January 2010

Frank Turner, the John Hay Whitney Professor of History and the Director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University will deliver the Conference Opening Lecture at the 2010 British Scholar Conference. Professor Turner’s lecture is entitled “Religious Paths to Unbelief in the Nineteenth Century” and will take place at 1:00 pm on Thursday, March 25 in the J. A. R. Moseley Room of the Harry Ransom Center. More information about Professor Turner’s talk will be forthcoming on the British Scholar Conference 2010 website in the weeks ahead.

The conference program for the upcoming British Scholar Annual Conference may be found by visiting www.britishscholar.org/conference2010.html. The conference will deal with a number of themes from a very diverse set of panelists. This year’s program is a testament to the international scope of the British Scholar Society. If you are not yet registered do so today by visiting the conference website at the link above and scroll down to registration. Registration includes admission to the Conference Opening Lecture by Frank Turner, all of the panels, the British Scholar Dinner Party on Friday evening, March 26 in the Texas hill country, as well as Tom Devine’s Keynote Address which asks the question “Did Slavery make Scotland great?” If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us at conferencebritishscholarorg  (conferencebritishscholarorg)  . We look forward to seeing many new and familiar faces at the conference in March.

In addition to booking a room at the AT&T Conference Center and Hotel via the telephone you now may use their online system. In order to book a room for the conference online, please visit www.meetattexas.com. Select your dates in the upper left-hand corner of the homepage. That will take you to a booking page. Under step 1 you are given the opportunity to enter a booking code. The booking code for the conference is BRITIS0310 (those are zeros, not the letter “O”). Once you’ve entered the booking code, hit enter and the changes should take effect so that the price of the available rooms lowers to $159 per night. The room block is available until 11 March. After that time, the AT&T Conference Center and Hotel will not be able to guarantee the conference rate.

This year’s conference will include a workshop on the way digital archives are changing the nature of scholarly research and classroom training. These collections of original, and often unique, historical primary sources, were previously available only at the top research libraries of the world. They are now available as online archives and are accessible to all researchers and students at an institution. Presented by Scott Dawson, Product Manager at Gale, the presentation will use examples from the following digital collections to illustrate the impact digital archives can have on your research and teaching across all subject areas associated with British Studies:

• State Papers Online, 1509-1714 – a key research environment for Early Modern Britain and Europe

• 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection and 19th Century British Library Newspapers – to illustrate how historical newspapers can be used

• Eighteenth Century Collections Online and The Making of the Modern World/Goldsmiths’-Kress 1450-1850 – our two largest scholarly collections, one considered critical for the study of the 18th century and the other an indispensable source of primary documents on the development of the Atlantic World.

The workshop will take place following the Conference Opening Lecture on Thursday, 25 March in the Zarrow Family Seminar Room from 2:30 to 4:00 pm.