How do we write the history of women’s lives when history itself has hidden them? In this International Women’s Day episode of the History Workshop Podcast, Christopher Kissane speaks to the Irish poet and writer Doireann ní Ghríofa about her book 'A Ghost in the Throat', winner of the An Post Irish National Book of the Year and the Foyle’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year. The book weaves together the stories of two women, separated by centuries: Doireann’s experiences as a young mother in twenty-first century Ireland, and the lost life of the poet Eibhlín Dubh ní Chonaill, whose lament for her murdered husband, Caoineadh Airt uí Laoghaire, has been described as the greatest Irish poem of the eighteenth-century. Finding Eibhlín Dubh’s story repeatedly obscured by her famous male relatives and an ‘academic gaze [that swiftly] places her in a masculine shadow, as though she could only be of interest as a satellite to male lives’, Doireann searches for the poet’s life with ‘the brazen audacity of one positioned far from the tall walls of the university’. Through research and imagination, between dropping her children to school and putting them to bed, she constructs a very different history. ‘This’, the book begins, ‘is a female text’.

Writing Women's Lives & History

How can historians best document, preserve, and make accessible the voices and artifacts of refugee and migration experience? What kinds of materials would such a collection involve? How can archives respond, ethically and practically, to the challenge of conserving materials from under-represented communities whose lives remain so politicized and whose experiences raise such thorny issues of nationalism, immigration, identity and belonging? In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, Ria Kapoor speaks to four historians and archivists who are grappling with those questions: Paul Dudman; Heather Faulkner; Mezna Qato, and Peter Gatrell.

Creating Refugee Archives

How can we write the history of AIDS activism so that all stories are equally important? In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, Sarah Schulman discusses how she navigated that challenge in her new book Let The Record Show: a Political History of ACT-UP New York.

Writing the History of AIDS Activism: Sarah Schulman & Let The Record Show

How has the writing of Black British histories functioned as both a form of historical analysis and a voice of radical oppositional politics? Caroline Bressey, Meleisa Ono-George, and Sadiah Qureshi discuss with Marybeth Hamilton in this episode of the History Workshop podcast.

Black British Histories

How can black feminism lead to our collective liberation? Today we hear from the Black feminist writers, thinkers and activists Stella Dadzie and Chardine Taylor Stone, who join Rosa Campbell to discuss internationalism, the importance of collectivity, the role history might play in achieving justice and hope in difficult times.

Listen now on Soundcloud - Apple Podcasts - Spotify - Stitcher - or wherever you get your podcasts.

Black Feminisms

Sheila Rowbotham is a writer, an historian, an activist, and an internationally renowned socialist feminist. In 1970 she participated in the first British Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College Oxford, and two years later she published Women, Resistance, and Revolution, a pathbreaking analysis of women’s participation in radical upheavals that was immediately translated into multiple languages and is now recognized as a feminist classic.

In 2000, she published a memoir, Promise of a Dream, which followed her first steps as a political radical and as an activist for women’s liberation over the course of the 1960s. She has now followed it with a second volume, Daring to Hope, a year-by-year exploration of her life in the 1970s, when she gained a global reputation as a writer and activist for whom women’s liberation and socialist revolution inextricably went hand in hand. In conversation with Marybeth Hamilton, she discusses the political challenges of feminist activism and the intimate challenges of navigating a life devoted to transformation, in which the personal was understood to be political.

Daring to Hope: Sheila Rowbotham and 1970s Women's Liberation

Ridley Road has recently gained attention as the subject of a new BBC drama about the revival of fascism in 1960s London and the anti-fascist action taken by the Jewish community in East London. 

Ridley Road Market has been around for almost 140 years and has been described as a “hub of connection, interconnections and social interaction”. Historically and today, the market is run by and for diverse communities and forms a public space which is political. Like many markets, however, Ridley Road is at risk from "regeneration", gentrification, and social cleansing.

In this episode by the audio producer May Robson, we hear local residents' memories of Ridley Road's anti-fascist history and about the struggles that market traders face today - from gentrification to lockdown.

Ridley Road

In this episode of the History Workshop Podcast, Elly Robson is in conversation with Professor Vinita Damodaran and Professor Harriet Ritvo to look at the ways that we know nature and how these have been political, in the past and today. Together, they discuss the rise of scientific expertise, its entanglement in projects of empire, and how it has interacted with indigenous and local knowledge. We also hear about whether solutions to climate change today can be left to scientists, what is meant by the Anthropocene, and about the politics of conservation.

Knowing Nature

Histories of gay men, lesbians, queer and trans people often focus on the heroic. But what about the gay characters whose impact on history was far more ambiguous, or complicated, or out-and-out bad? Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey, hosts of the Bad Gays podcast and authors of Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, discuss what those complicated lives can tell us about the dynamics of queer history and the formation of sexual identities.

Bad Gays

In episode three of our four-part series on Queer Activisms, Laura Forster is joined by Ajamu X and E-J Scott to discuss public history, the queer archive, and what it means to queer the museum. Listen now to the conversation on the History Workshop Podcast.

Public History And The Queer Archive

In this episode on queer education, Elly Robson is joined by Syeda Ali and Nazmia Jamal to discuss how queer lives can be integrated into school curricula and cultures. The history of queer education in the UK has often been one of deliberate silence: a silence that was officially legislated between 1988 and 2003 by Section 28, which made it illegal for schools to 'promote homosexuality'. We explore stories of resistance and trace Section 28's legacies, including what lessons it might hold for teachers seeking to challenge the Islamophobic Prevent strategy today.

To find out more about resources referenced in this podcast, check out 
- Nazmia Jamal's new LGBT+ poetry resource for the Poetry Society: https://poetrysociety.org.uk/education/learning-from-home/secondary-14-poets-for-lgbt-history-month-and-always/
- the Rebel Dykes documentary: https://www.rebeldykes1980s.com/
- the letter to the Independent in September 2019, titled "The government is hijacking LGBT+ sex education to bolster its counterterrorism strategy": https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/lgbt-no-outsiders-rse-birmingham-muslim-prevent-values-a9092781.html

Queer Education

Listen to leading scholars, activists and writers talk about the practice of history and reflect on the social forces that are changing our world.

Bad Gays

History Workshop Podcast

Related tracks