This multi-authored article demonstrates how widely History Workshop Journal articles are used within teaching and learning practice. From histories of the French Revolution, to policing in Early Modern England, to LGBTQ+ histories, these reflections highlight the HWJ archive as a valuable resource within many different classrooms.
Will Clement (University of Manchester)
An analysis of an extraordinary diary kept by an ‘ordinary’ man living in Paris before and during the French Revolution’s Terror, Michaela Kalcher’s 2024 article The Self in the Shadow of the Guillotine: Revolution, Terror and Trauma in a Parisian Diary deservedly won the Royal Historical Society’s 2025 Early Career Article Prize. In October 2025, I set it as key reading alongside an overview on historiographical debates about the causes of the Terror for my final-year undergraduate students. These two pieces framed the final section of our three-hour seminar, following close reading of primary source material on legislation and speeches by prominent figures like Saint-Just and Robespierre.
My students clearly shared the RHS’s enthusiasm about Kalcher’s work: indeed, I have never had quite so strong a positive reaction to a piece of set reading in a decade of undergraduate teaching. It sparked a rich discussion about applying the concept of ‘trauma’ to historical material, with one student saying it felt as if ‘we were observing a patient and their emotional fluctuations during the most cataclysmic event in European history’. Students also engaged with Kalcher’s speculative but convincing arguments about her diarist’s illustrations (reproduced within the article to good effect) debating what they could suggest about the author’s psyche at different moments.
Above all, the article nuanced the room’s understanding of what the Terror was and what it meant to people who were neither its architects nor its direct victims. This ‘ordinary’ Parisian’s perspective, richly unpacked at each step by Kalcher, set our other primary sources in new light. The judges of the RHS prize predicated that ‘this compelling article will likely become a key part of the historiography of the French Revolution’. I cannot endorse this statement strongly enough. One student emailed afterwards and summarised a sentiment expressed by several in the room that it was ‘the best article I’ve read for a seminar’.
Catherine Baker (University of Hull)
In September 2020, Hull’s transformed BA History programme included a new first-year module called A History of Freedom. It equipped students to understand the dramatically different meanings this concept has had through history in settings from ancient Greece and Rome to systems of transatlantic slavery and antislavery, post-apartheid South Africa, and beyond. The module’s final week covered feminist and LGBTQ+ movements in 1960s–90s Britain, using two articles from History Workshop Journal: Diarmaid Kelliher’s 2014 article on Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, which had already been supporting a Pride topic in the previous curriculum’s module on historical film, and Lucy Delap’s 2016 article on feminist bookshops.
I have been the module leader since it launched, and in 2022, tying in with the class falling in Disability History Month, I decided to extend the topic into disability activism: students that year said they had never been able to learn about that in a History class before. The new background reading included Giles Oakley and Peter Lee-Wright’s 2016 article on the BBC Community Programme Unit, which often offered disability activists a platform. Articles by Jeska Rees and Sarah Stoller on Women’s Liberation, and Matt Cook on the AIDS crisis, have enriched background reading elsewhere in the list. This week’s background reading happily grows more vibrant every year, not least through the growth of research on late twentieth century trans British history, which I hope we will see more of in the journal soon. We could not teach these classes the same way without HWJ.
Tom Hamilton (University of Durham)
Whenever we read Jonah Miller’s The Touch of the State: Stop and Search in England, c.1660–1750 (2019) it excites students like little else in its capacity to demonstrate the relevance of the premodern past for critical thinking about the present. The article shows how officers in London and Kent used the law to discriminate against suspects by gender, and sometimes to exploit their position to enact brutal force or subtle humiliation. In an age before modern policing, it reveals that officers were nevertheless present and active in the localities, especially constables, churchwardens, and overseers of the poor. ‘The state’ in this interpretation becomes identifiable not as Thomas Hobbes’ monstrous Leviathan but rather as a pattern of incidental, physical encounters between those with power and those without.
Some of the examples are harrowing. ‘The officer who searched Isabel Williams was blunt: “I stript her at the Round-House, and search’d her in every Place”. He found money in her pockets, bosom and stockings.’ The article’s use of the term ‘stop and search’ makes a direct but always fair comparison between early modern and contemporary controversies over policing practices; it highlights that stop and search then as now ‘tend[s] to criminalize people rather than reduce crime’. And when I tell students that Jonah Miller wrote this article during his PhD research their jaws drop – mine too! The article is followed by Miller’s book Gender and Policing in Early Modern England (2023), which brilliantly rethinks the early modern British state in a way that develops the arguments trailered here.
Paul Werner (the Orange Press)
Art students under a capitalist system are rarely encouraged to investigate how an artwork is made, let alone how it’s been made in the past. The focus, rather, is on how an artwork looks, or looked, or should look to a buyer or patron. This is especially true in Art History, which is more concerned with hyping the exchange-value of works of art than defining use-value at any given historic conjuncture. This was problematic for the course I taught on the History of Drawing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City between 1995 and 2014.
Drawing first emerged as a distinct genre in the Renaissance under the name of Disegno – “Design” in the double sense of artistic intention and visual composition. As such, Disegno is the genre approach most likely to appeal to a would-be artist’s fantasies of self-generated “genius,” of intuition and “spontaneity,” much as pure exchange-value, according to Marx, “is bound to come up everywhere against the inexplicable.” Carlo Ginzburg’s Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method (History Workshop Journal, 1980) returns us to “low knowledge,” to the crafter’s interest in insignificant detail; the traces left by the process. No longer the forms as they appear to external authorities, but the motivation behind the fashioning and the forms, that which Walter Benjamin calls “The decision and the process within the work itself.” As I often told my students: technique is not about blind mechanical skills, it’s about the meaning of those skills, and the freedom to use them.
Hannah Elias (Institute of Historical Research)
From 2020-2025, I helped to create, launch and deliver the MA in Black British History at Goldsmiths, University of London, and taught histories of race, migration and postcolonialism to both postgraduates and undergraduates in the Department of History. Articles published in History Workshop Journal appeared on every syllabus that I created during my time at Goldsmiths, from my Year Two and Three undergraduate module on ‘Black British Activism and Citizenship in the Twentieth Century’, to MA modules on ‘Postcolonial London: Race, Migration and Culture’ and ‘Media Histories of Black Britain.’ History Workshop Journal has been a major site for developing historical understandings about race as a historically situated and culturally constructed phenomenon, and for the publication of innovative research that has advanced understanding of the history of Black life in Britain.
An essential starting point for educators interested in teaching Black British histories is the 2021 Virtual Special Issue on Black British Histories co-authored by HWJ editors Caroline Bressey, Meleisa Ono-George, Diana Paton, Kennetta Hammond Perry and Sadiah Qureshi, which provides essential links to important articles published across decades. This list is rich with important reads, but teachers of the history of multiculturalism in Britain from GCSE-level History up should make sure to engage with Stuart Hall’s well-known essay From Scarman to Stephen Lawrence published in Issue 48 in 1999. The article provides a useful point of entry to introduce students to histories of structural discrimination in British policing but also contains Hall’s critique of British multicultural politics being a product of ‘drift’ rather than coherent policymaking. The article and the concepts or sections therein can be used as a helpful starting point for discussions about British histories of race, identity and belonging in the classroom, and encourages students to consider the connections between history and the present.
Tabitha Bates, Max Lord, Usha Masani, John Munro, and Joanna Obomanu (University of Birmingham)
Mo Moulton’s “Both Your Sexes”: A Non-Binary Approach to Gender History, Trans Studies and the Making of the Self in Modern Britain is one of those articles that makes significant scholarly interventions while being eminently teachable. In an autumn 2025 class on historiographical theory and practice, lively classroom conversation was indeed the means by which the five of us came to grapple with the range of insights Moulton’s article has to share. We came away from our seminar discussion with a new appreciation for the dynamics of four conceptual duos.
To begin with, “Both Your Sexes” demonstrates how categories of male and female do not amount to an either/or proposition. Moulton’s protagonist, Muriel St. Clare Byrne, presented herself as someone who defied dominant ideas of how women might appear in mid-twentieth century Britain, and in turn challenged received notions of who might inhabit masculinity as well. Such challenges come vividly to life through the wealth of archival images Moulton unearths, and his astute reading of them illustrates how Byrne lived what she called sex but what we now call gender in performative, rather than rigid and permanent, ways.
Sex and gender, then, mark another binary Moulton helps us reconsider. By highlighting the historical inaccuracy of treating sex as a fixed category, and by discussing individuals whose identities did not fit into stringent categories, Moulton illustrates how contemporary historical narration might misrepresent lived experience. Ultimately, he exposes the instability of the sex/gender binary itself, indicating its nature as a modern construction that cannot be unproblematically projected onto the past. Moulton motivates readers to question what we treat as natural or obvious, thus encouraging greater awareness of how sex and gender represent neither juxtaposed opposites nor stages of analytical sophistication but rather historically and culturally formed phenomena.
But Moulton goes further, using a non-binary historical methodology to reconsider the connection between past and present. Throughout the article, he explores how interpretations of a society, event, or person in different moments can co-exist. While viewing the past through present lenses might be an inescapable conundrum, we can nonetheless contemplate, with Moulton, how contemporary language and concepts could have been foreign to those who lived in earlier eras. Breaking down this imagined binary between how the past was and how we interpret it, and considering both through a non-binary methodology, is a central and highly generative theme in Moulton’s article. Finally, Moulton constructs a compelling assertion of “gender” as a contingent rather than universal category of historical analysis. Recontextualising postcolonial theory’s framework of “provincializing” to conceptualise gender is perhaps more suggestive than definitively elaborated on in “Both Your Sexes,” thus opening avenues into further inquiry. Turn of the twenty-first century scholarship around provincialization challenged Eurocentric assumptions of universalism, and there is more to say about how provincializing gender pertains to binaries of “the West and the rest” that continue to inform historiographical debate. In this way, Moulton’s article points the way toward future research into how binaries between man and woman, sex and gender, and past and present might be thought through from metropolitan and colonial perspectives.
Stephanie Brown (University of Hull)
I use History Workshop Journal to help students think critically about how history is written, whose voices are heard, and how archives shape narrative. I’ve particularly drawn on HWJ’s commitment to ‘history from below’ and feminist methodologies in undergraduate modules on gender, crime, and marginalised lives. In seminars on crime and punishment, I’ve assigned various articles to help students explore how criminal justice records can both obscure and illuminate the lives of marginalised people. Students discuss how these records are constructed and what ethical obligations historians have in retelling them. I love the Virtual Special Issues. It allows me to explore a topic but give students flexibility in their reading. Rather than setting a text that they must read, I ask them to read the article that interests them most in the issue. I also encourage students to see history as public and political. We read History Workshop Journal articles not just as academic texts but as interventions, demonstrating how scholarship can shape contemporary debates around gender, justice, and inequality.