An Undergraduate Journey from Paper to Plane: Owen Chennetier on NAASWCH’s 2025 conference (Ohio, US)

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In this blog post, Owen Chennetier, recent graduate in History at the University of Bristol, reflects on his attendance at an international conference where he presented on his dissertation research.

Between the 15th and 18th of July, I attended and contributed a 20-minute paper presentation at NAASWCH’s (North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History) 30th anniversary conference at the University of Rio Grande, Ohio. More information on NAASWCH and their work can be found here.

As well as Bristol’s parting gift of a fractured ankle (spot the splint in the photo!), was a kind grant by the Alumni Group and the School of Humanities. These grants, such as the Conference Travel Fund, are vital for supporting student participation in academic discourse, opportunities to engage with experts in academic fields, and contribution to scholarship. I sincerely thank these groups for their financial and academic support.

My dissertation interrogated Welsh settler and Indigenous Tehuelche memorialisation in Patagonia’s built environment, exploring how so-called ‘discoverer’ of the New World, Christopher Columbus, together with corresponding mentalities underpinning American colonisation, influenced these memorialisation processes. I discovered NAASWCH’s conference whilst researching scholarship for my dissertation in January. This taught me the power of thorough research: just one footnote can make a radical impact!

Fast forward to July, after finishing my degree programme, and I was confronted with a bizarre introduction to the United States – Americans more proficient in Welsh than I was! This was testament to the little-known Welsh migrant histories during the colonial Westward expansion of the United States – one of many subjects that I learned a great deal about at the conference.

I spent 5 days at the University of Rio Grande’s campus in Ohio, engaging in busy conference days that saw speakers from across the Americas and Europe discuss a vast array of topics relating to Welsh-American studies. We were all also given the opportunity to explore the industrial and Welsh-diasporic heritage of the rural Midwestern region via a bus tour, making the trip all the more informative and unique.

It was incredibly rewarding to share my dissertation research, rightfully very niche within the History cohort, with like-minded scholars, students and researchers. This kind of exposure to other scholars’ real, living work was an essential reminder that the bounds of academic curiosity and innovation do not end with a coursework deadline or at the library or seminar room door. They exist far beyond it, studying very real subjects and offering very real opportunities to those willing to follow them.

As I look back to my roots in Wales after graduating from Bristol, I will always cherish this experience both as part of my aspirations for a career involved in Welsh politics and as an embodiment of the years of opportunity and exploration that Bristol, both city and university, have enabled.

I therefore recommend to History students that they look, if they are truly passionate about their work, beyond the dissertation as a mere deadline and to the exciting opportunities beyond it that the University is there to support you in exploring!

BACS Doctoral Thesis Prize: Sijie Ren

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In this blog post we hear from Dr Sijie Ren about their prize-winning thesis!

I’m delighted to share some good news: my PhD thesis, “Science and Politics in Maoist China: The Synthetic Insulin Project and its Legacy,” has been awarded the 2025 Best Doctoral Thesis Prize by the British Association for Chinese Studies (BACS). The announcement at the annual conference of the BACS in Leicester on 5 September was a generous honour, and I’m deeply grateful to my supervisors, Professor Robert Bickers and Dr Adrian Howkins, and to colleagues in Bristol’s Department of History for their steady encouragement.

My research grows from a simple question that has big consequences: what political conditions help, or hinder, basic science? We often talk about breakthroughs as if they happen in a sealed laboratory, but the day-to-day reality of science is entangled with funding rules, personnel decisions, procurement, and shifting priorities. I wanted to see, at close range, how those forces shaped one landmark achievement in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and how the meaning of that achievement was built up over time.

I follow what is arguably the most important basic-science achievement in the history of the PRC, the synthetic insulin project, completed in the mid-1960s. Rather than retelling a heroic lab story, I reconstruct the project from start to finish and then trace how its meaning was shaped afterwards. That means asking not only how the chemistry worked, but also how decisions were made, how time and resources were protected, and how the result was presented to the public.

What emerges is a picture that’s both hopeful and realistic. Campaign-style drives—more people, faster deadlines, louder slogans—did not speed complex experiments. Progress came when mid-level administrators and senior scientists did quieter work: buffering core teams from political noise, smoothing supply chains, and giving specialists room to solve stubborn problems. In other words, the success of basic science depended less on grand declarations and more on creating small islands of continuity inside a turbulent system. That balance—between political ambition and laboratory reality—turned out to be decisive.

Once the result was in hand, another process began. Conferences, media coverage, museum displays and textbooks helped fix how the achievement would be read. The way a result is framed—what counts as definitive, who gets credit, what lesson is drawn—shapes its authority and afterlife. Synthetic insulin became a durable symbol of national capability and modernity, not simply because the chemistry worked, but because institutions told a clear story about what it meant.

To reconstruct this, I used a wide range of sources: internal publications from research institutes, journals and conference records, newspapers and newsreels, institutional gazetteers, memoirs, interviews, and site visits in Shanghai and Beijing.

What I find is a picture in which technical excellence is necessary but not sufficient. Whether a result becomes credible, exemplary, and nationally meaningful depends on the political architecture around it: who can shield long experiments from political turbulence, how merit is recognised, how resources are rationed, and how the story is told afterwards. That observation is hardly unique to Mao-era China. States everywhere try to turn basic research into public value, and in doing so they influence what counts as convincing evidence, how risk is judged, and who is believed when disagreements arise. The insulin case gives these dynamics historical texture.

Winning the BACS prize is an honour, but the real reward has been the chance to look closely at how science gains authority—and how fragile that authority can be without thoughtful stewardship. I’m thankful to the Universities’ China Committee in London and to the University of Bristol’s Department of History for supporting the work, and to the archivists, interviewees and colleagues who helped along the way. If any of this sparks questions or curiosity, I’d be glad to continue the conversation.

If you’d like to get in touch about this research, you can contact Sijie on: ch20082@bristol.ac.uk

 

Internship on British South Asian History: Hannah Clark

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In this blog post, we hear from Hannah Clark, who has just finished the second year of her history degree at the University of Bristol and completed this internship on British South Asian History over the summer.

Over the last six weeks, I contributed to the development of a public digital resource titled ‘South Asian Britain: Connections and Networks’ – you can find out more about this here. I worked alongside Professor Sumita Mukherjee, one of the University of Bristol’s historians that have led the project ‘Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830s to the present.’ To mark South Asian Heritage month (18 July – 17 August), the website was launched this July. This resource caters both to the wider public and to individuals conducting academic research. It consists predominantly of entries and oral histories on people, organisations and events related to the interconnected experiences of South Asians in Britain. This opportunity was facilitated by the Widening Participation Research Summer Internship Programme.

During my internship, I engaged with a range of research methods and gained experience completing different types of tasks that a project like this requires. My first week was spent familiarising myself with the topic, and in my second week I helped with website editing, either captioning photographs or fixing inaccurate map pins on certain entries. In my third week, I got the opportunity to conduct archival research for the first time, spending three days in the Arts and Social Science’s Special Collections. I specifically looked at records on M.G.K. Menon, a physicist who received his PhD from the University of Bristol, and on the first British South Asian Members of Parliament. I found this process fascinating, and I was able to apply my research on Menon when I later wrote his entry for the website.

The second half of my internship was spent writing entries on different people. I particularly enjoyed this task, and it has further improved the way I process resources, preparing me more to take on a dissertation this academic year. What I appreciated most was the process of going from reading an individual’s name for the first time, to piecing together my best attempt at an overview of their life; it was extremely interesting, and at times quite moving. For example, though I only found limited information on her, I wrote about the UK’s first female Sikh and South Asian police officer, PC Karpal Kaur Sandhu. Her story is tragic, as she was murdered at 30 by her husband, who deemed her profession unsuitable for a woman. Her story is also groundbreaking and inspiring, and she left a legacy that has motivated subsequent generations of female police officers. Being able to shed light on individuals that have broken down barriers in society, like PC Sandhu, is one of the many reasons that public history projects like Remaking Britain are so beautiful and so important.

This internship gave me the opportunity to see what goes on behind the scenes of a research project. One can easily take a website like this for granted, without considering the number of contributors and the amount of effort it requires to complete. This experience has helped me to develop my own research abilities and has taught me so much about this topic and its significance. I am so grateful to have been supervised by Professor Mukherjee, with whom I had weekly meetings and continuous support with every aspect of my internship. I wholeheartedly urge anyone intrigued by academic research to apply to this programme in the future!

‘Histories of the Present’: Writing for Policy Makers

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In this blog post, Bristol lecturer Amy Edwards reflects on her new project exploring women and self-employment and on working with policy makers.

Over the past 18 months I have been running an AHRC-funded project called ‘The Secret of My Success’: Women and Self-Employment in Britain (1970-2000) which focuses on the recent history of women’s self-employment. The aim of the project is to understand the motivations and lived experiences of women who worked for themselves in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

A lot of the work I’ve done for this project has involved familiar historical work. I travelled to archives to consult the records of companies like Avon Cosmetics, who hired thousands of women to work as independent sales representatives. I spent hours sifting through digitized newspapers, looking for reports featuring women entrepreneurs. I also conducted oral histories with women who worked for themselves during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, listening to stories about lives shaped by family obligation, friendship, house moves, illnesses, career breaks, and economic upheaval.

Something less familiar, has been the experience of translating my historical findings for non-academic audiences – or more specifically, for policymakers. A central aim of the project is to explore the opportunities, barriers, and conditions that affected self-employed women in the past, but to also think about what this can tell us about women’s working lives in the present. As a contemporary historian, I’m inherently interested in solving the puzzle of how we got to where we are today.

To this end, I have recently been working with PolicyBristol, a team based at the university who support academics in using their research to shape policy at local, national, and international levels. With their help, I have been turning my research into a series of Parliamentary Select Committee evidence submissions. Select Committees form part of the daily work of parliamentarians: they launch inquiries into current issues, and gather evidence from members of the public, academics, practitioners, businesses, think tanks, and activists. Committees then report their findings to parliament, who have 60 days to respond. In other words, submitting research to a relevant inquiry is a great way to inform policy development in key areas such as the economy, education, environment, and culture.

For this project, I identified two active inquiries that were relevant to the research I had been conducting: one for the House of Commons Women and Equalities Select Committee, and one for the House of Lords Home-Based Working Select Committee. I quickly learnt the importance of directly responding to the specific questions that each Committee set out as part of its call for evidence. Submissions also need to be concise, with key findings highlighted at the top: working parliamentarians don’t have hours of free time to read an entire thesis on a topic. They do, however, want specific recommendations – that is, evidence-based suggestions for how a particular issue might be addressed. This requires a knowledge not only of your own research area, but also of the current policy-landscape. It’s important to ask yourself what is the need/ problem that parliament is trying to address? What policies already exist in this area? Have other stakeholders – advocacy groups, think tanks, charities etc. – already had their say, and if so, what were their recommendations?  And ultimately, for a historian, the question is: what can a historical perspective add here? What does placing this issue into a longer context do to change our understanding of it (and how it might be tackled today)?

This was a really different way of writing, or even thinking about, a historical research project. Others have written much more insightfully than I can here, about the benefits and challenges of using historical knowledge to solve present-day problems (something that John Tosh labelled  Applied History). Crossing the bridge between academia and policy is tricky work. But it is also rewarding. I found translating my ideas about the relationship between emotions, social relations, time, space, and work into practical, applicable policy recommendations incredibly useful. It pushed me towards really thinking about historical subjects as people living through the historical phenomena I usually try to analyse. I had to consider what might have changed their lives had politicians at the time paid more mind to their experiences.

Most of all it reminded me of one of my favourite quotes from researcher and translator Graham Burchell, when he discussed his ‘experience of not being a citizen of the community or republic of thought and action in which one nevertheless is unavoidably implicated or involved’ – that is, of feeling out of place in society. In such a situation, Burchell reminds us how important it is to reveal ‘the (often quite recent) inventedness of our world’.[1] I think that history is a great tool for doing just that: it shows us that how we organise society, politics, and the economy is neither inevitable nor enduring. As such, using our research to remind those in power that we need more than sheer presentism to tackle the plurality of issues we face today, is work worth doing.

Dr Amy Edwards is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol and historian of twentieth and twenty-first century Britain. Her research focuses on cultures of capitalism, investment, and enterprise. Her first book, Are We Rich Yet? (UCP, 2022) explains how financial markets became so central to British society, not only economically and politically, but socially and culturally, too. She is now leading an AHRC-funded project titled ‘The Secret of My Success: Women and self-employment in Britain, c.1970-2000’.

Find Amy on:

Bluesky: @somsproject.bsky.social

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/somsdramyedwards

Instagram: somsproject

[1] Graham Burchell, ‘Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self’ in, Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (eds.), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government (London: UCL Press, 1996), 19-36, 30.

Return of the Mach: Heir to Concorde to the Skies – A Transport Revolution?

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Almost twenty-two years after Concorde completed its final commercial flight to Bristol in 2003, a US-made prototype jet, Boom Supersonic’s XB-1, has successfully broken the sound barrier. As a historian of industry, politics and technology in Britain and the wider world, Dr Keith Mc Loughlin considers the significance of the achievement, the challenges facing supersonic transport and the historical lessons to be learnt if it is to succeed…

To read more from Keith on Concorde, check out the original Arts Matter blog post!

PhDone! Dr Qiqing Tan

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Dr Qiqing Tan is a PhD graduate from the History Department at the University of Bristol, where she joined in 2020 after completing her master’s degree at Renmin University in China. Under the supervision of Professors Brendan Smith and Benjamin Pohl, she successfully defended her doctoral thesis on Irish revenue in January 2025.

Hi Qiqing. First of all, congratulations on your successful viva! Can you tell us a bit about what your doctoral research was about?

Thanks! My research investigates the state of Irish revenue and the operation of the Irish exchequer during the reign of Edward II (1307-1327). By analysing various sources of revenue through both geographical and chronological perspectives, it contends that, despite various pressures, the Irish exchequer effectively navigated the English lordship in Ireland through some of the most severe crises in medieval Irish history. Moreover, this study employs the operations of this fiscal system as a prism through which to explore how individuals and communities in Ireland adapted to this rapidly deteriorating conditions. Officials, ministers, clerks, citizens, farmers, and foreigners alike demonstrated resilience and flexibility in adversity, seeking to maintain and advance their positions amid a time of crisis.

How did you become interested in Irish fiscal history?

My interest in this field began during my master’s degree, where I focused on the English exchequer in the twelfth century. This research provided a solid foundation for understanding the development of fiscal systems in England. As I delved deeper into the subject, I became increasingly fascinated by how these institutions expanded and evolved in the late Middle Ages, particularly in Ireland, which was under English control at the time. The Irish exchequer, in particular, caught my attention due to the volume of surviving records, which offered a valuable, though manageable, source for studying a period of around twenty years. Furthermore, the fourteenth century in Ireland was an especially intriguing era, marked by political instability, power struggles, and the contestation of different identities. This complexity made Ireland an ideal setting for exploring the interplay between fiscal systems, society, and politics.

What did you enjoy most about your project?

One of the most enjoyable aspects of my research was the quiet, contemplative time I spent with the records. There’s something meditative about immersing yourself in historical documents and piecing together the past from seemingly fragmented data. I was constantly struck by the way small details in the financial records could tell you so much about the social and political fabric of the time. It was the process of solving these puzzles that I found particularly satisfying—there’s a deep joy in uncovering hidden patterns or discovering something previously overlooked in the archives. The interdisciplinary nature of my research also kept me engaged, as I was able to draw from history, economics, and political science to enrich my understanding.

Any top tips for lunch spots near your archives / libraries / museum collections / the Bristol University campus?

Absolutely! Near the University of Bristol, I highly recommend Chris and Jo’s Kitchen for lunch. It’s a lovely spot that serves wholesome, delicious food. If you’re ever in Dublin near the National Archives of Ireland, I always enjoyed stopping by Brew Lab Specialty Coffee. It’s a fantastic coffee shop where I’d grab a coffee to start my day or take a quick lunch break. The atmosphere there really helped energise me for the long hours spent in the archives.

Heading of one Irish receipt roll (TNA, E 101/237/3, m.8)

Let’s talk about the viva itself. What would you advise someone who is preparing for their own viva?

Preparing for the viva can be nerve-wracking, but the key is to be well-prepared and to stay calm. Even though you wrote the thesis, it’s crucial to familiarise yourself thoroughly with every section, as you may be asked to explain concepts in ways that require more depth than the written document provides. A good practice is to make a list of possible questions that could arise. The ‘Viva Survivors’ website is a great resource for this. In addition, try to rehearse your answers and don’t rely too heavily on notes during the viva itself. The more you practise, the more confident you’ll feel in presenting your ideas clearly and coherently. Lastly, remember that the viva is as much a conversation as it is an examination—don’t be afraid to engage with your examiners thoughtfully.

What’s next for you? Where can we find your research and/or writing now?

 At the moment, I am applying for postdoctoral fellowships, which will allow me to continue my research into medieval fiscal history. I’m also in the process of developing a book proposal based on my doctoral thesis, with the goal of expanding the research and making it more accessible to a broader audience, particularly those interested in the history of English colonial rule in Ireland. My work is also featured in the forthcoming volume Scotland and England, c.1300 to 1603: War, Diplomacy, and Power, edited by Andy King, Gordon McKelvie, and Jenny McHugh, where I have contributed an article titled ‘The Repercussions of the Scottish War: A Financial Approach to the Bruce Invasion of Ireland, 1315-1318’ (Brepols, forthcoming).

Shaun Wallace on In Pursuit of Freedom

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In this blog post, Bristol lecturer Shaun Wallace reflects on his forthcoming book In Pursuit of Freedom: Fugitive Slaves and Advertised Escape in the Early Republic.

Explaining the origins and motivations behind my first manuscript I find myself gravitating toward the same inspiration I accredit to my decision to study and teach American slavery—the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845). As a second year student at the University of Stirling in 2008, my introduction to racial slavery was through Douglass’s eloquent and powerful antebellum autobiography. I was drawn to its themes of agency and resistance and to the life of Douglass, the self-taught author who learned to read and write and used his literateness to challenge, and eventually escape, the system that enslaved him. I analysed literateness within narrative accounts of enslavement written by formerly enslaved people for my undergraduate dissertation, explored the relationship between literacy and escape for my MRes thesis, and resistance as captured in fugitive slave advertisements for my PhD project.

Yet, for every question answered, another seemed to appear. How did bondpersons pursuit of literacy fuse with their understanding of freedom? What other motivations led enslaved persons to escape? Douglass was Maryland’s most famous fugitive but who were the others—The women, men, and children who never left written testimonies but were advertised as escapees by enslavers? How did demographic, geographical, and temporal factors shape fugitivity patterns—Did bondpersons who escaped from the Chesapeake region in the upper South share the same profile as escapees from slavery in the deeper South?I designed the Fugitive Slave Database (FSdb) to address these questions. One of the largest digital archives of American fugitive slave advertisements from the turn of the nineteenth century, I built it to preserve fugitivity notices in their complete and original form, bring them into a corpus of historical evidence, and create datasets for analysis. A total of 5,567 fugitivity notices published in Georgia and Maryland (and smaller samples from South Carolina and Virginia) were collected and over 9,000 records extrapolated from them, generating new and original information for 2,350 enslaved women, men, and children advertised as escapees by some 2,000 men and women who enslaved them.

My forthcoming manuscript, In Pursuit of Freedom: Fugitive Slaves and Advertised Escape in the Early Republic (publication with the University of Georgia Press: early 2025) centres around the experiences of the enslaved women and men captured in fugitive slave advertisements, emerging as a major contribution to historiographical understandings of slavery in the United States from the turn of the nineteenth century.

Directing attention to a time (the early republic) and to places (Georgia and Maryland) that have not received sustained consideration by scholars of enslaved fugitivity, my book enriches scholarly understanding of the methods adopted by enslavers when enslaved men and women escaped, providing new insights into the attitude of enslavers as well as the role of printers and print in the surveillance of Black bodies.  In Pursuit of Freedom furnishes scholarship with first empirically-based profile of fugitives and fugitivity in Georgia and Maryland at the turn of the nineteenth century. It deploys quantitative and qualitative methods to unearth the stories that enslaved women and men did not write themselves but that can be recovered, reconstructed, and reimagined through careful attention to a vast archive of fugitive slave advertisements that became a standard feature of American newspapers during the eighteenth century.

My new book encourages slavery scholars to interpret fugitive slave advertisements in new and original ways. Pioneering innovative digital humanities methodologies to conceptualize and theorize bondpersons pursuit of freedom as a lifelong struggle, it sheds light on a profoundly personal process of becoming and self-actualization in the lives of enslaved women and men as they distanced themselves physically and psychologically from bondage. Fugitivity, the book argues, marked an important, if uncertain stride, in what has been until now a fugitive process—Not the end but rather a moment in the lives of freedom seekers alluded to in fugitive slave advertisements. Interpreting notices for escapees for what they were truly were—the desperate actions of enslavers to interfere and meddle in a process they could never control—we can ensure that the agency, decision-making, and personhood of the women and men in pursuit of freedom is never again generalized, masked, silenced, or undermined.

 

It’s Time to Think About Ability as well as Disability

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To properly understand what ability means we need to look beyond the human, too.

In this blog post, Dr Andy Flack reflects on his recent open access article in History and Theory – co-authored with fellow Bristol lecturer Dr Alice Would – exploring the history of ability ‘through an animal lens.’

How did you get into thinking about this area?

This article emerged out of my recent AHRC Leadership Fellowship, which brought together environmental history, disability studies and sensory studies for the first time. We looked at animals that live in the dark, and the naturalists (mainly British and north American) that looked for them, and asked how supposedly ‘strange’ and ‘abnormal’ senses were understood between around 1800 and the present day. During our research, this began to raise the question of what naturalists meant when they thought animals were either well-equipped or not to live in their dark worlds. And more than that, we noticed that naturalists and environmentalists had lots to say about environmental change and its impact on the way animals were able to continue living in their worlds. In effect, it seemed that animals were being ‘disabled’ by human changes. As we thought more about this, we realised that to understand that character of this ‘disability’, we had to better understand what people in the past thought it meant to be ‘able’ in the world.

Tell me more about ability beyond the human context?

By looking at a range of dark-dwellers, from bats and hedgehogs to star-nosed moles and deep sea fish and cave-dwellers, we found that the historical idea of ‘ability’ changed over time. Mirroring a medical understanding of the human body, for much of the period naturalists identified ability in the sensory structures of animal bodies, such as the tactile nose of the star-nosed mole, the neurology of the barn owl and the echolocating organs of the bat. Across the period, there emerged an understanding that ability resided in the ways in which specialized bodies interacted with the wider environment, and that environment change could – sometimes fatally – disrupt that ‘harmony’. Early in the twentieth century, it was sometimes seen as the fault of the animal itself in its failure to adapt to modernity. Later, however, there was a sense that for an animal to remain ‘able’, it was the responsibility of people to adapt the environments that we have made so that species can live well together. This has profound implications, because ability today is less often understood as something that resides within some kind of ‘specialised’ body, and more as something that is produced when environments are effectively adapted to the diverse needs of all.

What’s next?

We hope that our article will inspire historians to return to many of the ‘big ideas’ that structure how we think – and have thought – about the world but which often go ‘under the radar of our perception’. We also hope that historians look for the roots of ‘ability’ beyond our context, to test and nuance our findings. Looking well beyond human contexts could offer exciting and urgent ways to do this because we live in a world that is changing fast, and where the adaptation of all beings is going to be imperative. Indeed, we hope that we have shown that to understand either ability or disability, we need to understand both.

Summer Reading: Kate Skinner on Women Talking

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In this blog post, Professor Kate Skinner reflects on a book she read this summer – Women Talking – and draws connections to her current research in gender and legal history. 

Content warning: This post contains descriptions of rape and sexual and gender-based violence.

TLDR 1: The law matters in dealing with sexual and gender-based violence.

TLDR 2: If you don’t want to read the book, you can watch the film instead.

Early this summer, I read Women Talking by Miriam Toews (Faber & Faber, 2018). The story revolves around an imaginary debate between women in a Mennonite settlement in the aftermath of a shocking discovery: a group of eight men within their small, agricultural, religious community had repeatedly sprayed powerful animal tranquiliser over women and girls as they slept and raped them in their ensuing stupor.

Over a period of four years, the women and girls in the story had awoken with painful injuries and fragments of disturbing dreams. They were repeatedly told by the community’s male elders that this was the work of demons upon their wild female imaginations, until one woman stayed awake long enough to catch a perpetrator climbing through her window in the dead of night, animal tranquiliser in hand. The police had been called, and the rapists taken into custody. The women then learn that the elders are selling off assets to raise bail money so they can bring the men home and effect a ‘reconciliation’ with their victims. The women must decide what to do.

The story is narrated by August Epp, a schoolteacher. Born into the same community, to parents who were ex-communicated and left, Epp had attempted to live abroad for a while. He had been uneasily reaccepted after these unsuccessful acts of rebellion, for the community emphasised that Mennonites should marry other Mennonites, remain in their communities, and limit their contact with the rest of the world. When such contact had to be made, it was mediated by male elders. Herein lay a crucial element of their power.

Epp’s school was for boys only. Most of the women in the story could not write, but they wanted their reasoning and their decisions to be recorded, so they asked Epp to join them at their meetings in a hayloft. There, he writes down the arguments that the women made in relation to three options: ‘Do Nothing’, ‘Stay and Fight’, and ‘Leave’. The arguments, often religious and articulated through agricultural metaphors, are interwoven with glimpses of individual characters, whose experiences shape their perspectives upon Mennonite values, and how those values might be interpreted or adapted to respond to this desperate situation.

The reader thus encounters Salome, who had attacked one of the perpetrators with a scythe upon realising what they had done. It was this action that led the male elders to call the police to the community: the perpetrators were deemed in need of protection from the women’s rage. We also meet Miep, Salome’s three-year-old daughter, who needs medical treatment for infection and injuries sustained through rape. We meet Nettie, who refuses to speak to adults but takes care of children, and Greta, whose teeth were knocked out by her night-time attacker when she momentarily regained consciousness and tried to scream. The women in the story write a manifesto to guide their future lives and depart from the settlement.

The dialogue in Women Talking was imagined, but it was crafted in response to events that were real. They occurred between 2005 and 2009 in Manitoba Colony, a Mennonite settlement in Bolivia. The perpetrators were ultimately convicted and sentenced to prison terms.

Later in the summer of 2024, I was reminded of this story upon seeing a BBC headline: ‘Woman describes horror of learning husband drugged her so others could rape her.’ In this case, a French woman, Gisèle, was repeatedly drugged by her husband, Dominique Pélicot, over approximately a decade. He invited dozens of men into her home whilst she slept and photographed and filmed them as they raped her.

The use of tranquiliser to facilitate repeated rape was a common feature of the two stories, as was the violation of a woman’s privacy, dignity, and bodily autonomy by the perpetrators of this grotesque violence. There were of course many differences. One of them was in how perpetrators were caught.

In the more recent French case, Dominique Pélicot was reported by a stranger for ‘upskirting’ (taking photos up women’s skirts without their consent). This is a criminal offence in France. Once he had been reported, he became the subject of a police investigation. The police thereby gained access to his computer equipment, and images and videos of multiple rapes were discovered.

The law alone cannot prevent many forms of sexual and gender-based violence. The law is a limited tool with which to address the structural causes of this violence. Laws may be robustly or poorly written, and effectively or inadequately applied by police, prosecutors, and judges who are trained, committed, and resourced to varying degrees.

But the law definitely matters. Laws that criminalise actions such as ‘upskirting’ – and indeed the production and circulation of ‘deepfakes’ – are laws that criminalise the violation of privacy, dignity, and bodily autonomy. Without them, the police have fewer tools with which to investigate the online worlds in which perpetrators of sexual violence increasingly operate.

Kate Skinner is currently researching in the field of gender and legal history.

Women Talking has since been made into a film.

Internship on British South Asian history: Nazma Ali

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In this special blog post, we hear from Bristol student Nazma Ali on her recent Widening Participation Internship. This internship focussed on the histories of British South Asians from the 1830s to the present, working with Professor Sumita Mukherjee and Dr Aleena Din as part of the Remaking Britain project.

Hi Nazma! Can you tell us a bit more about the internship?

During my recent internship, I contributed to the development of a digital resource titled ‘Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830s to the Present.’ Throughout this six-week internship, I worked alongside Professor Sumita Mukerjee and Dr Aleena Din from the University of Bristol’s Department of History. This resource serves both academic researchers and general audiences interested in the experiences and contributions of British South Asians. This group has been less focused on by researchers and I was excited to see a whole internship project based on just South Asian history!

During this project, I had the opportunity of working in the British Library Archives and the Feminist Archive South collection, based in the university’s special collections. I handled diverse materials ranging from nineteenth century manuscripts to pamphlets on youth resistance movements of the 1970s. What I particularly enjoyed was writing entries. I synthesized large amounts of primary and secondary research to produce short essays for the website. I explored the self-organization of South Asians against the National Front and specialized in the resistance of Bangladeshi communities against fascist intimidation in London’s East End.

I would say the work of Bangladeshi women in this movement interested me the most. Anowara Jahan was a committee member of the Commission for Racial Equality, a board member of East London’s Bengali Teachers and worked extremely hard to mobilize Bengali women in local communities. She defied patriarchy control which restricted women to the domestic sphere whilst defying Britain’s racist laws that repressed Asian women. I believe highlighting the works of such individuals is central to the study of history. As someone of Bangladeshi heritage, bringing light to the contributions of my community was my motivation.

I have used resources similar to ‘Remaking Britain’ during my history degree, so it was interesting to see how such websites are produced. I also had the independence to decide what topics I wanted to focus on which was refreshing. I am grateful that this internship provided insight into academic research. I better understood the several opportunities that come with being a researcher. I think this internship project would be an amazing experience for anyone interested in race and gender history.

Finally, I built meaningful relationships with my supervisors. They continuously helped me with my entries. They organized weekly meetings so I could stay up to date and they allowed me to explore my interest in the history of British Bangladeshis. I thoroughly enjoyed this internship, and I am excited to see what impact this resource has!

What drew you to this topic?

Whilst I’ve learnt a lot in my first year of doing History, I noticed that my area of interest was not as well represented in the curriculum. South Asian women’s rights and resistance are my two main interests which I was excited to know this project covered.

About the Author

Nazma Ali has just finished her first year as a Bristol History student, and completed this internship over the summer. Through working on this project, she hopes to bring more light to the resilience of British South Asians.