Martin Johnes: What are Academic Historians For?
[Dr Martin Johnes is from Pembrokeshire and took his BA and PhD at Cardiff University. He subsequently held research posts at the universities of Oxford and Cardiff, before taking up a lectureship at St Martin’s College (of Higher Education) in Lancaster.]
The BBC is currently commissioning a major new television series on the history of Wales. No doubt this will be widely welcomed, but some academics are rather snooty about television history. They see it as obsessed by the gruesome and the dramatic, uninterested in the complexity.
Quite apart from the snobbery of this position, it is not sustainable in an era of spending cuts. Public expenditure needs to be justified and it is difficult to justify spending money on researching the past when the results are only published in obscure journals or expensive books not even available at the local library.
Consequently, academics in all disciplines are now suddenly expected by the funders of higher education to demonstrate and measure the ‘impact’ of their research on those working outside universities. For those in the sciences, computing and engineering, this can be relatively straightforward. Their research is more likely to have obvious ‘real world’ applications and taxpayers are far less prone to question the sense of public investment in areas such as medical research.
For academics in the humanities, the idea of public impact is less straightforward. How can a historian actually demonstrate that his or her research has had an impact? They tend to resort to talking in vague terms about cultural enrichment or developing a popular appreciation of heritage. To evidence this they are increasingly looking for opportunities to turn their research into museum exhibitions or to act as consultants on television documentaries. They are setting up websites to tell the wider world about what they are up to....
The reality is that it can take years before a book or article about history has any impact. If it happens at all, it is through the trickling down of knowledge that occurs when people are taught by an academic, or read his or her papers and then use this knowledge when they teach, make documentaries, work in museums or just discuss history with their friends. It is a slow, ad hoc process. It can be years before research and ideas become accepted, especially if they run contrary to powerful and long standing myths. Even when a historian’s ideas are accepted, there may well be subtle differences in understanding from what was originally conceived.
Measuring this process of ‘impact’ is nigh on impossible, but it is an important process. History has the power to challenge preconceptions, to ask awkward questions and to promote a nuanced culture. In Wales this is especially important. History unsettles any simple idea of Wales as a conquered nation, a radical nation or a Welsh-speaking nation. The past is much messier than that and an appreciation of that should undermine any attempt to build an exclusive or narrow view of what Wales is....
Read entire article at WalesHome.org
The BBC is currently commissioning a major new television series on the history of Wales. No doubt this will be widely welcomed, but some academics are rather snooty about television history. They see it as obsessed by the gruesome and the dramatic, uninterested in the complexity.
Quite apart from the snobbery of this position, it is not sustainable in an era of spending cuts. Public expenditure needs to be justified and it is difficult to justify spending money on researching the past when the results are only published in obscure journals or expensive books not even available at the local library.
Consequently, academics in all disciplines are now suddenly expected by the funders of higher education to demonstrate and measure the ‘impact’ of their research on those working outside universities. For those in the sciences, computing and engineering, this can be relatively straightforward. Their research is more likely to have obvious ‘real world’ applications and taxpayers are far less prone to question the sense of public investment in areas such as medical research.
For academics in the humanities, the idea of public impact is less straightforward. How can a historian actually demonstrate that his or her research has had an impact? They tend to resort to talking in vague terms about cultural enrichment or developing a popular appreciation of heritage. To evidence this they are increasingly looking for opportunities to turn their research into museum exhibitions or to act as consultants on television documentaries. They are setting up websites to tell the wider world about what they are up to....
The reality is that it can take years before a book or article about history has any impact. If it happens at all, it is through the trickling down of knowledge that occurs when people are taught by an academic, or read his or her papers and then use this knowledge when they teach, make documentaries, work in museums or just discuss history with their friends. It is a slow, ad hoc process. It can be years before research and ideas become accepted, especially if they run contrary to powerful and long standing myths. Even when a historian’s ideas are accepted, there may well be subtle differences in understanding from what was originally conceived.
Measuring this process of ‘impact’ is nigh on impossible, but it is an important process. History has the power to challenge preconceptions, to ask awkward questions and to promote a nuanced culture. In Wales this is especially important. History unsettles any simple idea of Wales as a conquered nation, a radical nation or a Welsh-speaking nation. The past is much messier than that and an appreciation of that should undermine any attempt to build an exclusive or narrow view of what Wales is....