Department of
History
Steering Committee
Global History and Culture Centre
Meeting 16 October 2013
12-1pm
F107, Engineering Building
Minutes
1. Welcome
Dan welcomes all committee members to the first meeting.
2. Attendance
David Anderson, Maxine Berg, Dan Branch, Bishnu Gupta, Maria Luddy,
Giorgio Riello, Claudia Stein, Amy Evans
3. Steering Committee’s composition and function
The Steering Committee is composed of members from History, including
the head of department, and other departments. Its function is to form a
coherent sub-group to provide guidance to the Director(s) in the future
running of the Centre.
4. Directors’ overview of the GHCC activities
A programme of events of the Centre was presented. Instead of the usual
Wednesday seminar series, the Centre has organised termly workshops.
Several joint events have been organised with the History departmental
seminar series and the Early Modern seminar series to avoid clashes and
encourage greater collaboration.
Among all the events, Dan emphasized the ‘Under Graduate Open Day’ on
29 Nov (week 9). It aims to attract potential UG students to the Centre
MA/PhD programmes. It will be conducted in a form of workshop to
prepare final year students for their dissertations writing. Applications
will be invited both internally and externally and will be selected by Dan
and Giorgio. This is the first experiment event of this kind this year and
any suggestions are welcome to further shape it for the future.
There is a PhD students led event planned in week 5. Details will be
announced shortly.
5. GHCC strategy
a. New internal and international context
New members join in the Centre this year and they bring in
interesting topics and subjects. This adds new strands of subjects
in the Centre which can be summarised below for the current year:
a) Early Modern material culture
b) 20 the century Africa
c) Global Humanities
This gives us an incredible possibility to link and collaborate with
other disciplines and institutes, History of Medicine and Science,
Sociology, Max Plank, Berlin to name just a few.
b. Funding
The Global Funding is now available for Centre members and
supervised PG only and has two deadlines, 1 Nov 2013 and 15
February 2014.
The Centre website is undergoing an overhaul.
c. Partnerships
A meeting is set up in January with British Museum and British
Library for future collaboration.
d. UG, MA and PhD provision
Giorgio and Dan will call a meeting with Head of Department for
discussions.
6. AOB
The main topic for discussion in the next meeting will be on the
organisations of the Centre.
7. Date of next meeting
12-1pm, 15 January 2014.