Today’s blog is written by the author T. D Grigg who considers the importance and perils of historical research when writing his novels. To coincide with this piece we will be offering his latest novel ‘Distant Thunder’ to anyone interested in reviewing it for JVC Online. Email Lucie if you are interested and the lucky person’s name will be drawn from a hat. You can email her at l.m.matthew-jones@ljmu.ac.uk.
Tomorrow will see Matthew McCormack (University of Northampton) kick start our ‘Teaching and Learning showcase’. His blog will discuss how he has successfully used Northampton’s urban environment as a canvass to teach nineteenth-century urban history. This will be followed on Thursday by Sarah Parker (University of Birmingham) who will show how university archives can be used in pedagogy. She demonstrates how using copies of fin-de-siècle books in the University of Birmingham’s Cadbury Research Library and Special Collections enabled students to get a hands on experience of ‘the beauty of the book’. This will be followed next Tuesday by Lucinda Matthews-Jones’s (Liverpool John Moores University) blog on using the university campus itself for field trips through an exploration of a field trip to Singleton Abbey at Swansea University.