British history attracts a range of scholars
The Montreal British History Seminar (MBHS), where Cynthia Hammond spoke, is run by Robert Tittler of Concordia and Brian Lewis of McGill. It is celebrating its tenth year as an inter-university, inter-disciplinary seminar for faculty and graduate students in all fields of British history.
“The subject is construed quite broadly,” Tittler said. “I think it’s fair to say that the MBHS has provided and sustained a nice little inter-university community of scholars who share this broad but serious scholarly interest, reaching across university and disciplinary lines as it does so.”
Tittler says he believes the MBHS is “the oldest continuing seminar of this type in any humanities area in the city, and despite the fact that Concordia no longer teaches British history on a regular basis, we seem to be gathering strength as we go. We will have had by the end of this year 62 meetings over the past decade, with speakers from Montreal and beyond, including colleagues from the US, Britain, and Ireland.”
Despite having retired from Concordia’s History Department, Tittler continues his scholarly career, having just returned to Montreal from a stint as a visiting professor in the U.K.
In October, Tittler was visiting research fellow at the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester, U.K. He has returned to Montreal, where he is part of a McGill-based research project called Making Publics: Media, Markets and Association in Early Modern Europe. It provides him with research funding for five years, out of which he is able to fund 60 per cent of a postdoctoral fellowship at Concordia.
He is also on the management committee of this $2.49-million SSHRC major collaborative research initiative, and in the summer of 2010 will co-direct a four-week graduate and faculty seminar on the model of the National Endowment for the Humanities here at Concordia.
He continues to chair the executive board of one of Canada's oldest humanities research projects, Records of Early English Drama, based at the University of Toronto.
He is also involved in a six-year project with Tarnya Cooper, Senior Curator of 16th Century Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery, in England. It entails documentation of what are called the middling elites in 16th- and early 17th-century England, especially urban and civic leaders below the ranks of aristocracy and royalty.
It will result in a volume of essays, a conference in London, and an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery called The Merchants' World, 1500-1740. Tittler will co-curate the show, and help write its catalogue and organize the conference.
He continues to do research on civic portraiture in early modern England. His book, The Face of the City: Civic Portraits and Civic Identity in Early Modern England, is due next spring with Manchester University Press. He is also teaching in Concordia’s Art History Department.