Hacking the Middle Ages

Chris Sparks

What happens when scholars in the humanities try to build an app?  The History department at QMUL and Cambridge University Library partnered to find out.  Chris Sparks reflects on the event.

Through a glass brightly: Whitechapel’s pandemic window

Mark Honigsbaum

Hidden in a Grade 3-listed church in Whitechapel is a remarkable stained-glass window commemorating the ‘heroes and heroines’ of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. As the centenary of the pandemic looms, Mark Honigsbaum reveals how the window disappeared from view and what it says about our culture of forgetting.

Art, Oscar Wilde, and Queer Labels

Tom Lee

A new exhibition at Tate Britain explores the history of queer art from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Exploring the life of perhaps the most famous figure in that exhibition, Oscar Wilde, QMUL History student Tom Lee shows us how conceptions of sexual identity in the Victorian period were not always as straightforward as we assume.

Take Five With: Mark Condos

Mark Condos

To mark Indian Independence Day, we are publishing the next in our series of Take Five interviews, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow and historian of India, Mark Condos.

Workshop report: The uses of historical medical photography

Jennifer Wallis

For the University of Huddersfield's 'History in Action' day, QMUL Lecturer Dr Jennifer Wallis and West Yorkshire Archive Service archivist David Morris ran a workshop on the history of medical photography in the asylum. The workshop highlighted the value of using visual sources as a way in to the history of psychiatry, and also raised some ethical issues that both Jennifer and David are hoping to explore further in the future.

Magical, but ordinary

Elizabeth Hunter

You might think of sleep as a simple and fundamental biological function that has been the same throughout human history but, as Dr Elizabeth Hunter discovers, fiction, science, and history all point towards a more interesting, complex, even magical picture.

Take Five With: Oskar Cox Jensen

Oskar Cox Jensen

In the second of our Take Five series of interviews with historians at QMUL, we meet Leverhulme Early Career Fellow Oskar Cox Jensen, whose current research project focuses on life on and around London’s streets in the in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.