General interest and trips
The HA Conference is a unique opportunity to join the history community on a weekend of engaging history. In the General pathway you can enjoy lectures from academic researchers on every aspect and period of history, improving your knowledge and exploring new sources and areas of historical interest, not to mention our popular local history walks and visits.
Walks and visits
Thursday evening walking tour of Liverpool
This year, we are offering an extra tour for delegates who are arriving on Thursday and fancy a look around. Led by a member of HA staff, we will take you on a walk around the city dock area and a few of the nearby streets, taking a quick look at some grand buildings. The tour will include an historic overview of the city and a few irreverent (and possibly irrelevant) cultural stories.
Thursday: 18:00–19:00
Walking tour of Liverpool
The city of Liverpool has had a mixed history, with much of its existence owed to its docks and sea connections. It has been a place of immigration and migration, with a mix of cultures and histories that have contributed to its unique character. This walking tour will take a good look at the serious history of the city, its trade and its people.
Friday: 10:45–12:30
Tour of Liverpool Central Library and archives
In the heart of Liverpool city centre is the Liverpool Central Library, which is a building that combines modern and old architecture. Within the building is the historic Grade II listed Picton Reading Room and Hornby Library, along with 15,000 rare books.
The HA has arranged a guided tour that will include the main library and services, the Picton Reading Room, the Hornby Library and the Oak Room (where special collections are housed), plus a trip to the archives search room, where some archival and special collection material will be there for us to look at. This promises to be a fascinating visit.
Friday: 13:30–15:45
Visit to Museum of Liverpool
Join us at the Museum of Liverpool, just a short walk from our conference venue, to learn about the social history of Liverpool. Tying in with the VE Day anniversary, we will be having specialist sessions delivered especially for HA Conference participants on the subjects of:
- Up close with wartime Liverpool: Liverpool was an important port during World War II. We will join a member of the Museum Participation Team and explore what life was like on the British Home Front in Liverpool, through handling real and replica objects.
- Never at sea – a Wren’s story: We will join a Liverpool ‘Wren’, May Hatton, to find out about the vital top-secret work carried out under the streets of Liverpool during World War II.
And, celebrating the rich history of diversity in Liverpool, there will be a short introduction to:
- Inspirational Black Scousers: A member of the Museum Participation Team will guide us through the stories of some of the many inspirational Black British people connected to Liverpool.
Saturday: 11:15–13:30
Talks and workshops
Official religion: serving the state and serving God in the Christian Roman Empire
Robin Whelan
University of Liverpool
This lecture is about how the Roman state became Christian in late antiquity. A mass of literature has traced the Christianisation of the Roman world in the centuries following the conversion of Constantine in 312 C.E. But there is a hole in the middle of these accounts of religious change. Surprisingly few studies have considered the impact of Christian commitments on those who served Roman emperors as courtiers, bureaucrats and governors. This is, in part, because historians of late antiquity have tended to take at face value contemporary assertions that a public career was irreconcilable with Christian piety and the true form of service: militia Christi. Yet this was just one way in which late ancient observers thought through the compatibility of political service and Christian commitment. This lecture will argue that Christian models of officeholding became part of the mainstream of political culture in the late fourth-, fifth- and sixth-century Roman Empire.
Friday: 11:30–12:30
Liverpool, slavery and the transatlantic development of medical racism
Andrea Livesey
Liverpool John Moores University
Recent years have seen increasing academic interest in the legacies of slavery. While institutions have produced valuable and impactful research on financial links to slavery, the complicity of educational institutions in the development and circulation of racial ideas has been largely overlooked in the UK context. This talk will explore the complicity of medical science in the perpetuation of slavery and the long-term legacies of this difficult history.
Friday: 13:30–14:30
Beyond cotton: a history of modern Central Asia in three plants
Beatrice Penati
University of Liverpool
The Central Asian landscape is now most often associated with the cotton monoculture and its disastrous effects on the environment, not least the disappearance of the Aral Sea. While true, this image fails to convey the complexity of changes in the landscape, economy and society that took place when the region was a colony of the Russian Empire and then part of the Soviet Union. This paper uses three plants other than cotton – saxaul (Haloxylon ammodendron), wormwood and rice – to reflect on these changes and question the importance of the 1917 revolution as a historical divide. Although rooted in the Central Asian landscape and climate, this perspective highlights Central Asia’s links with an increasingly globalised world, as well as comparisons with similar colonial contexts.
Friday: 14:45–15:45
Gods, spirits, people: historical research, analysis and representation of non-human/human interactions
Andrew Redden
University of Liverpool
What should historians of religious cultures do when they find evidence in the sources of human interactions with non-human entities, such as spirits, demons, angels and even gods? Should we ignore that evidence? Should we pretend that we are laboratory scientists who carry out experiments to ‘prove’ what is and what is not possible, or should we be faithful to historical methodology, which is to analyse the historical sources critically, yet with an open mind? I would argue for the latter. Yet what happens when all the historical evidence that we have available describes things that we believe could not have happened? Do we explain things away as metaphors or pretend that we are psychoanalysts who can diagnose psychological trauma or phenomena in our historical subjects? Or should we seek to take the people whom we study seriously and try to understand the worlds in which they lived and experienced and explain these to our readership? Again, I would argue for the latter. Not surprisingly, this throws up quite a few methodological, epistemological and even ontological challenges. Using specific case studies from the Spanish Colonial Americas (1500–1750), including the case of Pedro, a young lad condemned to death for homicide who made a (successful) pact with the devil in order to escape from jail, this paper will look at ways in which such histories can be studied and retold, analytically and respectfully, while also considering the problems that arise in the retelling and some possible solutions.
Friday: 16:15–17:15
Killing Lenin, stopping a revolution – Robert Bruce Lockhart and the origins of the Cold War
James Crossland
Liverpool John Moores University
As a 'British agent' in post-revolutionary Russia, Robert Bruce Lockhart was tasked with being Prime Minister Lloyd George’s unofficial representative to the newly established Bolshevik regime. Beneath this purely diplomatic enterprise, however, in the summer of 1918, Lockhart became the linchpin of a network of spies, saboteurs and counterrevolutionaries, who aspired to overthrow the Bolsheviks, if necessary by killing its leadership. The disastrous outcome of this supposed 'Lockhart Plot' marked a pivotal point of fracture between Britain and Russia and the low point of a fascinating adventurer’s extraordinary career. Drawing on his latest book, Rogue Agent: From Secret Plots to Psychological Warfare, the Untold Story of Robert Bruce Lockhart, James Crossland explains how Lockhart and the British spies who supported him lay the foundations for the Cold War and foreshadowed a century of Anglo–Russian tensions that have yet to be resolved.
Friday: 16:15–17:15
The darkness echoing: Ireland's places of famine, death and rebellion
Gillian O'Brien
Liverpool John Moores University
It’s no secret that the Irish are obsessed with misery, suffering and death. And no wonder, for there is darkness everywhere you look, in cemeteries and castles, monuments and museums, stories and song. This talk will take the audience through some of the key moments in Ireland's past and take them on a tour of some of Ireland’s most intriguing dark tourist sites. Alongside some tales of rebellion, imprisonment and death, the talk will challenge some old tropes about Irish history and question what we really know about our own past and what impact that has on our present and future.
Saturday: 11:15–12:15
Learning to play well with others? Jews and Christians as neighbours in the English Middle Ages
Dean Irwin
University of Lincoln
There was a Jewish presence in medieval England from shortly after the Norman Conquest (1066) until the general expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. For much of this period, Jews and Christians lived together in towns across England. This talk considers how we access the positive interactions between Jews and Christians in English towns during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Saturday: 12:30–13:30
History: The Journal of the Historical Association: academic research, publishing and new developments in the discipline
Charlotte Alston, Jennifer Aston, Katarzyna Kosior, Daniel Laqua
University of Northumbria; History journal editorial committee
Having been founded in 1912, History: The Journal of the Historical Association is one of the UK’s longest-running academic journals in the field of history. As of 2025, all HA members will have free access to the journal’s articles and book reviews via the website of its publisher, Wiley-Blackwell. In this session, the journal’s editor-in-chief (Dr Daniel Laqua) and fellow members of the editorial committee (Prof Charlotte Alston, Dr Jennifer Aston, Dr Katarzyna Kosior) will introduce the journal, covering its history, workings and value for HA members. The session addresses several questions:
- How does academic publishing work, and how do journal editors ensure that the quality of published articles meets the highest standards?
- How does the history of History (the journal) allow us to understand wider developments in the discipline?
- In what ways might the journal provide a resource for different audiences, from academic researchers to history teachers?
Saturday: 14:30–15:30
Dictatorships and authoritarianism in modern German history: new perspectives on an old problem
Andre Keil
Liverpool John Moores University
The history of modern Germany seems to have been dominated by the problem of dictatorship and authoritarianism. Particularly during the 'short' twentieth century, between 1914 and 1989, the lives of Germans were shaped by the experience of dictatorships, namely the national-socialist regime and the 'real-existing' socialism of the GDR. However, the paper will argue that authoritarianism in modern Germany was not an isolated phenomenon but a reflection of broader trends in modern political culture. While dictatorships like the Nazi regime and the GDR significantly impacted German history, authoritarianism was not unique to Germany. Instead, it was a prominent example that industrial mass societies are susceptible to authoritarianism, particularly during crises. Against this backdrop, modern German history exemplifies the fragility of liberal democracies.
Based on his forthcoming book on the topic, Dr Keil examines factors contributing to dictatorial regimes in Germany but avoids simply contrasting democracy and dictatorship. Instead, it explores authoritarian elements within liberal democracies, such as emergency powers in the Weimar Constitution and the Federal Republic. By highlighting the connections between democracy and dictatorship (for instance, populist appeals and concern for the populace's welfare), he encourages a critical reassessment of the assumed clear distinction between the two.
Saturday: 14:30–15:30
Unlocking the potential of Britain’s country houses to tell imperial stories
Miranda Kaufmann
Independent historian
Hundreds of historic houses across the country, be they English Heritage, National Trust or in private hands, have connections to Britain’s colonial past. Some were built or bought by enslavers, East India Company merchants or heiresses to imperial fortunes. Others were bought by men who traded in colonial commodities like sugar, tobacco and coffee, or who profited from administering the Empire or fighting colonial wars. Sometimes enslaved Africans worked in these households. Most collections have imperial objects, from Chinese wallpaper and porcelain to furniture made from Jamaican mahogany. These facts are hardly surprising, but they have become hugely controversial in recent years. How, then, do we use these houses and their collections to explore uncomfortable histories, educate an increasingly ethnically diverse next generation and heal a country divided in its attitudes to its imperial past? Using case studies, Kaufmann seeks to explore these questions and draw on the audience’s expertise, with an extended discussion in the Q&A to think about positive ways forward.
Saturday: 15:50–16:50
