On July 15 971, the bones of St Swithin were removed from their resting place on the order of Aethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, and placed in a shrine inside the…Read More >
Heritage & Creativity
Cross-disciplinary Conversations on Caring in a Crisis
In this post Amie Bolissian considers how the ‘Old Age Care in Times of Crisis’ Symposium in April 2021, highlighted the polysemic nature of old age care, the different ways…Read More >
Mispronunciation: why you should stop correcting people’s mistakes
A recent survey of 2,000 adults in the UK identified the top ten “mispronunciations” people find annoying. Thankfully the majority (65%) of annoyed people do not feel comfortable correcting a…Read More >
Beckett our Contemporary
We at the Beckett Centre often draw on our spectacular archives of Beckett’s notes and manuscripts to examine the links between his work and the moment in which it was…Read More >
Trouble in Headlines
Our headlines are currently riddled with selective uses of the passive voice. Passive voice means that it isn’t clear who is doing the deeds mentioned. “Headlines are… riddled” rather than…Read More >
What Can a Dog Called Margarita Teach us About Ancient Rome?
The Classics Department of Reading recently announced the release of a special video called What Can a Dog Called Margarita Teach us About Ancient Rome? In this video Prof. Peter…Read More >
Broken Futures project: podcast, walking tour and exhibition
The Broken Futures project researches local historical prosecutions of sex between men in Berkshire’s Crime and Punishment Archives, 1861 to 1967 to understand how these men were experiencing life and…Read More >
New archaeology finding shows how Muslim cuisine endured in secret despite policing by the Spanish Catholic regime
Granada, in southern Spain’s Andalusia region, was the final remnant of Islamic Iberia known as al-Andalus – a territory that once stretched across most of Spain and Portugal. In 1492,…Read More >
Shulie, and the place of the feminist past in the feminist present
‘Sex class is so deep as to be invisible.’ So begins American feminist Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 global blockbuster The Dialectic of Sex. I remember vividly the first time I read…Read More >
The Long Read: This 400-year-old botched nose job shows how little our feelings about transplants have changed
In 1624, a physician called Jean-Baptiste van Helmont told a strange story in his book of “magnetic cures” about a man from Brussels who had lost his nose. Having had…Read More >