Past versus present

Professor Melman is Professor of Modern History at Tel Aviv University and has written extensively on colonialism, gender and modern total war. She will be visiting Cambridge to take part in a discussion about her new book, The Culture Of History. The event marks the official start of Past Versus Present, a new project exploring Victorian approaches to history.

The symposium will focus in particular on Victorian approaches to the Tudors and Jacobins and will also feature contributions from two Cambridge-based historians; Robert Tombs, who specialises in French history, and early modern literature expert Jason Scott-Warren.

The event, which is open to the public, heralds the start of a five-year investigation into Victorian attitudes to the past and how much our own view of history relies on the way it was reshaped during the 19th century. Historians, classicists, historians of science and English scholars from the University of Cambridge are already involved in this major new study, and they will be reaching out to scholars in many other disciplines from Egyptology to music.

No collaboration of this sort has ever taken place before. The project is being funded by a £1million grant from the Leverhulme Trust.

During the Victorian era, economic and technological developments helped scholars unearth new information about a range of different historical periods. Major new theories and discoveries came to the fore, new methods of historical investigation such as the archaeological dig were implemented, and new institutions such as museums and academic departments established.

But as these developments took place, new interpretations of the past arose and had to be accepted or rejected. The Victorians’ fascination with history informed everything from their literature to their views on citizenship, empire and cultural identity. Inevitably as those views were formed, choices had to be made about which past to prioritize, how to understand it, or whether to ‘abandon the past’ altogether. In many ways, the choices they made about history – and how history is understood – continue to influence our views in the 21st century.

“One of the key purposes of this initial symposium,” said Dr Peter Mandler, one of the directors of the project, “is to remind us how many different pasts we have to choose from and how wide the range of interpretations is that people have drawn on. It’s not all chocolate-box nostalgia - we start with Henry VIII chopping off his wives’ heads and the Jacobins’ guillotine in part to draw attention to the gruesome thrills and horrors that history has often provided for popular culture.”

The public symposium on: “The Culture Of History: Tudors and Jacobins in Modern Memory”, will be held in Keynes’ Hall at King’s College at 5pm on Monday, is free to attend and open to all.