Centre for Public History

This research project, Reflections on the Centenary: Learning and Legacies for the Future, was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2017-2020). Professor Lucy Noakes, Principal Investigator worked with colleagues at the Universities of Exeter, Glasgow and Kent, and with Dr James Wallis a post-doctoral researcher in the previous Department of History at Essex to investigate the impact and legacies of a range of projects that took place between 2014 and 2018 to commemorate the centenary of the First World War in Britain.

Funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) project was a three-year programme which produced a standardised, integrated dataset of most of the censuses of Great Britain for the period 1851 to 1911. The dataset is available at the UK Data Archive.

After years of research into the Zong massacre of 1781, Dr Jeremy Krikler brought his insights into one of the most infamous atrocities of the Atlantic slave-trade to a wider public by writing a play about them. The play, A Peril of the Sea, was shown at both the Lakeside Theatre and the Bloomsbury Studio and has also been published by Methuen. Dr Krikler is working with school teachers locally and nationally to develop ways in which to use the play to improve the teaching of the history of slavery in British schools.

The documentary Body Games - Capoeira and Ancestry is one of the major outcomes of The Angolan Roots of Capoeira: Transatlantic Links of a Globalised Performing Art, a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2010-2013. In the project, which included extensive fieldwork in Angola, Professor Matthias Röhrig Assunção traced the roots of the Afro-Brazilian martial art capoeira to the combat games, dances and musical instruments of Southern Angola.

The film is co-directed by Richard Pakleppa, Professor Matthias Röhrig Assunção and Brazilian capoeira master Cobra Mansa, and follows Cobra Mansa on travels through Angola and Brazil in search of the historical roots of his art. The film had its world premiere at the Zanzibar International Film Festival in Tanzania, in June 2014. It has since won several prizes and been seen by thousands of people across the world, communicating a new understanding of capoeira’s history to large global audiences. For more information about the film, and information about how to watch it, visit the website.

The Essex County Hospital Remembered project aimed to help preserve the history of this popular Colchester hospital by documenting it's story in the NHS era of 1948 to the present day.

The Sloane Letters project is a project to catalogue in depth, and eventually transcribe, the contents of Sir Hans Sloane’s correspondence.