Seminars

ICHRE runs the History of Education Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research. The seminar attracts speakers from around the world, providing a forum for established historians as well as early-career researchers to present their work. For further information please contact Sam Blaxland or Gary McCulloch at ioe.ichre@ucl.ac.uk.

All seminars will be held in ‘hybrid’ mode, with both face-to-face and online attenders. Details of rooms and Zoom links are given below. All seminars will start at 5.30pm UK time.

Thursday 25 September 2025, 5.30pm

The Intellectual Life of the British Wartime Housewife

Professor Hester Barron (University of Sussex)

UCL Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1h OAL (Room 728)

In January 1945, the social research organisation Mass-Observation asked its volunteer panellists to consider whether ‘there are any gaps in your general knowledge…which you particularly regret?’ Of the couple of hundred responses they received, forty-three were from housewives. Many of these women were comfortably middle-class and several had benefited from higher education; others had left school at 12. Almost all expressed regret about something they felt they had missed. This paper takes an in-depth look at the wartime lives of those 43 housewives, born between 1870 and 1915. It considers their responses to other wartime directives that asked about reading, films, music and adult education; many also kept diaries for Mass-Observation and discussed cultural activities there. Rather than focusing on work (paid, voluntary or domestic), which is more usually examined as the driver of wartime expectations and aspirations, it instead considers the way in which intellectual and educational opportunities affected women’s outlook and sense of self. It testifies to the value of education in people’s lives, and a culture of self-improvement and autodidacticism that is more usually characterised as male and working-class.

Hester Barron is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sussex. She has written extensively about working-class life, childhood, schooling and education in the first half of the twentieth century. Her most recent books were Class of ’37: voices from working-class girlhood (2021) and The social world of the school: education and community in interwar London (2022). As well as current and recent research using the Mass-Observation wartime archive, she is also in the early stages of a major project examining ordinary people’s relationship to music in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Thursday 6 November, 5.30pm 

UCL Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1h OAL (Room 828)

American Grammar: African Slavery, Native Land Dispossession, and the Origins of US Public Schooling

Professor Jarvis Givens (Harvard University)

https://ucl.zoom.us/j/93622155217?pwd=wbNsrCum28Fbyw1Zb29aIId9iqaTXW.1

Passcode: 225577

This talk focuses on political and economic links between black, native, and white schooling in the United States through the nineteenth century. Based on research from his new book, American Grammar: Race, Education and the Building of a Nation (Harper, 2025), Jarvis Givens argues that native and black communities experienced distinct forms of racial domination in US schooling, including policies that forced Western schooling on indigenous communities as an expression of the American Indian Wars and laws that criminalized black education as motivated by the political economy of chattel slavery. What’s more, he asserts that these distinct racial projects in American education were structurally linked to the development of common schooling for white citizens. Contrary to mainstream narratives of US educational history, which imply that native and black people were overwhelming excluded from early US education, Givens insists that it was the educational experiences of “this founding racial triad,” collectively, that shaped “the schooling apparatus of the United States.” Moving beyond the language of exclusion, he traces how native land dispossession as well as slave capital (and labor) directly contributed to the physical and fiscal development of public schooling in the United States, as well as how racist ideas about black and native peoples informed the curricular foundations of American education. In offering this new interpretation on the origins of US public schooling—one that places black and native experiences at the center of the story—Givens seeks to clarify how education has always been a racial project in the United States; and furthermore, he outlines how the structural development of this racial project was essential to the building of the nation as a whole.

Jarvis R. Givens is a professor of education and African & African American Studies at Harvard University, and he is currently a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at University College London’s Institute of the Americas. He is the author of four books, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (2021), School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness (2023), American Grammar: Race, Education and the Building of a Nation (2025), and I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month (2026). He is also the co-founding faculty directory of the Black Teacher Archive at Harvard. Givens’s work has been published in various outlets including American Education Research Journal, Journal of African American History, Harvard Educational Review, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, and more

Wednesday 10 December, 6pm

Please note our usual December seminar is replaced by the Royal Historical Society public lecture at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Hunger, Health and Hope: A History of School Meals in Britain’ – Dr Heather Ellis (University of Sheffield)

Manson Lecture Theatre, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London, WC1E 7HT

Open to all but please register here: Eventbrite

What children eat at school has long been a matter of political debate, social concern, and everyday experience. Since the introduction of the School Meals Service in 1906, meals served in schools have been used to tackle malnutrition, reduce inequality, and promote social inclusion. They have also been the site of controversy, from free milk in the 1940s to Jamie Oliver’s campaign against Turkey Twizzlers, and today’s calls for universal free school meals.

Drawing on new research from the ESRC and AHRC-funded project The School Meals Service: Past, Present and Future, this lecture explores how policy, practice, and lived experience have shaped school dining across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With reference to new oral histories, archival evidence, and ethnographic studies in contemporary schools, the lecture highlights the emotional and sensory dimensions of mealtimes as well as their wider social and cultural meanings.

At stake is more than what children eat. School meals open a window onto questions of inequality, poverty, community, and the politics of care. By tracing the past and present of school food, the lecture shows how historical perspectives can illuminate contemporary debates about fairness, health, and childhood in Britain.