11 February 2020
On Friday 7th February, I took part in an event entitled ‘Discovering the Blues: Paul Oliver and the Blues’, held at Oxford Brookes University as part of the Thinking Human Festival. The event was held to commemorate the…
18 August 2017
On Monday 14th August, Paul Oliver – the world’s most prolific writer and most respected blues scholar – passed away in Oxfordshire at the age of 90. Scores of blues historians, researchers, enthusiasts and musicians are paying tribute…
20 March 2017
The web is bursting with tributes and obituaries to Chuck Berry, the songwriter and guitarist who died on Friday at the age of 90. And this is understandably so. Berry’s famous repertoire which includes songs like ‘Johnny B…
28 April 2016
When I was thinking of a subject for a possible blog post on my Fulbright experience, I had no shortage of options. I could have easily talked about teaching American history to American students at Elon University, which…
25 November 2015
Congratulations to former UG History staff member Dr Anna French on the publication of her new book Children of Wrath: Possession, Prophecy and the Young in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2015). This book explores questions surrounding early modern…
30 October 2015
October has been a busy month this year in Cheltenham. In addition to the renowned Cheltenham Literature Festival at the beginning of the month, there have been a number of events for Black History Month in Cheltenham including…
9 October 2014
What is it to ‘do’ public history? This is a question our students are asked to address in a number of different modules and which I was forced to ask myself as a result of attending a couple…
23 June 2014
Teaching and research using Popular Music with Dr Christian O’Connell: we talk about the blues, Civil Rights and more…
14 May 2014
On Friday 9th May I attended this seminar to present a paper on Paul Oliver’s Conversation with the Blues (1965), and the role of oral history and photography in developing the iconography of the blues during the 1960s…
4 December 2013
There was a very interesting documentary on BBC4 last night on Big Bill Broonzy. I’ve mentioned his song ‘Black, Brown and White’ a few times in class, particularly given its critique of racial discrimination in America in the…