History Workshop Podcast

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.

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.

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’.

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

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.

In this four-part podcast series on Queer Activisms, historians, performers, educators and activists take a deep dive into existence and resistance in queer life – past and present. In our second episode, Marybeth Hamilton is joined by Matt Cook and Debra Levine to discuss AIDS, queer activism, and the politics of loss and grief.

In this four-part series on Queer Activisms, historians, performers, educators and activists take a deep dive into existence and resistance in queer life - past and present. 

In this episode on Queer Joy, Laura Forster is joined by Shay Shay, Tim Other and Dr Fiona Anderson. Together, these artists, activists and historians talk about performance and community, and how they relate to about precarity, gentrification and dispossession. Ranging from 1970s New York to Ru Paul's Drag Race, this episode considers where queer creativity is forged in the margins and asks how we can take up space.

Introduced by Marybeth Hamilton | Audio Production: May Robson

Are we living in an Age of Walls? Talk of walls is of course all around us, from heated political rhetoric about building a wall on America’s southernmost border to more amorphous references to the walls of our psyches or firewalls blocking the flow of digital data. In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, HWO's Laura Forster talks to historian Paul Betts, author of Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic.

Dan Chatterton: a London walking tour by History Workshop

How might museum exhibitions convey the complex dynamics of black British history? In this episode of the History Workshop Podcast, co-curators Melissa Bennett (Museum of London) and Iyamide Thomas (Historical Researcher for The Krios Dot Com) discuss their work on "The Krios of Sierra Leone," a new display at the Museum of London Docklands that tells the story of Sierra Leone’s Krio people. In the process they have a broader conversation about Black British history in museums and community-engaged museum practice. Subscribe and listen now on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.