¶ Historical research

Image: Rijksmuseum, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The underlying issue which interests me as an historian is around the bounding of the state. What is the role of local and national government? Which services are hard public goods, and which are soft ones? How are services to be funded? And how is public conceptualized?

The most useful moments of visibility in this have, for me, been at times of reform. My MA dissertation considered this in terms of the reform of one notoriously corrupt borough, ‘The languages of common good: municipal reform, urban governance, and charity administration, Leicester c.1820- c.1850’. A shorter version appeared as an article in Midland History.

My thesis, ‘The Common Good and the reform of local government in Edinburgh 1820-56’ was concerned with similar questions. In Scotland, the ancient patrimony of a Royal Burgh is known as the Common Good, which had special legal status, and whilst it could fund much municipal action, yet against the public health and other challenges of the rapidly growing and industrializing nineteenth-century city, provided only scant relief. Extensive borrowing against the security of its future income led to disaster for Aberdeen and Edinburgh. I am working on converting my thesis to a monograph.

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Welcome

As I move around, working in different institutions and independently, I have decided the easiest thing to do is to pull together information about my work in one place. I am a freelance historian, sometimes working for Leicester Vaughan College, a higher education co-operative I helped establish, but primarily working for private clients. My historical interests are wide, and I can help with any British history after c.1700, with experience and skills in corporate, civic, central governent and personal records of all kinds, the full range of printed matter, oral histories, and material culture. I get great pleasure from weaving narratives and sharing material. Do please feel free to contact me malcolmjnoble [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk, or if you prefer call +44(0)7791380273. Image: John Thomas Serres, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Call for papers: Queer Bibliography workshop

QUEER BIBLIOGRAPHY: TOOLS, METHODS, PRACTICES, APPROACHES With my colleague Sarah Pyke, I am arranging a workshop in London in February 2023, and am pleased to share the CfP below. Call for papers for a symposium at Senate House, University of London, 4 February 2023* Participants are invited to an optional practice-based workshop on 5 February 2023, venue TBC Sexuality and textuality are tightly bound. From our earliest experiences of media –including print – LGBTQI+ individuals are employing queer interpretative methods and navigating the ways queer identities might be ‘read’ by others. And yet, while literature’s constitutive effect on queer subjectivities is relatively well-worked ground, how exactly print objects inform, acknowledge, embody and produce queer identities and communities is understudied in bibliographic terms. Queer/ing book history is a project that has been advanced both inside and outside the academy (The Queer Book course at London Rare Books School, devised...

Call for papers: Co-operative Education online workshop (12 September 2023) and special number of 'Journal of Co-operative Studies'

With my colleagues Professor Esther Gicheru, Deputy Vice Chancellor Finance Planning & Administration, The Co-operative University of Kenya and Dr Cilla Ross, Honorary Professor Co-operative Education, University of Nottingham; Co-operative College UK; Journal of Co-operative Studies Advisory Board, I am arranging a workshop in September 2023 leading to a special number of the Journal of Co-operative Studies which considers co-operative education in its broadest sense – learning about co-operation, for co-operation, by co-operation, and through co-operation. The call is pasted below and can be viewed here . Key dates 12 June 2023 Deadline for short abstracts (300 words) and other proposals 12 September 2023 Online workshop 31 Ocotber 2023 Deadline for submission to special issue Co-operative Education — Call for papers Late-stage capitalism appears to have reached a point of permanent crisis: environmental catastrophe, nuclear war, and technological dystopias loom, against a b...

Malcolm Noble

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