This session has been planned to happen directly after our lunchtime talk All Our Stories Happened Here.
Attendees of this event will be invited to ask questions, and to talk about what The Box means to them.
Tea / coffee etc will be provided.
Details for the speakers from St Mary's University Twickenham
Dr Angela Platt - Course Lead – English Literature Lecturer – Liberal Arts
Angela is a Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts, Course Lead in English Literature and Associate Head in Student Experience.
Her research explores lived experience, with particular interests in religion and belief, emotions, family and intimate life, and the ways people make meaning of their experiences.
She completed her PhD in History at Royal Holloway, University of London, examining love and religious experience in Britain between 1780 and 1850. Drawing particularly upon letters, diaries, religious writings and other personal sources, her research considers how religious belief shaped experiences of family and intimate life and, in turn, how relationships and emotions shaped people's experiences of religion.
Her more recent research has developed these interests through work on lived experience, public history and heritage. She leads a collaborative project exploring how the lived experiences of the past can be recovered through archival sources and communicated through participatory and multisensory approaches to public history. The project began through a partnership with Hogarth’s House in London, exploring new approaches to interpreting lived experience within historic-house settings, and has since developed through a partnership with the Panacea Museum in Bedford, examining the experiences of members of the Panacea Society, a predominantly female twentieth-century religious community. The next phase of the project is being developed in partnership with the British Association for Local History (BALH), extending these approaches into local and community history and exploring how they can be applied by local historians, heritage organisations and schools.
Angela is also developing research examining relationships, emotions and lived experience in the age of artificial intelligence, including questions around intimacy, emotional technologies and what changing relationships between humans and machines might tell us about what it means to be human.
Her teaching spans English Literature, History and Liberal Arts, with particular interests in literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the present, critical theory, gender and sexuality, religion, public history, and the relationship between technology and human experience.
Dr Stewart McCain - Subject Lead - Liberal Arts . Senior Lecturer – History
Stewart McCain is Programme Director in History. He holds a D.Phil in History from the University of Oxford, and he is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy. Stewart is also the Reviews Editor for French History (OUP), and sits on the steering committee of History UK. He also convenes the Walpole Public Lecture Series in History at St Mary’s.
Stewart’s book, The Language Question under Napoleon, offers a new interpretation of the nature of Napoleonic imperialism, by exploring the linguistic dimensions of state power and the responses of local elites and administrators to Napoleonic language policy in the school, church, army and law courts.
Before moving to St Mary's in January 2016, Stewart taught History at the Universities of Winchester, Aston and Oxford. He completed his doctoral studies with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council at Oxford, and was the RHS PJ Marshall fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in 2013/14. At the 2014 annual conference of the Society for French Historical Studies in Montreal he organised a research panel on Modernity and its Discontents alongside two other doctoral researchers from the UK, supported by a grant from the Society for the Study of French History.
Stewart’s teaching reflects his research interests, focusing on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period in France as well as the history of nationalism, and the changing nature of war and conflict. He also supervises third year dissertations and independent study projects.
