̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Humanities and Social Sciences

Cambridge and Sciences Po to enhance collaboration

ag236 — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 12:09:54 +0000

At a ceremony held in Paris on Friday November 24th, representatives from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and from Sciences Po signed a Memorandum of Agreement to formalise and strengthen the partnership between both institutions.

̽��ֱ��stated aim of the document is to develop research links in disciplines including Politics, History and Public Policy, with a strong expectation that the collaboration will develop to encompass other areas of mutual interest.

Covering an initial three-year period, the agreement includes the provision of matched funds by Cambridge and Sciences Po to enable academic workshops and symposia, and to pay for travel grants, short-term research visits, and visiting professorships at both Sciences Po and Cambridge.

Other bilateral activities within its scope include the encouragement of student mobility, and access for Cambridge PhD students to the Sciences Po Teaching Fellowships programme at Sciences Po campuses in Reims, Menton or Le Havre, where lectures are done in English.

One specific outcome of the agreement between Cambridge and Sciences Po will be the organisation of a public conference on “ ̽��ֱ��Future of Europe”, to be held in Paris in 2018, and led by specialists in European studies from both institutions.

Signing on behalf of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Professor Eilís Ferran, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Institutional and International Relations, said: “This Memorandum of Agreement builds on strong existing relationships between our two world-leading universities. It offers us a formal mechanism to strengthen our partnership at a time when collaboration between academic institutions is more crucial than ever before.”

Mr Frédéric Mion, President of Sciences Po, said: “There is a need to maintain and deepen cooperation among excellent academic institutions in Europe. It is the right time to continue strengthening our ties with a world-class ̽��ֱ�� such as Cambridge by developing jointly this innovative and ambitious research partnership in the social sciences. ̽��ֱ��Memorandum of Agreement is built on that firm conviction. ”

Sciences Po was founded in 1872 as the École Libre des Sciences Politiques to educate the French governing class in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Today it is one of France’s leading research universities in the social sciences and humanities. It has seven campuses across France, and a record of excellent research in law, economics, history, political science and sociology.

Agreement will enable closer research ties and funding of joint projects

Sciences Po-Cambridge agreement

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Yes

Academics to join British Academy Fellowship

bjb42 — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Election is an acknowledgment of "academic distinction" and is granted annually to only a small number of scholars in any field.

This year's list includes eight Cambridge academics. ̽��ֱ��newly appointed Fellows are as follows:

Professor David Abulafia has been a Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge since 2000 and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College since 1974. He has a particular interest in the economic, social and political history of southern Italy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and has written a wide variety of publications on the history and development of the Mediterranean lands.

Professor Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics and a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement and her blog, 'A Don's Life' appears in ̽��ֱ��Times as a regular column. She has written widely on Classical culture and its reception in the modern world, and her latest book, 'Pompeii: the Life of a Roman Town' is soon to be adapted into a BBC series.

Professor Christopher Clark is a Professor of Modern European History and a Fellow at St Catharine's College. Born and educated in Australia, Clark became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2007. His research interests include the history of 19th century Germany and continental Europe, but his current work focuses on the outbreak of war in 1914 and political change across Europe in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions.

Dr Alan Baker was elected in 1970 as the first ever teaching Fellow of Geography at Emmanuel College and is now a Life Fellow. From 2001 until this year, Dr Baker was a Cambridge City Councillor and chaired its Planning Committee for seven years.

His research focuses upon the social, economic and cultural geography of 19th century France. In 1997 the French government recognised his "services to French culture" through awarding the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

Professor Deborah Howard is Professor of Architectural History and a Fellow of St John's College. Her research interests include the art and architecture of Venice and the Veneto and the relationship between Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean. She recently co-ordinated a major research project on 'Architecture and Music in Renaissance Venice'.

Professor Juliet Mitchell is Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies and a Fellow of Jesus College. She is the Founder Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and a Research Fellow at the Department of Human Geography. Her research looks at gender difference from a psychoanalytic and social history perspective and examines the sibling relationship in different contexts.

Dr Karalyn Patterson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Clinical Neurosciences. She is currently studying the effects that brain disease and damage have upon adult language and memory. She has published her findings in a variety of scientific journals.

Dr Andrew Wallace-Hadrill is Master of Sidney Sussex College and will be Professor in the Faculty of Classics from October 2010. He is a Roman social and cultural historian with a particular interest in Pompeii and Herculaneum. He was the Director of the British School at Rome from 1995 until 2009, and was made an OBE in the New Year's Honours for services to Anglo-Italian cultural relations.

On hearing of her election, Professor Mary Beard said: "I am overwhelmed, touched, honoured and very aware of the responsibility of becoming a Fellow of the British Academy. It's a cliché to say that these are difficult times, but true all the same."

"We Classicists know what a world without Humanities is - it's the Dark Ages. My job, and all the more now, is not just to resist the forces of darkness, but to make clear why the Humanities are not an optional extra for times of plenty, but central to everything we, as a culture, do."

̽��ֱ��scholars will become the newest members of the British Academy which currently consists of over 1,000 academics. ̽��ֱ��British Academy not only recognises academic achievement, but also helps fund national and international research and organises a wide-ranging programme of public events.

̽��ֱ��British Academy has today announced the scholars elected for this year&rsquo;s Fellowships in recognition of their contribution to the humanities and social sciences.

I am overwhelmed, touched, honoured and very aware of the responsibility of becoming a Fellow of the British Academy. It's a cliché to say that these are difficult times, but true all the same.

Professor Mary Beard

Sir Cam

Senate House

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Yes

Finding fault

tdk25 — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Examining how western legal systems have developed, and understanding the factors that have shaped the dynamics of legal change, has been at the heart of a three-year study that reached its conclusion in December 2007. ̽��ֱ��European Legal Development project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), was led by Professors John Bell and David Ibbetson at the Faculty of Law. It brought together some 70 academics, including eminent scholars and early career researchers, from 10 different jurisdictions across Europe.

Although concerned with legal development and involving the research input of many lawyers, the project also benefited from the insights of historians, philosophers and scholars in other disciplines. It stands as a model for how national scholars can be supported and developed in an international context in the humanities and social sciences. Regular meetings and website interactions have built a network of researchers that will continue long after the project itself.

Illustrations of legal development

Of course, the topic ‘How do western legal systems develop?’ is very broad. Does the law change principally in step with the state of the economy and of society at large, or does it respond to its own internal dynamics of change? Even where there are strong similarities between the social and economic factors that fuel changes in the law, how do legal systems in different European countries respond? To make these areas of enquiry more manageable, they were tackled through the lens of a particular branch of law that illustrates legal change over a specific period of European history: the liability for harm caused to others by fault in the years 1850–2000.

In England, the core principles for deciding when one individual has to compensate another for the harm they have caused date back to the 14th century; in continental Europe, they date back to the 3rd century BC. This research has sought to chart how these old principles have needed to change and to seek explanations for what happened.

̽��ֱ��law relating to fault began to alter around 1850. Enormous technological and economic changes took place as industrialisation and urbanisation occurred in different countries, influencing many aspects of society, including the law. With the rapid rise in the use of steam boilers to power factories, boats and trains, accidents became more frequent. Machinery was both more complex and less predictable than before, causing injuries to employees and passengers. Although in 1850 there were many similarities in approaches to liability for fault across the legal systems of western Europe, significant divergence began to occur in the years that followed.

Constructing the case

To understand the forces behind legal change, we have to look beyond the experience of one country and investigate many. To this end, six case studies were investigated by academics from jurisdictions across Europe: England, Scotland, ̽��ֱ��Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Sweden, France, Italy and Spain.

̽��ֱ��six case studies, each convened by a different project member, focused on the problems that the law has faced in the 150-year period under study: liability in relation to technological change; liability between neighbours; liability for traffic accidents on rail and road; liability for products; liability for medical negligence; and legal doctrine, or the writings of legal academics trying to set out the principles of this developing law.

Factors for change

In a second stage, the project examined the factors that actually shaped legal development in the fields studied. Certain legal institutions, such as law reform bodies, have been important in fostering change in the law. But these bodies have depended on key individuals who have promoted change, typically by persistence over many years. Governments often promote legislation in response to recent prominent crises or disasters, and at such moments proposals that are already formulated are often seized upon.

To what extent does the law reflect developments in social and political ideas? Sometimes there is a clear connection. For example, the French social theorist Émile Durkheim influenced key French legal writers of the late 19th century to argue that the law should provide compensation out of social solidarity with those who were injured, rather than focusing simply on whether a responsible individual was at fault. But, in other areas, it is the opinions of specialist technical experts that shape the law. For example, the law governing asbestos was strongly influenced by relatively small numbers of people in inspectorates, rather than by a broad movement of opinion or ideas.

Changes in the economy clearly have an impact on law – new problems arise that the law has to solve. But it is less clear whether the pattern of solutions directly responds to economic interests. For example, the easy availability of insurance is frequently invoked in arguments for legislation or in court. But it does not dictate a solution. Although Germany and France introduced insurance-based compensation for road accidents, England did not, even though the economic conditions and the availability of insurance were similar. And so, similar economies do not necessarily adopt similar legal solutions.

This study has illustrated that private law can operate with a kind of relative autonomy from contemporary social and political ideas or economic interests. History and legal ideas can be powerful determinants of how far private law contributes to the solution of contemporary problems.

A multicentre project led by the Faculty of Law has reached its conclusion, having studied over a century's worth of European legal changes relating to liability.

It stands as a model for how national scholars can be supported and developed in an international context in the humanities and social sciences.

Keith Heppell

Members of the European Legal Development Project

Coming to a Conclusion

Three main trends in the law relating to liability have become apparent from this study:

Victims of accidents have gradually found it easier to obtain compensation, either because the burden of proof has shifted towards the person causing the injury or because liability no longer depended on proof of fault.
Simpler and less expensive compensation systems have gradually been created outside private law (the law of relations between individuals). For example, although the victims of boiler and railway accidents tended to be employees, they rarely gained compensation through private law but instead through state-created insurance-based workmen’s compensation systems. In Germany, Sweden and France, such schemes have also replaced private law for most road accidents, and Sweden and France have now adopted similar schemes for medical injuries.
Although private law has played a minimal role in incentivising accident prevention, other forms of regulation could have an impact. For instance, state regulation on the siting of boilers, or of buildings or crops alongside railway lines, as well as regulation related to determining who can practise as a doctor, has played a very important role in reducing the incidence of harm.

For more information, please contact the author Professor John Bell (jsb48 AT cam DOT ac DOT uk) at the Faculty of Law.

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Yes

Rebellion, repression, retribution

tdk25 — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��true course of events of the Irish rebellion of 1641 has never been fully known. Initiated by disaffected Irish Catholics rebelling against Protestant settlers, the rebellion quickly escalated in violence, resulting in widespread killing. But was the rebellion intended to be a bloodless coup that spiralled out of control, or were the thousands of Protestants deliberately driven out and massacred? What’s clear is that the years that followed were a time of savage revenge for the events of 1641 – Oliver Cromwell arrived with 30,000 English troops to conquer Ireland in the name of the English Republic and to exact ‘a just judgement of God upon those barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood’ – and the groundwork was laid for Ireland’s Catholic–Protestant divide.

A curious aspect of the rebellion is that although it is the least understood of all the great massacres of European history, it is amongst the best recorded. Historical narratives in the form of eyewitness accounts of those who lived through the rebellion are still in existence in the library of Trinity College Dublin, where they have remained largely unstudied. This is chiefly because there is too much of a record of what happened and it has taken until now, with improvements in technology and the political climate, to conspire finally to make it possible for the secrets of the ‘1641 depositions’ to be unlocked. A team of scholars in Cambridge, Dublin and Aberdeen are poised to do just this. Professor John Morrill from Cambridge’s Faculty of History is chairing the three-year project, working alongside Professor Jane Ohlmeyer and Dr Micheál Ó Siochrú (Trinity College Dublin), and Professor Tom Bartlett ( ̽��ֱ�� of Aberdeen).

Roots of an uprising

̽��ֱ��1641 rebellion had roots stretching back to the mid-16th century, when the Irish provinces were heavily colonised by English settlers. Throughout the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the English government, fearful that continental Catholic kings would use Ireland as a springboard for invading England to exploit the dynastic weaknesses (Elizabeth was, in Catholic eyes, a heretic bastard tyrant, unmarried and the last of her line), sought to impose strong Protestant control of Ireland. This led to a dreadful cycle: Catholic rebellion, repression of the uprising, replacement of Irish landowners by English as part of a ‘Plantation’ policy, then more rebellion, more repression and further Plantation.

In and after 1610, the largest of the Plantation policies, in which not only the Irish landowners but also the tenant farmers and urban elites were displaced, affected large parts of Ulster in the far north of Ireland. Previous Catholic owners and occupiers were driven into exile, where thousands either became mercenary soldiers (‘Wild Geese’) in the armies of the Habsburg kings or fell into destitution.

For 30 years, the strong authoritarian government, softened by a blind-eye to private Catholic worship, kept the dispossessed of Ulster and elsewhere in check. But in 1641, England was paralysed by the disputes that were to lead, a year later, to civil war.

King Charles I’s puritan opponents had plans to introduce much more effective religious persecution of the Catholic Irish and to make Ireland increasingly part of an enlarged English state. This provoked, from late October 1641, a series of pre-emptive strikes by members of the Catholic nobility and, in the ensuing chaos, a series of what (unless this research project tells otherwise) appear to be spontaneous revenge attacks on Protestant settlers that quickly got out of control.

An imperfect account

Although we have no idea how many people were killed during the events of 1641, the most prudent estimates are that 4000 died through acts of violence and that 6000 more died of the consequences of being driven out naked into the winter cold, while many more fled from their homes and made their way eventually back to England. So much is clear. But the precise chronology and geography of the rebellion have remained hazy at best.

̽��ֱ��English government had to do something to protect the English Protestant settlers, but their own country was in chaos. They could not raise taxes to fund the army. So they borrowed money from 2000 venture capitalists (the ‘Adventurers’) against the promise that they would receive two million acres of Irish land once Ireland was conquered. To establish which land was to be confiscated, all (mainly Protestant) witnesses to the rebellion were questioned by government-appointed commissioners and their accounts recorded as ‘depositions’ that could be used in court.

Today, 3400 depositions are in existence, providing the fullest and most dramatic evidence we have for any event of this kind before the 20th century. They add to up 19,000 pages of testimony in crabbed 17th-century hands. Trinity College Library acquired the documents in 1741 and for centuries there they have remained, far too extensive for any one scholar to explore them all and in too poor a condition for widespread access. Even with a team of researchers, it will take a total of more than eight person years to transcribe the accounts.

A new kind of history

̽��ֱ��spirit of co-operation between the UK and Irish governments following the Good Friday agreement has made it possible to fund a project of this size – the most ambitious British-Irish collaboration in the humanities ever undertaken. Separate but linked funding streams in the UK and Ireland have raised more than 1 million euros from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK, the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) and Trinity College Dublin.

Once the depositions are captured and online, they will constitute a database that can be arranged and re-arranged in any way a scholar would like: by date, by map reference, even by act of violence. Many of the depositions give detailed inventories of goods taken and destroyed, affording unique insights into the material culture of a colonial society. Members of the general public might even use depositions to trace family trees. There are endless possibilities for further study, both looking backwards to the pattern of exploitation that provoked the explosion of Catholic violence, and forwards to the way in which these massacres resulted in the confiscation of 40% of the land of Ireland and its transfer from Catholics born in Ireland to Protestants born in England. These are events that transformed Irish history and therefore British and world history. This collaborative project represents a new kind of history: one where the medium and the message can change how we understand ourselves in time.

For more information, please contact the author Professor John Morrill (jsm1000@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of History.

John Morrill explores one of the most extraordinary and least understood aspects of Anglo-Irish history - the rebellion of 1641.

But was the rebellion intended to be a bloodless coup that spiralled out of control, or were the thousands of Protestants deliberately driven out and massacred?

Credit- the Board of Trinity College, Dublin

Deposition taken from a witness to the 1641 Irish rebellion

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Yes