Tehmina Goskar

In a little under two weeks I shall be starting a new job in the department of History & Classics at the University of Swansea. I will be Research Assistant on an ESRC-funded project entitled, History, heritage, and urban regeneration: the global and local worlds of Welsh copper. Project Leader, Prof Huw Bowen, won the £95,000 funding for this project which will be conducted in partnership with the University of Glamorgan, the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, and the City and County of Swansea.
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Over the past two years or so I have been working with Dr Eleanor Quince, Postgraduate Research Coordinator for the School of Humanities at the University of Southampton, on a project to deliver skills training online. A training programme for Humanities postgraduates already existed as class-based sessions but a need was identified for those students who were either studying away from campus on a regular basis and part time students whose time commitments prevented them from attending daytime classes. Training covered all major sections of the Research Councils’ joint skills statement on the acquisition of generic and transferable skills such as oral presentation, career development, time management, as well as more specific skills such as research ethics, archival research, ethnographic techniques, and the four milestones of completing an MPhil/PhD thesis (first year presentations, MPhil upgrade, submitting your thesis, the viva).

Phases 1 and 2 of the online course were completed by April 2010. Phase 1 was concerned with gathering course materials, evaluating the target audiences (working part timers, distance learners, students abroad) and selecting the most appropriate delivery mechanism. Phase 2 was solely focused on developing the learning objects and training themes for the course. These were divided into ‘core’ and ‘additional’ learning objects. An expert assessor has evaluated their content and feedback has been responded to in additional improvements. In addition, informal feedback has been gathered throughout the process. If funded, phase 3 will concentrate on qualitative evaluation of the course and its elements. The project so far has been funded by the School of Electronics and Computer Science and the Roberts Skills fund (named after the Roberts Report which identified the need for postgraduates to complete their doctoral studies while also gaining skills), both internal to the University.
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I am very excited to announce the forthcoming publication of what promises to be one of the signature books on history and human survival. My own contribution to this book is not on my usual topic of research, but on the example of the Parsis, Zoroastrian Indians of Persian descent and their diaspora. It is entitled, ‘A Zoroastrian Dilemma? Parsi Responses to Global Catastrophe’ and is in the final part of the book (Part VI: Surviving Catastrophe: Creating Conditions for Renewal) where I discuss how Parsis have reconciled life and religion throughout their history to survive a series of crises that have challenged this tiny community whose impact on the world has nevertheless been greater than most realise. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the editors, Mark Levene (University of Southampton), Rob Johnson (University of Oxford) and Penny Roberts (University of Warwick) for their brilliant shepherding of this project.

The book will be published in e-book and paperback form on 15 April, History at the End of the World? History, Climate Change and the Possibility of Closure edited by Mark Levene, Rob Johnson and Penny Roberts and is available from the following sources:

History at the End of the World? Out 15 April 2010:

Paperback via Troubador

E-book direct from Humanities Ebooks

Download the flyer for History at the End of the World

The collection has been produced under the auspices of Rescue!History , a network of historian activists with broadminded and sometimes radical approaches to thinking, life and the world. Rescue!History is the sister network to Crisis Forum. I will be reviewing the book on Past Thinking in due course.
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I am currently writing up a paper based on two pieces of research which compares material culture from southern Italy with that of its central and eastern Mediterranean neighbours (e.g. Sicily, Greece, Egypt, North Africa). It is based on a conference paper I gave last July, at the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean conference at the University of Exeter, on the shared cultures of dress and textiles in the eleventh to tweflth century, and on a research paper I most recently gave on earrings in the Mediterranean, mainly dating to the seventh to eighth centuries, to the Islamic Art and Archaeology seminar at SOAS. Both papers problematised the idea of using the Mediterranean as an heuristic device (a framework for investigation) for studying material culture and both attempted to use basic anthropological techniques to question whether the elements of description and style we identify as being similar would have been recognised by those who made and wore these items. Do our typologies and philological designations do justice to the variety of experience and taste that objects held for their contemporaries?

Of particular inspiration has been the work of anthropologist Michael Herzfeld and the conceptual masterpiece, The Corrupting Sea by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell. Whether or not you agree with the latter’s approaches to Mediterranean history, there is no doubting its importance in making scholars question their own disciplinary boundaries. From a medieval southern Italian viewpoint, it has been quite liberating to centralise the region in this geo-historical space, rather than fight against its peripheral situation in the wider historiographies of medieval Europe, Byzantium and even the early Islamic world.

I am thinking of calling it ‘Material Girls in their Material Worlds: The Shared Cultures of Southern Italy and its Mediterranean Neighbours’. You’ll just have to read the paper when it is out, for more.