Seminar Series

The Regional History Centre runs a free, monthly evening seminar with our partners at M Shed, Bristol.

Seminars are usually held every third Thursday of the month, but please check our programme for variations.

Current Seminar Programme

Our 2022-2023 season of seminars are being held live online. Please follow the event link for further details and bookings.

May 18 2023: ‘Murder by witchcraft‘. Speaker: Dr Louise Ryland-Epton, Victoria County History Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. Event Details and Booking.

April 20 2023: “The Antidote and Answer to Cliveden’ – Buscot Park and the Aristocrats who fought fascism‘. Speaker: Dr Alison McClean, UWE. Event Details and Booking

February 16 2023: Bristol goes bananas – the city’s role in the birth of a globalised fruit trade’. Speaker: Andy Linington, Senior Policy Advisor at Nautilus International.

January 26 2023: Decolonising the Catalogue: Access to Records of Bristol’s Transatlantic Slave Economy’. Speakers: Sophie Welsh, University of Exeter, and Allie Dillon, Bristol Archives.

December 15 2022: ‘Muck and Modernity: Nineteenth century sewerage engineering and the growth of modern Bristol‘. Speaker: Professor Chad Staddon, UWE Bristol.

November 17 2022:The burning of Bristol’s New Gaol in 1831‘. Speaker: Steve Poole, Professor of History and Heritage at UWE, Bristol and Co-director of the University’s Regional History Centre.

October 20 2022, part of Black History Month: ‘Emperor Haile Selassie I in South-West Britain, 1936-1941‘. Speaker: Ras Benji, Rastafarian historian and project manager at Fairfield House, Bath, home of Emperor Haile Selassie I and the Ethiopian royal family, 1936-1941. A recording of this talk is now available via Imperial Voice Media, Fairfield House.

Previous Talks

December 16 2021: ‘She is capable but sullen and troublesome’: Analysis of Muller Orphan Homes’ Dismissal Books, 1850-1900. Speaker: Kate Brooks, Associate Lecturer in Education History at Bath Spa University.

January 20 2022: Bristol’s early cinema history: From Willie Green to Archie Leach. Speaker: Dr Charlotte Crofts, Associate Professor of Filmmaking, University of the West of England.

February 17 2022: Witchcraft, magic and society in nineteenth-century Somerset. Speaker: Owen Davies, Professor of History at the University of Hertfordshire.

March 17 2022: Beyond the ballot: Girls’ education, women’s welfare and the Bristol suffragists. Speaker: Dr Alison McClean, University of the West of England.