Meeting the advisory board
Mark Freeman
On Monday the ‘Redress of the Past’ team met with the project advisory board for the second time. Along with many other projects, we made provision in our application to the AHRC for an advisory board, on which a range of academic perspectives are represented, as well as stakeholders in the project from the heritage and information sector. One member, David Glassberg, came all the way from Massachussetts to attend the meeting. His book, American Historical Pageantry, is one of the most important contributions to the literature on historical pageants, and we will be referring to it in most of our publications.
It is always interesting to get different views on the project and our intended ‘outputs’. The advisory board meetings are one way in which do this, and we also had an end-user engagement workshop earlier in the life of the project. The large ‘database’ of pageants that we are creating as the central academic ‘output’ of ‘The Redress of the Past’ is a large and complex resource, and it is useful to discuss with others the different ways in which it might be used.
We also talked about some of our main research themes, and identified some areas that we might want to pay further attention to. There was some useful discussion of the precursors to, and influences on, the Parker tradition of historical pageantry, of the differences between pageant-masters and the types of pageant that they staged, and of the ways in which pageants are remembered by individuals and communities. This last theme is particularly important in the context of our oral history research, which is progressing very well and has yielded some important insights.
Above: Two members of the project team digesting the recommendations of the advisory board.
Of course, we provide our advisory board members with hospitality, in the form of lunch before the meeting and wine afterwards. At the wine reception, we presented a leaving gift to Tom Hulme, who worked with us for nearly two years as the London-based project researcher. He looked very pleased with his print of Louis Napoleon Parker and the ingredients for making negroni, his favourite cocktail.
Above: Departing project research associate Tom Hulme, with his leaving present. The display boards from our Bury St Edmunds exhibition are visible in the background.
When the wine began to run out, we dispersed, with some of us going on for a pleasant Chinese meal in Soho. The following day, the project team met again to discuss some of the recommendations of the advisory board. We have learned much from this useful meeting, and look forward to our third and final meeting, which will take place around the time of our conference at the UCL Institute of Education in September 2016.