At the Crossroads of Empires: the Longobard Church of Sant’Ambrogio at Montecorvino Rovella (Salerno), Italy

Sean Deans (BA Ancient and Medieval History) shares his experiences of working with the ‘At the Crossroad of Empires’ project team to research an early medieval church in Italy, which encompassed everything from archaeological surveying and interviewing local residents to meeting the Mayor and attending a saxophone concert!

The Grenville Collection

Katriona Lawrenson (BA History) blogs about her experiences of cataloguing the collection of John Grenville, a former professor at the University of Birmingham whose extensive archive of microfilms is an important source for US foreign policy at the turn of the 20th century.

The Sound of the ‘Big Bang’: Cataloguing the Douglas French Archive

As a special advisor to the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, Douglas French was able to gather an extensive (and hitherto unseen) private archive of material relating to the conduct of economic policy in the 1980’s and in particular to the ‘Big Bang’ in financial services of 1986. Here, John Tibbits (BA History and Political Science) explains how he was given the daunting task of digitising this archive.

Selly Oak Activism

Here Bryony Parsons presents some of the findings of her research into the history of social and political activism in Selly Oak in the 1960s, part of a project led by Dr Chris Moores, the Director of Modern British Studies.