St Edmund Hall Blog
The St Edmund Hall blog brings you the latest thought in academic research and interesting artefacts from our archive and library.
Please note that any opinions or views expressed by blog contributors are not shared or held by St Edmund Hall.
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How rocks keep time and why they might be lying
6 May 2025
Stressed-out crystals make it seem like a million-year journey happened in just one hundred years.
Letting the dead rest? Ethical encounters in the archives
12 Mar 2025
A day in the archives in Antwerp is transformed by the discovery of handfuls of human hair among an otherwise ordinary stack of court records.
Portrait of a Friendship: Henry Liddon and Lewis Carroll
12 Feb 2025
Hall Librarian James Howarth explores how a small postcard left in a book reveals the friendship between a Hall Vice-Principal and a famous author, and how they spent Friday 30 August 1867.
How your social media posts can help behavioural ecologists understand wildlife
30 Oct 2024
Voices from the past: The surprising stories told by medieval German nuns
20 Jun 2024
The newly published book by Hall Fellow Professor Henrike Lähnemann explores the life of medieval German nuns, told through their diaries, letters and artworks. It opens up for the first time the rich surviving heritage of…
“I have receiv’d by the hands of mr Fleming”: Thomas Smith, the Fleming Family and St Edmund Hall
22 May 2024
Librarian James Howarth continues the story of a recently discovered 17th-century letter sent by Principal John Mill to the Bishop of Carlisle. Here he turns his attention to its connection to the early career of one of the Hal…
“A Library is a thing that will universally please”: The donations of Thomas Smith, Bishop of Carlisle and the earliest image of the Old Library
28 Feb 2024
Melting Pots, Salad Bowls and Kaleidoscopes: Unpacking Metaphors for Multiculturalism
20 Feb 2024
Officers and Gentlemen? An Aularian ‘actor’ & architect, Evelyn Waugh and the Bride of Frankenstein
22 Jan 2024
Celebrating Marriage
1 Aug 2023
Staff members at Teddy Hall are celebrating multiple weddings in 2023! An Old Library Exhibition was created to mark the occasion.
A Soldier’s Bivouac, Incense for Marguerite, and Gambling Debts. Eighteenth-Century Fugitive Poetry and Everyday Note-Taking
16 Jun 2023
Eighteenth-century ‘poésie fugitive’ was produced, published, used, and reused in a wide variety of ways; a series of almanacs bound with a notebook shows its proximity to everyday life.
Determinism and Enlightenment: the collaboration of Diderot and d’Holbach
24 May 2023
Ruggero Sciuto’s Determinism and Enlightenment: the collaboration of Diderot and d’Holbach is the April volume in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series.
“Ye sight was very splendid & great”: Teddy Hall witnesses and celebrations of Coronations past
2 May 2023
As the Coronation of Charles III on 6 May 2023 approaches, Librarian James Howarth investigates connections between Aularians and the Coronations of the last 350 years.
The Inevitable Energy Transition
10 Mar 2023
Our current insatiable appetite for energy has had direct ramifications on geopolitical tensions and triggered current and future climate disasters. It is only a question of time until we move towards sustainable and renewable…
How to find holes in the universe
28 Feb 2023
We cannot study the shape of the universe by looking at it from the outside. Many other mathematical settings also show this lack of an outside view. Geometry and Topology allow us to get our head around shape from an entirely…
Crossing the Alps in the Renaissance: German immigrants in northern Italy
21 Feb 2023
During times of war, religious tension, and political strife, people and goods still made their way across the Alps into northern Italy. Connections traversed geographical and social boundaries as people from all walks of life…
‘Bought out of Mr Churchill’s study’: John Mill, the Old Library and the Churchill Family
14 Feb 2023
What a list of books in the Hall’s oldest record reveals about the construction of the Old Library collection, the beginnings of postgraduate study and a Principal’s attempts to ingratiate himself with an aristocr…
Celebrating International Day of Women and Girls in Science through the Library
10 Feb 2023
This International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the Library is exploring our collections to celebrate some of the women who have led the way through the male-dominated field of climate science.
Where there’s a will….
28 Oct 2022
How a bequest by Principal Rawlinson in his will of 1631 still pays out today
Making and receiving impact in Nepal
28 Oct 2022
When I considered projects in my application for the Matt Greenwood Travel Scholarship, I worried I might not fully embrace Matt’s gifts of adventure, courage, and concern for others.
“He was my bridge to Oxford and beyond”: Kevin Crossley-Holland and Bruce Mitchell
24 Oct 2022
Aularian Kevin Crossley Holland is a poet, translator and re-teller of medieval poetry, romance, and folklore for all ages. However, his relationship with Old English got off to a rocky start until a sympathetic tutor and an ag…
Papering over protest in sixteenth-century Venice
15 Jun 2022
Historians work on sources, but what can the absence of sources tell us?
What has Earth’s Magnetic Field Ever Done for Us?
16 Feb 2022
Is a magnetic field an essential criterion on the planet habitability list?
Celebrating International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2022
9 Feb 2022
Using the Library to celebrate and showcase St Edmund Hall’s own Women in Science.
