Programme for the conference "In the Name of the History"

Names and History

PROGRAMME

9.30 – 10.20: BREAKFAST AND REGISTRATION

10.20 – 11.40: SESSION 1 – NAMING AND SOCIAL IDENTITY

Rachel Tod (Wolfson College Oxford)
Names as an expression of royal power: personal names given to English royal infants from the twelfth to the fourteenth century

Teresa Phipps (University of Swansea)
Naming women in medieval court records

Dave Postles (University of Hertfordshire)Names and the presentation of self in early-modern local societies

11.40 – 12.00: TEA AND COFFEE

12.00 – 13.20: SESSION 2 – NAMING AND RE-NAMING

Kate Gibson (University of Sheffield)
In the name of the father: Illegitimacy and naming practices in long-eighteenth-century England

Sophie Coulombeau (University of Cardiff)
Name change by Royal Licence and Frances Burney’s Cecilia

David Andress (University of Portsmouth)
Naming and un-naming in the French Revolution

13.20 – 14.20: LUNCH

14.20 – 15.40: SESSION 3 – NAMING, PLACE AND COMMUNITY

Alice Harvey-Fishenden (University of Liverpool)Learning about the past environment and landscape from field-names in Staffordshire

Alice Crook (University of Glasgow)
Personal names in early modern Scotland

Rebecca Gregory (University of Nottingham)
Uncovering the past through Nottinghamshire field-names

15.40 – 16.00: TEA AND COFFEE

16.00 – 17.20: SESSION 4 – ANONYMOUS, UNNAMED AND UNKNOWN

Sara Uckelman (University of Durham)
Onomastics and big data: What can we Learn from massive cross-cultural onomastic corpora?

Luke Giraudet (University of York)
What’s in a name? Assessing the historiographical and terminological challenges facing an anonymous fifteenth-century French text, the so-called “Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris”

Fraser Joyce (Oxford Brookes University)
The unknown dead are people too? Addressing nameless corpses in England, 1800-c1930

17.20 – 17.30: SHORT BREAK

17.30 – 18.30: KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Richard Coates (University of the West of England)
Names as still points of the turning world: anchors, traditions and identities

18.30 – 19.15: DRINKS RECEPTION

Call for Papers "IN THE NAME OF HISTORY The Name as a Historical Source"

Website is here

5TH SEPTEMBER 2017, UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD

A conference exploring new approaches to names as historical sources. 

Names are a feature of all societies in all periods of history. We name people, places, pets, personal objects, planets, planes and political movements – any number of other things. The study of names has often focussed on their linguistic properties or their etymological origins. But names, and the way in which they are used, offer a great opportunity to find out about the society, culture and historical period to which they belong. They also allow us a glimpse into the everyday lives of the people who bore, chose and used them.

This conference will focus on names as historical sources. It will give scholars the chance to reflect on current approaches to how we study names and their use as a means of discovering more about the past.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Personal names, nicknames and bynames
• Place-names
• Name changes and pseudonyms
• Animal names
• Names in literature, film and television
• Names of ‘things’, such as personal objects, houses and products
• Names of groups, such as clans, ethnic groups and associations

Proposals for individual papers of 20 minutes are invited for any topic related to names as historical sources from any period. We would welcome papers from scholars from outside the discipline of history with ideas of how their field of research can be useful to historians. 

Abstracts from postgraduate and early career researchers are particularly welcome.

Please send abstracts of up to 300 words to James Chetwood at namesandhistory@gmail.com by 25th June 2017.