quick overview, and I haven't given statistics or anything like that but it's it's pretty real and it's pretty grave, and it's gotten really bad in the past three or four years. 17:21:04 And so, again, the kind of department, you have a Birmingham is not something we will see in the United States, in the future. 17:21:11 Thank you. 17:21:15 So I guess the know you get a sense of why I thought Jay gotta go first I think he was kind of sense Oh, from speaking to him before that it was going to be a more of a, you know, why are we having this panel, why do we need to have a panel Why is it 17:21:26 worth having a conversation about who are the audiences and it's precisely because a lot of people are feeling that sense of crisis. 17:21:35 Around the way that things have been in work that would already wasn't that way. 15 years ago and was clearly not that way. Five years ago or 10 years ago, but I would like to invite Laura Paull if you have anything to ask her point out about precisely 17:21:49 about the questions that Jake has raised, or the points that I have things to raise as well. 17:21:56 But would you like to come in on this. 17:22:02 Laura's gesturing to me so maybe I'll just jump in for a moment, I mean, I think Jake has painted a pretty accurate picture of things that have gone on in our academic lives right because I've been, you know, I was a grad student in the 1980s, and, you 17:22:15 know, so I've also been, you know, both observing and participating in these changes and, you know, I think, on the one hand, I'm always heartened by the resilience I mean let me kind of say to the other side of this right for those of us who are in situations 17:22:29 where you might have an opportunity to make a difference, you know, every time one persuades a department and administration to invest in pre modern studies and that is the broader category pre modern studies, right, We're all as I like to joke we're 17:22:48 all post antique because we're not yet in classics though somebody might like to put us there. 17:22:55 And but we certainly are pre modern studies for a lot of the way we're perceived when you look at this aerial view. And so every time we have an opportunity to show why it matters why it will be a value why students are interested, why it makes a really 17:23:11 strong program. 17:23:14 You know, we fight back a bit at this idea that you know it could all go away and you know we could just have departments that focus on the 19th century to, you know tomorrow. 17:23:28 Right. And so, so this is one of the things about what a difference it makes to kind of get places to see that yes they should still invest in this. and that investment is not only within the discipline of history, but across the board right so a lot 17:23:42 of us who've been watching what happens to the interdisciplinary what is happening to art history what is happening to literature, you know to music departments. 17:23:52 You know the difference of one or two strong hires you know less than it would have been in the mid, you know, the it the height of this field in the 70s 80s into the 90s less than it would have been then, um, but more than it could be if we don't, you 17:24:09 know, if an art proactive about insisting on the value of this. That's what continues to make a healthy and robust field. I mean, maybe I will just add sort of really briefly about what I thought when I was a graduate student, moving to the next phase 17:24:26 at the end of the 1980s you know having been in one of these really large Programs at the University of California Berkeley, and I thought you know going out, you know, in the not too distant future, getting a job in the Renaissance, the reformation, 17:24:46 a tutor Stuart England up, you know, 18th century friends. 17:24:51 This is going to be irrelevant right we're all going to be early modernist of one kind or another we might as well start preparing for that will insisting on the value of whatever our particular specialty was. 17:25:04 And, you know, there were intellectual opportunities about not only studying the Renaissance which for me was the starting point for my own interests, and also doing other fields such as the history of science and medicine. 17:25:18 But, but, but it also was very clear to that that that will be intellectual opportunity was talking across all of these fields and thinking very much about what two different how to define you know what registered called famously in an article the early 17:25:31 modern model. 17:25:33 When he was thinking about this and you know wrote read his thought pieces on that. That said, there were opportunities but yes, there were also costs right what would be the status of some of these individual subjects that had bed as Jake said flagship 17:25:45 subjects. So that's been a question that has been on my mind basically since I left graduate school. 17:25:51 I want to thank Jake for raising it and and sort of laying outlining the whole ecosystem right of publishing and community and scholarship and you know how these things all intersect. 17:26:04 So let me turn this back to Laura and Noah to see if they have any, any further remarks right now. 17:26:10 I think, thanks very much. Jacob I'm corner that that's really interesting to get the comparison with, you know, what's happening in the states and thinking about what's happening here. 17:26:20 And although I think these, the language we use might be slightly different I think you can see lots of very similar kind of squeezes and trends and things that are happening over here. 17:26:31 And I was really pleased that you mentioned medievalists I'm kind of thinking of ourselves as pre modernist, and I think that's really important, and I'm a UK institution where we do have a very strong set of medieval so medieval Research Center, and 17:26:46 I'm a UK institution where we do have a very strong set of medieval medieval Research Center, and they're actually very aware and very kind of on the ball, about the need to fight their corner and to make sure that we're still hiring medalists when when 17:26:56 posts come up. And I think they're quite savvy but we could learn a lot from them. 17:26:59 But it also raised this this other question about the importance of articulating how necessary pre modern history is if you want to teach modern history, and that our modernist colleagues really need to be on board with, you know, making sure that they 17:27:15 have the ecosystem stays healthy, by, you know, recognizing that it can only work if we're all in there. 17:27:21 ecosystem stays healthy, by, you know, recognizing that it can only work if we're all in there. And so I won't say anything more now but I found that really interesting. Thank you. 17:27:27 I guess I should a little bit of forth these two worlds since I was trained in the states and know that world event but I I work here now and I think that there are some real differences, I think, Jake was alluding to some of them, the persistence of 17:27:39 interest in national histories, which I think is really important and I think it's something that we see, you know, Jake was saying oh it's a robust history department but as you know we often say, well, but you know look, look how unbalanced we are towards 17:27:51 England, you know we wish we had early modern is to we're working in other fields and trying to make that kind of case. 17:27:57 But of course it's true that what in some ways what keeps the enrollments coming which is really what allows the fields to exist as they do, or is it the fact that these are national histories and there is there for some kind of public for them which 17:28:10 wouldn't expect it in every other place from every other place and that ultimately this question, I was, you know, thinking about undergraduate enrollments and how those sorts of things are going on, which are partly a question of early modern having 17:28:23 a smaller share but is also a question of at least in American departments which are about history departments having a smaller share, and we're always thinking about oh well, how many people want to come and study history at all, much less do anything. 17:28:37 Do other sorts of things and that's something that we we pay a lot of attention to. 17:28:41 We have the educated public, which is an undergraduate public that's grown up. 17:28:46 We have a scholarly public which can only exist at the educated at the undergraduate public, I also exists, you know, and just to teach them. 17:29:00 My question or, you know, based on what what would shake his head is, is there anyone else we could be talking to. Is there any other group of people who are interested in these kinds of things. 17:29:05 And, and, you know, one group of people that I've always, you know, and this is sort of pulls off the question about, you know, making the case to modernist just to think about the place of early modern history and early modern studies in the intellectual 17:29:20 life of a university more generally you know what is to what extent is it valuable or valued by people working in other kinds of departments. And I think that's also something that I struggle with and don't really understand, and I think varies a lot, 17:29:33 but it's something that is worth paying attention to and I was wondering, take the other thing is think about that anything to say about that. 17:29:43 I was just actually thinking how you make that case to a administration it's basically run by McKinsey I mean they don't care. 17:29:54 They don't care. Um, I think that will by the way also I mean I actually, I hope no one's offended I consider medievalist to be early modernists I consider even though the fields are different and they're completely intertwined. 17:30:04 So, um, I what I have been seeing is we're still able to do some hires around the university, but there is no sympathy for us and I have seen. By the way, the one thing that really is amazing and Paul mentioned this is the undergrads love the early modern 17:30:24 stuff, and they love it and they, and I hate to say it, they love the cheesy stuff Renaissance Florence, 14th, the stream in for that stuff. There's not a problem with the undergraduates there's just not. 17:30:36 Um, I will say, I'm colleagues in the history department I'm no longer in the history department. Most of our early modernists aren't because there was a move. 17:30:44 There was an angry reaction towards it. For various reasons that one can imagine. 17:30:50 And so in Art University many early monitors have been pushed out of the department on the richness is now in all these other departments. And that's an issue, one might see that. 17:31:02 I mean, I know, colleagues of Paul it might be moving actually out of the, the humanities into the social sciences, it. It's strange. I don't know I'm not feeling good about it, but I don't think as Paul said, I think it's the end of the world. 17:31:15 I do think it's the end of the world as we knew it in the United States, I think we will hold on the one thing that gives me hope so many phenomenal young people have been hired on that we can hold on and do really great work. 17:31:28 One thing I want to just a little anecdote about nine or 10 years ago, the idea was floated of doing a kind of degree in early modern studies between USC and UCLA. 17:31:38 Those who saw the writing on the wall on that our numbers were just dropping and we couldn't run a program or PhD program with a cohort, like we used to and that one for UCLA as well, their, their department on their early modern Studies Department has 17:31:52 also been partially decimated on and that got off the ground and then then crashed and never happened and I think that was really bad, because we. The idea was that it'd be impossible to give a PhD outside of history, and we create a department outside 17:32:06 of history which I didn't have problems with, because we could have made it super interdisciplinary with all the other departments. And I think that was like a visionary idea, UCLA was on board with it and remarkably USC that had less strength, although 17:32:20 I think now we might have more strength in early modern on was against it, but I still think that might have been the way to think about it, because there's so much generalized wealth as the history departments, thin out. 17:32:34 But as far as talking to the administrators, um, maybe at Stanford there's still some humanity up there here was being recorded. That's wonderful. I forgot where verify it's really great. 17:32:47 But I think it's a harder case to make. 17:32:52 To put it in recorded terms. Um, So yeah, I'm really really concerned. At the same time, I think we're just going to have to operate differently, but when we're talking about Publix, and I think as far as Publix go sure we're going to have people across 17:33:08 the departments that we all do work together, and that's really wonderful. And that's where a lot of the wealth of the experience comes from. But as far as our Publix go and I do think for younger colleagues, and I know in Britain that you have your production 17:33:22 production machine right you have to produce these articles on that are cited and people have complained to me about this. And I've always been sort of horrified by it, but that world is going to get harder to navigate as the Citation Machine in the United 17:33:37 States breaks down or changes in in drastic ways. And I, I sit on the the the highest committee for promotion, they're always doing Google Scholar to check people out for citations and compare it to social scientists, we don't have this kind of, you know, 17:33:54 um, you know micro changes in this or that or the other 1400 References we don't have that, it just doesn't our fields don't work like that. 17:34:03 But the way they do work is going to break down and I can foresee a time when you're sitting in front of a provost on with a 10 year profile and they're like there are. 17:34:13 I mean I actually look at some of my colleagues in early modern studies around the country, and their references are shrinking. And I'm like this is crazy. 17:34:21 They're shrinking to a vast are incredibly compared to the way it was. So I do think there's a crisis, I do think we have to respond to it. Um, and I do think we're going to actually have to get creative. 17:34:34 And I do think there will be places that survive better than others one note we haven't made no you noted being at a public university in america i hark back to Iowa, the state of Iowa, used to be a kind of semi progressive place. 17:34:48 It is really not anymore. There's not a law in Iowa that if you cannot ask a student to wear a mask in your office on the idea that young people will want to go into the field and take a job at Iowa which used to be a wonderful center of early modern 17:35:04 studies is not that realistic I wouldn't send my kid to Iowa to live. It's too too scary actually with the laws of the anti Vax thing the whole thing it's just too crazy. 17:35:18 Um, so what we're seeing is those people who are in unfriendly territory in the United States are dealing with universities that have boards of regions were extremely hostile. 17:35:29 I would say that one of the ways early modern would survive would be by far right wing strategy which is sort of horrifying. So, America is in worse shape I think that those parts of the field. 17:35:40 I don't know what's going to happen out there in places like that, but I didn't mention that before because I didn't want to become. 17:35:47 I didn't want to get into the doom thing but here we go right. 17:35:51 It is pretty scary. It's not going to get better in the United States and in any term, and everyone in those public universities in red states, you know, on there's a whole thing about textbooks in Virginia and what's just happened in the last month is 17:36:03 just literally mind boggling. They're teaching that like slave owners were nice and high schools again in Virginia. 17:36:10 Like, it's completely nuts. 17:36:11 So, Yeah we're gonna we're just beginning this that's my sense, and it's going to be, you know, USC we're dealing with a corporate administration and and public states they're dealing with politics that are, to say the least horrifying. 17:36:29 So, sorry, sorry, sorry I'm sorry to get negative, it's early in the morning here, I can still work my way out of it maybe if anyone needs a reference to Samaritans the anti suicide charity after Jake's discussion I have it I can put it in the chat. 17:36:44 I'm hoping that you know it's it's all up from here, it's all from here, Laura how tell us how to save ourselves we need to save ourselves Laura, what's the answer. 17:36:54 And I'm not sure I'm quite cut out to fulfill this role, you've given me but I'll give it a shot and. And what I'm going to be talking about are picking up on what Jacob was saying about operating differently, and actually kind of zooming in a bit and 17:37:09 just thinking about different types of audiences that we, we might engage with. I'm talking as the co author of the many headed monster, which is a blog on early modern history that's 10 years old this year. 17:37:21 And it's a blog with four co authors. All of us are early modern historians at UK institutions. 17:37:27 That includes Jonathan Willis so I can see here hi Jonathan. 17:37:31 And we also host contributions from guest bloggers. And so you might be thinking is 2010, why is somebody being so retro and kind of popping up and talking about blogging and well. 17:37:44 The reason is because from its inception, our aim with the monster was to reach broader audiences and to try to engage people who would not read journal articles and academic monographs but might read a blog. 17:37:59 So the types of history that we discuss the format that we use the tone of the writing style of writing is all intended to be much more accessible and engaging for non specialist. 17:38:09 So what I want to do is to kind of offer some reflections on how that's gone and tools that make some suggestions about digital platforms more broadly and how that might open up new audiences. 17:38:21 And I'm going to drop a load of links into the chat now. And so if you do, if you're not familiar with the blog, and he wants to kind of look at some of the things I might mention then you can just use those links to find the material, and so has the 17:38:33 blog, extending the reach of our research, does it enable anyone history to travel to New and perhaps even more public audiences. 17:38:42 It's a very hard question to answer, but we do have the crude data that relates to the number of views that we receive on particular posts and over time. 17:38:57 So if we look at those stats, it's clear that we do reach a much bigger audience and we would do with traditional academic publishing. 17:39:15 All 375 posts have wrapped up more than half a million views, the past decade, and that isn't, kind of, you know, it's hard to exactly that do people actually read things when they click on posts. 17:39:14 You know how many, how many people are just kind of clicking on it and clicking like we don't know. But, you know, either not knowing that that's still a very high level of engagement. 17:39:24 So we average about four between four and 5000 views a month. 17:39:29 Now, for information about websites that refer viewers to us, the comments that we get on the blog and from engagement on Twitter, we have a bit of a sense of what the different groups of readers are that are looking at the blog. 17:39:41 So firstly, yes many posts are being used by tutors in teaching. So lots of years of directed through from electronic learning environments like Blackboard, and particularly during the pandemic when lots of people were looking for asynchronous activities, 17:39:56 blog posts were clearly being used in that kind of context. 17:40:01 And secondly, yes, lots of other early modernists read the blog, I'm always meeting people and they say, Oh, I really like your blog right now about the blog. 17:40:10 So you know, anecdotally, that that's definitely happening. 17:40:13 And, but significantly a large number of our readers are not an early modernists, so they're particularly people that study later periods. And, you know, as, as we've already kind of mentioned, I think this is really important. 17:40:26 It obviously opens up new potential for research connections, but it's a way of making kind of articulating the importance of the exciting what is happening in the early modern fields, and alerting our colleagues to that. 17:40:42 And many of our themes series have also engaged, and lots of multidisciplinary discussion. 17:40:48 Not always on the blog itself so sometimes these conversations are happening on Twitter, when people are sharing the posts and then kind of discussing them on there, and but for example we did a series on period ization which brought in a whole range 17:41:00 of perspectives from people working on different parts of the globe. And, you know, we're all specialists in England, but this was a much broader than that. 17:41:10 But we also had geographers classicists and even some scientists who were kind of pitching in saying oh that's really interesting that's not how we think about the past at all. 17:41:19 So, you know, getting those kinds of discussion discussions going. So it's definitely putting our research in front of other scholars who wouldn't come in contact with it elsewhere. 17:41:30 Now that doesn't mean that a large part of our audience is traditional in the sense that we're talking about people that are in higher education contexts. 17:41:38 But it also looks like blogging has the capacity to reach further than that. 17:41:42 So, particularly here I'm thinking about people who end up on the margins of professional academia. So we might be talking about students who are daunted by hierarchies hidden curriculum and distance learners who face physical obstacles to navigate that 17:41:58 particularly scholars who are not officially attached to universities, and who were there for denied access to many of those, those resources. 17:42:06 So, a blog can be an alternative to attending a big conference, and we do a lot of online symposia, which are basically not a kind of streamed or recorded event that you publish the, the talks as papers online, and then you encourage discussion in the 17:42:24 comments. And so he's online symposia to provide opportunities to bring scholars together. And obviously you don't need institutional funding to do that, and temporary contracts can often make it difficult to access that kind of funding. 17:42:39 This also has a very small carbon footprints which might be something that's worth thinking about. 17:42:44 But the online platform I think also can provide a kind of more stable and permanent research community, that might be impossible to build up when you're on short term contracts or when you just have a brief affiliation with a particular research center. 17:42:57 So you can kind of create these scholarly communities. 17:43:02 And there's clear signs that blogging can have a role in including those people on the more marginal parts of the Academy in your conversations. If you do that, and of course this is a lesson that's been very firmly reinforced by the switch to online 17:43:14 moving lots of our research activities online and hosting events, much like this one which are obviously much more inclusive, or candy. And not everybody gets on well with online things so we also need to be aware of that. 17:43:28 And. 17:43:30 But the other thing I would say is that there are also indications that beyond that, that wants to can reach other audiences that are less kind of associated with higher education. 17:43:41 We know that librarians archivists museums, create that music museum curators managers historical novelists playwrights actors, musicians, and other people have read our posts. 17:43:52 museum curators managers historical novelists playwrights actors, musicians, and other people have read our posts. And we've had positive feedback from the people that Jacob described as an external public so history graduates who, you know, continue to think about history and 17:44:03 to think about history and read about history, or perhaps return to it in retirement and might be thinking about taking and doing an MA or a postgraduate degree. 17:44:12 And so, we know that that that kind of lifelong learning category, and certainly being captured by our viewers. 17:44:21 And we also have numerous opportunities that have opened up to us as a result of the blogs and people contacting us and saying, we've read the blog, would you like to write for our sixth form magazine. 17:44:31 And so, you know, taking this into schools. I've been asked to write to the folklore Thursday blog which is a sort of, you know, anything to do with supernatural beliefs, And what I work on. 17:44:42 And so it kind of opens up different opportunities to then reach more people in different kinds of formats. 17:44:50 So it's clear that the blog can create a bridge between the academy and broad audiences, but this is all very specific, and it all relates to just one blog that was set up 10 years ago. 17:44:59 So I want to finish by thinking about the general direction of blogging and it's relevant for our discussion today. 17:45:05 And so what I did was I started off by running a very unscientific poll on Twitter, asking did people read history blogs and 145 people responded. And 27% said they regularly, read history blogs, 54% said they occasionally read history blogs and 19% said 17:45:25 they never did. So that's roughly 81% of people saying they still read blogs and confirming my suspicion that there is life in the old blog, yet if you will permit me to make a terrible job. 17:45:38 But yeah, but the point being is the history blogging has really changed over the past 10 years. So, I think, and this is impressionistic, but I think the blogs have become more institutionalized. 17:45:49 So the tone and the focus is much more academic if you, if you will. So rather than individual academics or independent researchers using a format to experiment to be creative to uncover unusual topics to be playful and the most common blogs that I come 17:46:05 across now, are those that are linked to ongoing research projects or research centers, and that people presenting their research or whatever they're currently working on. 17:46:14 So that means that they're a great place to keep up with current research, but I think it marks the trend, whereby blogging is becoming just another academic forum, albeit one that is freedom accessible to anyone. 17:46:27 we were connected computer. 17:46:29 But it's the train, which I think tends to restrict the audience for those blogs to people with a more formal academic training, and it replicates traditional forms of scholarship. 17:46:39 So this leads me to my broader point which is that there's a very important difference between giving people access to something, and actually making something accessible. 17:46:49 So just making research more widely available will not automatically expand your audience. Current history blogs are often written and packaged for our peers we're talking still to people within our field and posting an extract of a conference page online 17:47:05 will not have the same effect as a post that is conceived and pitched with a broader audience in mind, making your event hybrid will allow more people to attend. 17:47:16 But will it brought in the range of people that are actually attending. 17:47:20 Will it be free, where and how are you going to advertise your hybrid event. Who do you want it to reach. Are you inviting different audiences into your conversation or are you just expand it and say you know your your event in the same kinds of people. 17:47:37 So having access to something is not the same thing as making it accessible, we need to be aware of that when we're using digital platforms. Don't assume that you're naturally going to attract a wider audience, because that will take work to do that. 17:47:50 So, it is true, it is not 2010 anymore so I'm not going to recommend to everybody that you should start up your own blog I think that moment has has moved on that cater to the school bus in the pros and cons of using online and digital platforms. 17:48:13 But we need to be more self conscious about what we're already doing. And then thinking about how with a little bit of extra work we might make that more accessible in a more meaningful way by thinking about who we're trying to actually talk to. 17:48:29 Thank you I have I have lots of things to say but I'd like to invite Chicken, Chicken politic come in on that first 17:48:38 part you want to go first. 17:48:41 Oh, well you know i anyway I think Laura has really offered us stellar example of, you know, the kinds of things that organically grow out of the changing ways we communicate, not only with each other but with a sort of unknown and often undefined audience 17:48:58 until as you say you do the experiment, and you do the experiment for a while long enough to begin to get to know the potential audiences. And so, I find myself thinking you know you've offered me not offered but co created such a really interesting example 17:49:14 of something that succeeds. That of course it invites us to think about what for people who, you know, might be thinking, what would I go out into now what would you if you were doing this now, you know, starting it from ground zero and 2022, how would 17:49:30 you go about a project like this now I'd love to hear you talk about that Laura. 17:49:36 Wow, big, big question and I mean the main thing that has changed to me is in the UK I think we all really struggling with workload. So, for all of us we don't write as often as we used to for the monster because we just can't find the time to do it, 17:49:53 or rather we can't prioritize it enough so you know the pressure on outputs, and the fact that our institutions don't really kind of factor this into promotion or thinking about career progression or things like that means that you don't put it at the 17:50:06 top of your priority list and then it just, just gets neglected. 17:50:09 So, if I was, was thinking about doing again I think I'd have to think really seriously about what my intentions were in doing that. And if my intention was like, I do want to try to reach lots of broader audiences and then I could build some kind of 17:50:24 an impact case study, which will make sense if you know about the research excellence framework in the UK. 17:50:31 And that's something that was which will be recognized by your institution and it will be work loaded and it will count towards career progression. So you could use it as a route to something else but I think I'd have to think very carefully about whether 17:50:43 the time and effort that's needed to create the thing would have been worth it. I mean, the other thing I would say is that I don't think it would have been anywhere near as successful had it not been collaborative to the fact that there were four of 17:50:56 us that were able to contribute and that each of us could then pick up the slack, when we had the time, and could take a lead on on various different things and share, share that workload has definitely made it made it possible and sustained it across 17:51:10 the years, I suppose, one of the things that that you might, might be thinking of, or that might be a good way to think of this is if you had a particular theme or an area that you were trying to sort of carve out, as you know, this is an important and 17:51:26 growing interesting area in my field, and I'd like to start lots of conversations. And, you know, run events and workshops around that. And also collect resources that could be used by other people to them research in a similar area. 17:51:40 That might be something that could be very rewarding so kind of networking thing. 17:51:45 But that would obviously be very kind of academic facing rather than trying to reach those audiences, so that I don't think I have necessarily have any answers apart from things that I wouldn't do, which might be useful to think about as well. 17:52:00 So Laura, are you officially an influencer that's actually a serious question, like do people, or no I'm gonna it's leading to somebody that so does that look like you're called know. 17:52:12 I think a lot of my colleagues probably don't even know that I write a blog. 17:52:27 But, so I'm working in this, this, it's an app, right, it's called. It's called threaded books, and what they initially did is they hired scholars to write comments on books and I'm doing the Wealth of Nations because one of my missions right now is to 17:52:34 sort of end the Smith myths, there's so many. Um, but what they had had all these different books and they've gotten scholars and people, and I yesterday said to someone Hey you should get on and do this. 17:52:45 And they said oh they've stopped hiring scholars, like, as they were building the app they realized that scholars didn't know how to talk to people online. 17:52:54 What they're doing is they're getting influencers and influencers are people and they said most of them are people that didn't get jobs in academics, but have gone online, and have these huge followings and know how to speak to the online public I was 17:53:08 like whoa so I immediately called up credible and I said, am I already out of date, like, before we even go online and they said possibly. 17:53:17 And so we started talking about what it would take to do this and what they're finding is that, as they test these things, they're reading public. Once you to make sort of comments that are emotional about works, which is, you know, scary as a scholar 17:53:34 to do. And then I said look I don't feel comfortable doing that even though I do it because I said all these mean things about Adam Smith on the phone call and they're like, that's what needed to go into your comments I'm like, I can't write that kind 17:53:44 of stuff in a scholarly format, you know, and then they said, Well, how about this. What if you have these things that are called like I think rooms or something and you go in and you get part of your audience to read the book with you. 17:53:58 And then you do this but over and over again they kept saying like, what we're looking for. Our influencers that are bringing with them, not just a following because one of the other historians has like hundreds of thousands of followers and I actually 17:54:13 don't like social media because I find it terrifying and I get super upset and I, inevitably say something that gets me in trouble right because I get so upset about it and whole thing and so emotional. 17:54:26 Um, but, um, they said it was not just people with followings that wasn't enough. It was people that had really good interactive followings that knew how to talk to this public. 17:54:38 The one thing I your blog is fantastic and I think we really do need more of that because especially now right that people are really online and young people like my kids. 17:54:49 That's how they're going to see stuff they're not you know I hand them books pretty forcefully, I don't think that happens in many households these days right people are skimming things, and, um, but there's this idea of what kind of conversation will 17:55:05 you have as a kind of online influencer and I will say this, that began to make me feel a little bit sad, but I do see the potential in it, because it was very much reality show emotions, immediate emotions were what they were going after. 17:55:21 And at first I was sad about it and then I was like, well, but you know it's not like that, Voltaire wasn't thinking about that the 18th century, I mean this idea. 17:55:31 The modern academic is writing in a way that has nothing to do with the way scholars were writing in the 16th and 17th and 18th and centuries and even before that you were sad because that was your emotional reaction to them. 17:55:44 You could have. You could have told me that I was like, and then I was kind of like hey maybe I could do that but it sounds stressful because, because it's just like, because there's always that moment where you have to say to some of the public, I can't 17:55:57 say that you're you We can't say that in a scholarly way, that's something we can actually, we can feel that way, but we can't say that and that always happens in these sort of wider forums I find, were like well that's that's a thought and a feeling 17:56:10 it's not like something that you can say as a fact, and again in America we're having those issues in Britain too but I do think that I think we're you're saying that it's a problem that your blog. 17:56:22 I mean, I think, I think it's fantastic that you can do both things like it's super important to keep the scholarly footing, and then to reach out, so that it doesn't turn into a kind of reality show feelings fast, but can still raised emotions and still 17:56:39 bring people in, I think that that balances, from what I've been working with super hard to do. And if you can pull that off, I don't know, it's obviously what we need. 17:56:49 I mean it's really important. 17:56:50 Yeah, and I think this comes back to that question of who who you're trying to talk to. And I never think of myself as I just want you know I want everybody to love a long history as much as I do, because they just won't you know that's never going to 17:57:06 unless you resort. Yeah, kind of the entertaining side of it which is something that, you know, pure entertainment, if you want to do that just write historical fiction and then you can, you know, you can pursue that. 17:57:21 And, but in terms of thinking about it okay it grows out of an existing interest that people have so you're trying to engage those people. 17:57:26 And that might be people who studied history at university, it might be people that belong to the local Historical Association. 17:57:33 It might just be people are interested in the history of the local region or whatever it is. 17:57:45 I do because I don't think I am because I don't think I'm very good at. Sort of like getting stuff to go viral saying a witty thing about which caught that you know will be picked up and, and we'll get 10s of thousands of people engaging with it. 17:57:56 So I do have decent Twitter following, but almost all of us, the many headed monster authors got on Twitter, to promote the blog. That was why I initially joined Twitter because there were lots of other bloggers who also want to say you were sharing the 17:58:10 links to your place and then commenting and discussing things on there. 17:58:15 And that's very much why I'm still on there because, again, it takes a lot of work so it's a it takes time to do that kind of stuff and I assume if you're an influencer, you have, you know, you need to take that time to think about how to package the 17:58:28 message and how you're going to get people to click on it and like it. 17:58:32 And then if you've also got people saying to you but we'd like you to engage with it in a different way and to think about emotions or to read your book with people. 17:58:40 Again, it's, it's more work and I think it would take, certainly protect me in a direction that they're not not pursuing because it doesn't fit with so much of what my employer expects me to be doing, which I think is why it often ends up being people 17:59:02 whose last last decade, academic, the academic world who then have a bit more time and can can put in the work to make that happen. And so once the reference to a bit, a bit mixed in there, the chat there. 17:59:06 And that's somebody I think, Andy customers is gone part time possibly or may have left academia, but that's what's allowing him to be able to put the work in there and said, You know it's interesting, I'm Jake I'm afraid I'm really conscious of the time 17:59:21 it's six o'clock we got to get through before people have to go home and take care of their stuff will come back to it in the general discussion, bring it back. 17:59:28 I'm going to pull up please bring asleep bring us your comments before we before we run out of. 17:59:33 Oh, I'm just I'm enjoying this where we're going. Now at this point. All right, but I will bring some comments and. 17:59:40 In light of, I thought about a few different things to talk about. And, but let me just start with this so I just filled out my annual review forum, you know, sometime around the winter holidays that we have to do our equivalent of the ref. 17:59:55 And I noticed that our Dean actually asked a new question and one notices because these forms never ask new questions they always ask the same questions. 18:00:04 So, the new question was, that they have decided in, at the end of 2021 that they would finally after you know decades and centuries of not asking this question asked us to put down, what kinds of public contributions to knowledge, so that they could 18:00:20 account for this aspect of our work now so of course I paid attention to this and I thought to myself, well so what have I done in the past year. that was a public contribution to knowledge and. 18:00:33 And this of course has been a particularly rich period for certain aspects of my field that aren't primarily what I'm going to talk about it because I did know it decided to talk about the museum. 18:00:46 So that's primarily what I'm going to talk about, because I've had a much longer relationship to that than the kind of public history I actually wrote down on the storm. 18:00:56 At the end of 2021 because, like many people who do the early history of science and medicine, I have been teaching and talking about plague, a lot, not just a little, but a lot I've talked about it in the bassoon review I talked about it in the public. 18:01:11 You know in the public history of view I've talked about it on the radio I've talked about it in interviews I've done daytime classes I've been asked, in fact this evening I'm doing the second round of a Continuing Studies class that they asked me to 18:01:25 do. So, that of course was my answer this particular period, I hope in some not too distant future to be say I have been talking and writing endlessly about playing things to cope it, but it is an example I think of one of the other things that I think 18:01:42 a lot about which is to what degree are we willing to deploy our expertise to engage with timely issues. And the answer is not always for all sorts of good reasons including what Laura just said in response to the conversation about the blog how much 18:01:59 time management how much time Can we put into these things, relative to the things that we must do each day or each week you know for our jobs and our lives. 18:02:09 And so one can't respond to everything. So the question becomes, when is it worth doing that. This certainly has been a period in which has been which it has been worth doing that but also even for me I will say, intellectually, interesting. 18:02:23 You know, I literally when we did the 48 hour bug out at Stanford. In March of 2020, no and literally 48 hours notice that not with no sense of when we'd be back in our offices I thought okay. 18:02:38 Besides this, that and the other for teaching or for some possibly imminent but soon to be delayed publication project. I of course took my copy book conscious to Cameron because I knew separate from any of the public history that I have subsequently 18:02:51 done since then, almost two years ago, I knew that personally, I would like to reread this and I was hardly alone right but number of sales of Boccaccio can move to fo gone on I think Manzoni not so much, you know, because lots of people not just people 18:03:09 with PhDs who do early modern or medieval history but lots of people have thought they'd like to read those plague novels and. But of course, for me it was a prelude of thinking, you know, I've taught this stuff for years in all sorts of ways, but never 18:03:24 have I thought about it during a pandemic right what has been missing for me is to think about you know these historical episodes in light of that. 18:03:32 Alright, so that was my answer to the brand new question on the institutional form what are my public contributions to knowledge was to talk about how I had contributed there in a variety of ways. 18:03:46 And gladly though again I hope not to do that but what I what I have spent much more time thinking about over the years. And so it did seem appropriate Noah to, to talk about this is about early modern history and the museum, you know, for a variety of 18:04:03 both accidental and not so accidental reasons I'm one of the historians who've worked a lot with museums, and that's not true most historians it's much more natural to art historians right art historians become curators historians, mostly don't. 18:04:20 Um, and, and so our relationship to the kind of past in the museum is not as obvious. Though I think there has been a sea change in that in other words I think the number of historians who in some way have thought about museums, as intersecting with their 18:04:36 work as being a possible venue sometimes for aspects of the research, you know in public history that we do is greater rather than lesser so here's an interesting instance of a game, perhaps, and then we can sort of think about where it fits into the 18:04:51 broader conversation that we're having. 18:04:54 Um, so, what we have, let me just say a few things to start on this brief reflection. One is that we have never been early modern in the museum. 18:05:04 When have you gone, or heard or seen a museum exhibit that was about the early modern The answer is pretty much almost never right. 18:05:15 That is a reminder that that early modern category doesn't translate to that kind of public history right no one's going to go and see the early modern painting. 18:05:26 Nobody is going to go and see the early modern house. 18:05:31 You know, the early modern whatever in the museum that will not draw them so that language already the language that we have framed this in that we take to be Fq medically as well as intellectually, the framework of institutional teaching communities 18:05:46 etc just is absent. So I have spent my whole career thinking about the absence and presence of the early modern in the museum because in the end the other statement one can make is, and yet. 18:06:01 And yet, dot dot dot early modern is everywhere in the museum, right, even as the discipline of art history is veering heavily at times quite politically towards the modern and contemporary right so you know we're not here to talk about that crisis in 18:06:18 our history, but it is equally real and profound and difficult, both in the you know in universities, but also in museums. 18:06:29 So, The early modern is everywhere in these museums, and that means that one of the ways that we can continue to, to think about what our audiences are and what are the topics that can expand our audiences is tied to all of these fascinating puzzling, 18:06:51 and ultimately alluring objects that are there the objects of early maternity. So, you know, I consider myself fortunate to be part of an interdisciplinary community that is concerned with those objects of early modernity and writes about the end times 18:07:28 is 18:07:28 how you know, how does this happen to me. 18:07:33 First of all, like why did I do that and just just for those who don't know some of you already know this about me and and what have I learned doing this now for over 30 years. 18:07:44 Um, and so I got interested in museums for very accidental and serendipitous reasons which is, I, I grew up in a small town about an hour and a half north of New York City I didn't grow up in California though I've lived here my entire adult life. 18:08:02 And when I was in college, a house on the edge of town, decided that it might try to become a museum they already had a music festival there the owners had died, it was being put into a trust, and they got some funding to hire a few college students to 18:08:19 help them figure out how to do tours of the materials in this house without yet knowing whether it would become a museum and it didn't they still give house tours, but there was this period they were going to try to make museum so I had in retrospect 18:08:34 to the highly unusual experience of working in a space that was trying to become a museum. 18:08:41 And one of the reasons I got the job along with a couple of friends was not only that I showed up at the right time. But I also had been taking a lot of classes in Medieval and Renaissance studies and that was one of several areas that they had stuff 18:08:55 right so they had some medieval Renaissance stuff. And you know, and it was this eclectic you know place right one of these house means people had, you know, each room was from, you know, a French Chateau in 18th century, you know, you know, English orient 18:09:11 Talia in the dining room Baroque wood ceiling and you know the music room I mean it was a complete hodgepodge. And that of course then there was this interesting challenge because we were basically helping them think about how to make up an interesting 18:09:25 tour of these things. So I had that experience you know I worked there for several summers. And then I went after graduate school, not in the least thinking that I will work on the history of museums and collecting, but having really fallen in love with 18:09:41 the idea of doing you know late medieval Renaissance early modern studies with all that that came with that. 18:09:48 And yet. 18:09:51 In the first year of graduate school poking around for some research paper that had nothing to do, in some obvious way anyway with museums, I found an old book from the 1950s about the origins of museums that had a few bad reproductions of pictures that 18:10:08 are now iconic right of some of these, these, these engravings of cabinets of curiosities, so I didn't find the cabinet of curiosity in the museum I found it in a book in graduate school. 18:10:20 I'm in a book of course about museums, and one that that revealed something that none of the then fairly sparse literature about the history of museums could tell you because I thought the museum was basically a 19th century institution and what this 18:10:35 book told me in a very cryptic you know way because it wasn't a deeply researched book was that there was an earlier history that in fact the early modern period was quite important to this. 18:10:46 So, this has sent me on a very long expresses to find the original artifacts that had these engravings because I fell in love with what they looked like, you know, with what with, with these were for me the first alluring objects in many ways, and to 18:11:02 them begin to work on them and to then begin to see, you know, what this field was that, in retrospect I can say was a field in the making that had not yet happened the field of museum studies, and the role of early modern history in the field of museum 18:11:17 studies. 18:11:19 So then, when can sort of say fast forward not that long after that to what I discovered as I began as I made the decision that I was going to in fact write a dissertation in this area and explore this material and go in search of the people behind the 18:11:38 images I had founded an old book. And what of course I also discovered was and I think this echoes something that Laura was saying was, was a scholarly community right who was the community I was going to talk to you that wasn't dead long ago in the 16th 18:11:50 and 17th century but living and equally interested not historians, certainly not really even art historians, particularly at that time, but curators right curators with historical and archeological sensibilities, who were beginning to do what now are 18:12:08 some of the earliest projects of restoring the history of their institutions to them and I want to point for instance to Arthur McGregor, and the incredible work that he did that started with the simple fact that the Ashmolean Museum had a Tercentenary 18:12:23 in 1983 that produced a landmark book that I saved up to buy in graduate school the origins of museums that he did with this colleague, all of her MP both of them curators at the Ashmole in that book was as Arthur will tell you was an unexpected bestseller. 18:12:40 It was so a lot of people laugh about this, it's a good place to tell the story. This book was so hard to find, even though it was really expensive it was $100 at 1985 right that's a ton of money when you're a graduate student in 1985, but it was impossible 18:12:54 to buy a copy I was reading the one in the seminary cup at the University of Chicago because I was there as a distinct grad student. Then I took the one out of the library I Xeroxed it but this was not enough for me I needed the real book. 18:13:06 And so finally I had some family temporarily posted in London and they finally were able to buy a copy in the UK and ship it to me. So I can have this book this artifact. 18:13:17 But the point being that what I unexpectedly discovered was that in choosing this historical subject this aspect of early modern history. 18:13:27 I, you know, found a community that was not inside the university but actually mostly in and around museums and. 18:13:37 This was the beginning of my thinking what would the role of early modern history be in the museum. Alright, so let me know just say here briefly because we're trying to talk very informally in this workshop. 18:13:50 What did I, what did I learn from this unanticipated audience that insisted on the importance of early modern categories for reinvigorating rejuvenating the museum in the late 20th century. 18:14:04 Wonder Marvel curiosity, not for the past midst of these categories but for the sake of the present. 18:14:13 These, you know, these aspects of early modern collecting have become so important for one key strand of the reinvention of the modern museum. 18:14:24 Since the 1980s but especially in the 1990s onward. And so 30 years later, right, who are the audience for audiences plural for the cabinet of curiosities and what has this subject done for early modern history. 18:14:39 What is that it's created a tangible bridge between museums and this particular past. 18:14:45 If you know I think many of you here will have had this experience of going to a museum and seeing either a reconstructed cabinet, a museum that has reorganized there early modern artifacts right there now not only concerned about the Renaissance the 18:15:01 broke when they do this to resemble a wonder kaput. 18:15:06 I'm insured, actually the museum has made space for the early modern without ever using that word because of the cabinet of curiosities and because of how useful this has been in museum practice right not just theory but in practice. 18:15:23 So, what kind of early modern history does this offer the cabinet in the end is not a closed or narrowly defined history. In fact, it's the antithesis of what preceded it the old master exhibit right that now is so you know past say, I'm not that that 18:15:39 Not that that doesn't have a very large audience, and therefore is also an important part of the public history. 18:15:45 The cabinet the early modern cabinet inspires many different histories, whether we do them in the museum, or on paper or in the classroom and increasingly also pointed the way for an early modern global history, hardly the only subject that's done that 18:16:03 but certainly one of the ones that is made it tangible traceable concrete through its artifacts that suggest all sorts of other topics about mobility, people empires, a world of an assemblage of randomly surviving things. 18:16:24 And here of course I want to point to the fact that invite people to, you know, take a look again at the early modern component of, you know, the British Museum's you know really wildly popular history of the world in 100 options which I always like to 18:16:37 remind students in my commodities class started as a podcast, not as a book right but started this an interesting effort, you know, not, not only about early modern history but certainly deeply historical to take the museum, out of the museum to a much 18:16:53 broader audience by doing podcast. So the cabin, of course, is closely connected to one of the areas that early modern history has a broad eager reading public in fact it's become now you know terribly formulaic to write these commodity histories, you 18:17:10 know, which is not how that subject started but you know at this point now that the number of commodity histories that that you know are out there is, is boundless infinite, and they're no longer only early modern and yet that whole genre of writing started 18:17:26 with early modern commodities, you know and and so. 18:17:33 So, all this is to say that that sometimes we discover.