May
Major funding awarded for SSiM-based team:
SSiM are delighted to announce that the project, ‘Forged by Fire: Burns Injury and Identity in Britain, c.1800-2000’, has been awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Standard Grant. From September 2016, a research team including Jonathan Reinarz (PI), Shane Ewen (Co-I; Leeds Beckett University) and Rebecca Wynter (RF), will draw together expertise from the history of medicine, the senses, psychological trauma, disability, emergency services, and urban history to investigate how burns have shaped individual, group and urban identity in three British urban centres: Birmingham, Glasgow and London.
Find our more about the four-year grant
March
For the last three months Vanessa Heggie (Birmingham Fellow in the History of Medicine) has been acting as the Director of the new Birmingham Research Institute for History and Cultures (BRIHC), based within the College of Arts and Law. This is a flagship research institute for History, Archaeology, Classics and African Studies at the University of Birmingham, which intends to encourage and support inter-disciplinary research work. After setting up the Institute, planning events and research collaborations, and overseeing a job search for two BRIHC Fellows – all with the help of the Development Officer, Chloe Lund – Vanessa handed the Directorship over to Dr Simon Yarrow in mid-March.
Find out more about the School of History and Cultures
February
In February, our Unit was hosting the incoming President of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (EAHMH), Octavian Buda, for one week. While in Birmingham, Octavian gave a seminar presentation, while staff assisted him in organising the EAHMH 2017 conference, which will take place in Bucharest, Romania. A call for papers and more information will soon be available online.
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Congratulations to Emma Jacobs, one of our past intercalation students in the History of Medicine (BMedSc). Emma has won one of the Undergraduate Essay Prizes offered by the Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM) for her comparative study of medical dispensaries in Bristol and Dudley. The blogs from each prize will soon be available here: https://sshmedicine.wordpress.com/undergraduate-essay-prize-blogs/
Bristol Dispensary (1901). Reproduced courtesy of the Bristol Reference Library (reference B7891)
January
The Unit said good-bye to Fanxiang Min, whose year in Birmingham came to an end at the end of January. Fanxiang has become a part of the team, and enjoyed his time in the UK. He will now return to Nanjing University, where he will begin to set up a history of medicine programme in the History Department. In future, staff hope to visit and see how that project advances. Good luck, but not good-bye.
