Talking History: Seminar Culture at the Institute of Historical Research, 1921–2021

Since its founding in 1921, the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) at the University of London has seen students and teachers come together, socially and intellectually, to engage in lively academic seminars. But for what purpose and with what value?

Talking History provides a defence of the seminar as a central element in historians' teaching, research and sense of community. Covering a range of the IHR’s long-running seminar series, which are differentiated by historical period, region and/or theme, the book presents the seminars as a local, national and international hub for scholarship that emerges from and is sustained by the ongoing learning practices of historians as scholars and people. Talking History bears witness to a seminar culture of evolving, multifarious synergies between teaching, researching and learning, historiography and participation — intertextual, interpersonal, intergenerational and intercultural. Viewed as such, the seminars constitute a living tradition, stimulating and incorporating dynamic change over time to contribute not just to the development of historiography but intellectual life more generally, often in conversation with major political events and cultural phenomena.

This original and significant book therefore reflects upon, and gives further expression to, the ongoing evolution of historical research and its role in wider society today.