History and heritage public lectures

5 May 2021 - Colonial Countryside, Heritage Research and the Culture War

• Prof Corinne Fowler

Colonial Countryside is a child-led history and writing project guided by a team of historians. The project worked with 100 primary pupils and commissioned 10 writers to produce new stories and poems about 10 National Trust houses’ connections with the East India Company and transatlantic slavery.

Between 2019-2020, Prof Fowler was also seconded to the National Trust to identify houses’ links to empire and to assist with incorporating this information into the historical accounts of relevant properties.

The subsequent release of a National Trust report on its houses’ colonial links, co-authored by Fowler, attracted government attention and led to Parliamentary speeches and debates, and public expressions of disapproval by government ministers and the then head of the Charity Commission.

In February 2021, 56 Common Sense Group Conservative MPs approached Professor Fowler’s project funders to argue that the project was ‘political’ and therefore should not be given public money now or in the future.

In 2021, the Daily Mail and other papers misreported that Professor Fowler’s book, Green Unpleasant Land, said that ‘gardening was racist’, giving her no right of reply and attracting related abuse and threats.

Given the political pressures that she – and other academics in the field – are now experiencing, Prof Fowler considers the implications for academic freedom. What is at stake for us as academics and as universities? Why is this happening and how can we best respond to government and public hostility?

21 June - Digging up Manchester: Industrial Archaeology and Heritage in the Shock City

Dr Nevell discusses buildings, bricks, cobbles, pots and glass bottles recovered from more than fifty digs in Manchester.