Our outreach

The Centre for History has always actively engaged with our local communities, as well as keeping in touch with our graduates and collaborating with colleagues elsewhere. We take part in talks, arrange conferences, host knowledge exchange activities and develop partnerships in which our staff and students work closely with individuals and external bodies.

History Talks Live

Our flagship online public seminar series is currently suspended, but we offer an archive of recordings of all our past talks which can be accessed through our History Events page.

Conferences and workshops

Our staff take part in conferences around the world, but we also help organise them.

Here are some recent events:

• We hosted the Royal Studies Network 2021 conference, Kings and Queens 10, on the theme of Royal Patronage: material culture, built heritage and the reach of the Crown in collaboration with Historic Environment Scotland and Culture Perth and Kinross.
• A Celebration of the 1919 Land Settlement (Scotland) Act on the Isle of Lewis, organised by the Centre for History in collaboration with the Centre for Scotland’s Land Futures and the Historical Geography Research group, took place in 2019. The three-day conference included keynotes from the Centre for History’s Professor James Hunter and Edinburgh University’s Professor Ewen Cameron.
• Firths and Fjords, the first ever coastal history conference, featured international speakers such as Isaac Land, John Gillis, Pamela Ballinger, Martin Carver and T C Smout, and was run with help from local community groups in our home town of Dornoch in 2016. It led to the publication of The New Coastal History: cultural and environmental perspectives from Scotland and beyond and the Firths and Fjords blog.

Museums, heritage and tourism

Our staff work closely with museums, heritage and tourism groups in the Highlands and Islands and further afield. We invite heritage practitioners to be guest lecturers on our undergraduate modules (such as Public History) and offer our historical expertise to museum boards and projects.

Here are a few of our activities:

• Dr Elizabeth Ritchie runs a very successful blog for Historylinks Museum as well as acting as historical advisor for the Storas Ulbha project.
• Dr Jim MacPherson is board member for the Clan Macpherson Museum and in 2021 reinterpreted the museum’s entire modern collections.
• Dr Lucy Dean has a long association with the AK Bell Library and the Charterhouse project in Perth.
• Professor David Worthington is a member of the Inverness Castle project delivery group and on the steering group for the Coast that Shaped the World, a project to collect and curate stories from Scotland’s west coast.
• Dr Iain Robertson has close connections with the West Harris Trust and is part of the developing Iolaire heritage centre project on Lewis.