Centre for the Social and Cultural History of Wales

Mission Statement

CSCHW is intended as a new research centre operating in the Department of History and Welsh History. It builds on the considerable strengths in the Department in research and teaching in the field of the history of Wales, as outlined below.

The Centre has five key aims:

To promote the study of the history of Wales across all chronological periods;
To support individual and collaborative research projects in the history of Wales;
To stimulate critical analysis of the development of Welsh historiography;
To arrange research seminars in conjunction with the Department of History and Welsh History's research seminar programme;
To organise day schools and conferences on key themes in the history of modern Wales and to facilitate publications deriving from these events where appropriate.

The Department of History and Welsh History has a critical mass of researchers whose main or subsidiary research interests lie in the history of Wales. These include: Professor Aled Jones, Dr Paul O’Leary, Dr Eryn White, Dr Steven Thompson, Dr Owen Roberts, Dr Michael Roberts, Dr Jeffrey Davies, Dr Karen Stöber, Dr Richard Coopey, Professor W. D. Rubinstein, Professor Phillipp Schofield, Dr Iwan Morus and Dr David Ceri Jones. In addition to these members of staff the Department has an AHRB post-doctoral fellow, Dr Sharon Howard, researching crime in early-modern Wales. One of the Department’s honorary professors is Angela V. John, who is a distinguished authority on Welsh women’s history.

Collectively, the range of expertise spans the medieval, early modern and late modern periods. Thematically, our concerns are also very varied. They include, but are not restricted to: medieval monasticism and the medieval peasantry; early modern gender and religion; modern urban developments and public health; the media, music and popular culture; missionaries and imperialism; and ethnic minorities and national identity. This concentration of expertise in Welsh history is unmatched by any other department in the United Kingdom, and it is an opportune time to create an institutional framework for co-ordinating research projects and associated activities.

Members of staff in the Department play a pivotal role in editorial responsibilities and the promotion of research more widely in the field. Professor Jones is one of the editors of the main scholarly journal in the field, the Welsh History Review; Dr White is an editor of the Studies in Welsh History series of the University of Wales Press, which publishes monographs based on doctoral theses, and she is editor of Ceredigion; Dr O’Leary is chair of the History and Law committee of the Board of Celtic Studies, editor of a series of political biographies for the University of Wales Press and co-editor of Llafur. Other important interventions by staff and postgraduate students of the Department include an on-line bibliography by Dr Simone Clark and Dr Michael Roberts: ‘Women and Gender in early Modern Wales: A Guide to Sources and Further Reading’ (http://www.aber.ac.uk/history/bigbib.html).

It is anticipated that fruitful collaborations with interested researchers in other departments at Aberystwyth – some of which already exist informally – will be established and reinforced. Formal collaboration already exists, for example, with media historians in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies.