Discovering Britain through discourses of indigeneity I: Pre-British empire

Description

An event organised by the Indigenous Studies Discussion Group research network.

Speakers

• Alex Woolf (Senior Lecturer in the School of History , University of St Andrews)
• Thomas Booth (Postdoctoral Research, Harvard University)
• Ben Guy (Research Associate in the School of Welsh, Cardiff University)

Abstract

British history is rife with change; ethnic, social and linguistic shifts have indelibly marked its present day. While discourses of ‘native’ or ‘original’ Britons in popular media are nothing new, with the surge in topics of Indigeneity across disciplines, some scholars have begun to apply Indigenous Studies theoretical frameworks to understanding different contexts, including British history. Such frameworks are a rather recent development, and have drawn both interest and critique. Our panel aims to unpack some of these approaches through discussions on pre-Imperial Britain, from the Cheddar Man to the Mediaeval Age. Our speakers will cover various topics from periods of pre-modern Britain and participate in a fruitful discussion on the utility and validity of these frameworks to the pre-Empire British context.

About the speakers

Professor Alex Woolf is Senior Lecturer in the School of History in the University of Glasgow. His main interests lie in the history of Britain and Ireland before the coming of the Normans with a bias towards the earlier part of the period, c.400-900. Particular interests include ethnic interaction and language shift, the development of political structures, and social and economic history. Furth of these islands, he has less well developed interests in Late Roman and early post Roman Gaul and in Scandinavia in the first millennium AD.

Dr Thomas Booth is a Postdoctoral Research at Harvard University. He is currently working as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate on the Wellcome-funded project ‘Human Adaptation to Diet and Infectious Disease Loads, from the origins of agriculture to the present’. His own research is concerned with the microstructural analysis of diagenesis in ancient human bone, particularly the relationship between bioerosion and early post mortem taphonomic processes. This research also has applications to the survival of DNA in ancient bone.

Dr Ben Guy is a Research Associate in the School of Welsh at Cardiff University. He specialises in the language, literature and history of mediaeval Wales. His interests range across early Welsh poetry, historical writing, and manuscripts, as well as early Insular history. He also has a special interest in mediaeval Welsh texts that convey contemporary political views through representations of the Welsh past. He has conducted extensive research on the tradition of Welsh genealogical writing, from the early mediaeval to early modern period, and this is the subject of my monograph. He is currently a Research Associate working on the earliest poems in the Welsh Merlin tradition.

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