Putting History in its Place: Historic Landscapes and Environments
On Thursday 20th April and Friday 21st 2017, the Department will host a Royal Historical Society funded Symposium 'Putting History in its Place: Historic Landscapes and Environments. Three plenaries will be delivered by Professor Elizabeth Tingle, Professor John Blair and Professor William Whyte.

Programme: Thursday 20th April 2017
Binks Building, Parkgate Road Campus
Department of History and Archaeology, Departmental Hub Area and Mezzanine.
12:00pm Welcome by Professor Tim Wheeler, Vice-Chancellor.
12:00-13:30pm Student Poster Exhibition and Lunch Reception.
Best Building, CBB/017 14:00pm
- Plenary 1: John Blair (Oxford): Was There Such a Place as Anglo-Saxon England? Material Cultures and Regional Identities.
Chair: Tom Pickles (Chester)
14:45pm
- Landscape History at Chester and the University College Isle of Man: A Roundtable. Rebecca Andrew, Clare Hickman, Tim Grady, Hannah Ewence and Catriona Mackie.
Chair: Katherine Wilson (Chester)
16:30pm Closes
Programme: Friday 21st April 2017
Best Building, CBB/013 08:30-09:00am Registration and Coffee.
Best Building, CBB/017 09:00-09:15am Welcome (Jenny Hillman, Tom Pickles and Katherine Wilson).
09:15-11:15am Panel 1: Landscape and Identity
Chair: Rebecca Andrew (Chester)
- Julie Schlag (Hull): Forest Landscapes of the Northeast: An Investigation into the Cultural History and Socio-ecological Significance of New England’s Local Woodlands, 1500-1850.
David F. Duke (Acadia): Over the Gossiping Grass: Community Succession and Environmental Influence in the Tantramar Region of Atlantic Canada.
Leo Baker (Bristol): The Handley Torches Have Not Forgot: Protest, Memory and Landscape Change in a North Dorset Village, 1818-1832.
Best Building, CBB/013 11:15-11:30am Coffee.
11:30-12:15pm
Plenary 2: Elizabeth Tingle (DMU): Sacred Landscapes, Spiritual Travel: Embodied Holiness and Long-Distance Pilgrimage in the Catholic Reformation.
Chair: Jenny Hillman (Chester).
12:15-13:00pm Lunch.
13:00-15:00pm Panel 2: Sacred and Liminal Space
Chair: Ruth Nugent (Chester)
- Stuart Prior (Bristol) and Helen Frisby (UWE): Law, Lore and Landscape: Gravedigging in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century England.
- Anuradha Gobin (Calgary): Unsanctioned Acts: Landscape’s Boundaries and the Exertion of
Agency in the Dutch Republic. - Emma Wells (York): Sacred Spatiality: The Transformation and Ab‘sense’ of Experience in the English Reformation Parish Church.
- Dee Dyas and John Jenkins (York): Pilgrimage and the Sacred Environment in Medieval English Cathedrals.
15:00-15:15 pm Tea
15:15-17:15pm Panel 3: Place and Affect
Chair: Tim Grady (Chester)
- Jonathan Hogg (Liverpool) and Jessica Douthwaite (Stirling/IWM): British Nuclear Sites in the Cold War: Concrete Silos, Affective Regimes and the Impossibility of Change.
- Oleg Benesch (York): Castles and the Militarisation of Urban Society in Imperial Japan: 1868-1945.
- Graeme White (Chester): Settlement on the Frontier: Defence, Crossing, Refuge.
17:15-18:00pm Plenary 3: William Whyte (Oxford):
- Re-enchanting the World: Buildings, Landscapes, and the Genius Loci.
Chair: Tom Pickles (Chester)
19:15pm Symposium Dinner, Chez Jules, Northgate Street, Chester.