Staff Journeys

Contents

• Professor Eleanor Robson
• Dr Jagjeet Lally
• Professor Stephen Conway
• Dr Rebecca Jennings
• Dr Yağmur Heffron

Professor Eleanor Robson

So here’s the thing: I never planned to be an academic, and I certainly never meant to be a historian. My highest qualification in History is an ‘O’-Level, taken at the age of 15 in the mid-1980s. I might be the least-qualified Head of a History Department in the country. I shed any sense of imposter syndrome long ago though. Instead, I think my personal journey shows that there’s no one right way to be a historian and no core set of knowledge that’s required. Rather, it’s about putting one’s intellectual curiosity, independent-mindedness, and sense of purpose to work.
 

I come from what used to be called a broken home: chaotic, emotionally unpredictable, and financially insecure. Several close family members had quite challenging, untreated mental health problems, which, by my early teens, meant that they were very hard to live with. School — my very ordinary but supportive local comprehensive — was one lifeline; books were another. Friends’ homes and, later, babysitting gigs, were my refuge. I could get lost in a novel, or the beautiful orderliness of my maths homework or French verbs. School history was tedious in the extreme though, just lots of very dull facts about 19th-century Britain, and one of my few brushes with trouble came when I stupidly wrote about how bored I was in the back of my history exercise book.

All that homework-as-home-avoidance made me rather precocious and so in my mid-teens, school sent me on various enrichment programmes for what we would now call Widening Participation students: a series of Saturday maths mornings at Hertfordshire Poly (which I completely adored); a maths weekend(I think?) at Eton, of all places (which I completely didn’t). But school really wasn’t set up to prepare students for university and I knew that I desperately wanted to go. 

So, off to the local Further Education College for A-Levels in maths, physics, chemistry and French; then a place at Warwick to study maths. University was just heaven and my programme was set up so that I could continue to dabble in languages — a bit of Spanish, Russian and Italian — but I never really made the conceptual transition to degree-level maths. Maybe I no longer needed it, now that I’d left home for good, or maybe I just didn’t have the capacity to think at that level of n-dimensional abstraction. In any case, in my final year, scraping the II.ii–II.i borderline, I leapt at the opportunity to take a module in history of maths, for the simple, shallow reason that it counted towards the 50% minimum of compulsory maths modules but obviously (to me) wasn’t real maths.

I could write a whole book on how that one module changed my life. The tutor, David Fowler, was a convert to ancient Greek mathematics, so we focused heavily on the ancient world. He made us read Carr’s What is History?, which blew my mind. I volunteered to give one of the first presentations, in order to get the ordeal of public speaking out of the way. I was given a week to put together a 10-minute talk on Babylonian mathematics, and that was how it all began. In that week I fell in love. I was obsessed: how could ‘maths’ be so utterly different to everything I’d learned so far? Why were researchers treating the translations as their sources, not the original texts, and trying to make it look as much like modern algebra as they could? Where and when was Babylon anyway? And who the heck had actually written this stuff? So many puzzles and worries that I couldn’t quite articulate, that 10 minutes really wasn’t enough.

Above: Celebrating David Fowler’s 60th birthday with his wife Denise and a cake in the form of an ancient Greek times table, Warwick, April 1997

To cut a very long story short, I not only wrote my history of maths essay on Babylonian maths that year but also persuaded the degree committee that my final-year dissertation should be on a historical topic too. Together those marks (and some non-maths options) saved me from a II.ii. Knowing only that I didn’t want to become an accountant or actuary like most of my friends, I set out to learn the Babylonian language and cuneiform script, to get it out of my system before knuckling down a real job. In those pre-internet days, the only place I found that was prepared to take me on as a part-time graduate student was the Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford. Jeremy Black, my supervisor-to-be, had just taken up his post, had no students and couldn’t afford to be fussy. (Cambridge and London both rejected me out of hand.)

I arrived in Oxford penniless in the summer of 1990 and scrabbled together a series of part-time shop jobs and bar work to make ends meet. I knew no-one, read all the books in the public library on Iraq and on Babylon, and listened to radio reports of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. 

Apart from the impending doom of all-out war, it was bliss – until the new academic year began. There’d been one token posh kid on my course at Warwick. Now my world was awash with self-confident and moneyed young persons who operated in entirely alien and alienating ways. ‘But of course, I’m sure you went to the sort of state school that taught Greek and Latin!’ Errr, no. Fortunately, Jeremy was every bit as kind and inspiring as David had been and I eventually found ways to screen out the Bullingdon types. Learning Babylonian was the hardest thing I’d ever done, and the most exciting and rewarding. The first time I read 4000-year-old letters from real people to other real people and they actually made sense was just astonishingly empowering. And through the archaeology and history I was starting to see that contextualisation would be the key to solving my big question: not just to describe Babylonian mathematics but to account for its very existence.

Above: Eleanor in the pub on the night of her DPhil viva, Oxford, December 1995

That was a challenge that took over fifteen years to tackle. That’s not what I planned, but it’s gradually what happened. My 2008 book, Mathematics in ancient Iraq: A Social History, was written for my 20-year-old self. Along the way I earned a doctorate in Oriental Studies in 1995, finally travelled to Iraq in 2001, campaigned against the Iraq War in 2003, and took up a permanent lecturing position at Cambridge in History and Philosophy of Science in 2004. It was hard to adjust to at first, as I had no idea who or what many of my new colleagues were talking about most of the time. But it was a joy, as well as a challenge, to think my way into an entirely different disciplinary context, because it gave me a new conceptual vocabulary in which to articulate ideas I had previously been fumbling for but had not been able to express. 

Above: With Jeremy Black and colleagues in Iraq, March 2001 (Jeremy: back row, fourth from left; Eleanor: back row, third from right)

David and Jeremy—who never met—died within 10 days of each other, just a few months after I moved to Cambridge. I miss both of them still, and make a conscious effort every day to live up to their ideals and expectations. David had campaigned for Amnesty International; Jeremy had spent the 1990s helping Iraqi colleagues survive, and escape from, Saddam’s regime; both were passionately anti-war. I’d like to think, if they were still alive, that they’d both approve of the activist-research of the Nahrein Network, which aims to rehabilitate and re-centre the role of local experts in the production and uses of history, heritage and humanities in post-conflict Iraq today.

Dr Jagjeet Lally

Because my parents were high-school dropouts, my sister (older by three years) and I both went on to study at Oxford without the personal stories that help give shape to what studying at university is like, even if that’s only a fantasy version of higher education. Both of us had a tough time, although we flourished – eventually.

I was a terrible undergraduate student: I skipped a fair few lectures and I slept through tutorials, pretending to be unwell. It was mostly because I wasn’t very happy and hated lots of what I had to trudge through as a Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) student. If some of my students think I’m a harsh marker, it’s because I know only too well what a 2.2 or a third-class essay really looks like: I wrote plenty of them, pretty consistently, well into my second year! It wasn’t until I could study the courses I was interested in (international relations, international economics, the politics of South Asia) that I got it together.

I realised then that I most enjoyed studying the world beyond Euro-America – that is, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. This was exactly what we had been denied in our first year as we were forced through the very Eurocentric core course, which was rather imperiously (and misguidedly) seen as an essential prerequisite to understanding any other part of the world – with disastrous consequences for my self-confidence. I hadn’t really enjoyed any of the many internships and work experience I’d done in the vacations during my degree, ranging from finance to political consultancy, and was glad to be able to ‘rule out’ a number of careers. A philosophy tutor of mine quipped that studying the social sciences or entering a related career was pretty ‘pedestrian’ – every man on the street had something to say about politics or the economy. I laughed politely and still think that’s a bit harsh (even if it did ring true). I did feel, however, that I wanted a bit more distance between myself and my subjects of study and was struck how much I’d enjoyed courses that used more historical approaches. That’s when I remembered something I’d forgotten in the clamber to get into Oxford to study PPE: I really enjoyed History.
 

And, so, I went on to study for a masters in economic history at the LSE. It was a natural sideways move, allowing me to leverage my social sciences background into studying the material aspects of the past. I felt the LSE was the best place to do that, with its very geographically-diverse range of courses, with the added benefit of being back in London. I loved it, wrote the best dissertation in the year, and knew I wanted to continue studying. I also knew I wanted to go to Cambridge to do so, because there was an even larger community of ‘world historians’ there, but I was still a bit shellshocked by Oxford. I took two years away from studying to work several jobs, save up, buy and renovate my home in London, and build a base for myself. You need that as a PhD student: somewhere to write and work, but also somewhere to retreat and chill. 

I went to Cambridge for two days each week during term and spent the rest of my time in archives and libraries in London or elsewhere in the world. I was unleashed on some Cambridge undergraduates in my second year, which is when I realised how much I enjoy teaching and how intellectually productive it is for my own thinking. I’d made good progress with my research and started applying for academic jobs at the start of my third year. I was lucky: a group of Ancient Historians (and one Earth Scientist) presiding over an appointment committee really liked my work and gave me the Moses and Mary Finley Fellowship at Darwin College, Cambridge. At the end of the third year of my PhD, therefore, I submitted my dissertation and started my first academic job. A few months later I got lucky again: I managed to get an interview for a post as a lecturer. I hadn’t eaten all day of the interview because I’d been so nervous, so I popped out to buy something sugary and easy to digest to replenish myself. That was exactly the moment when Stephen Conway left me a voicemail and an email saying to get in touch because UCL History would like to offer me the lectureship!

If these experiences have taught me anything, it’s that diversity and inclusion matter. My undergraduate experience would have been so much less miserable if I’d been able to study the things that interested me, and if I’d been better supported through the difficult transitions, although I appreciate that being forced to study Rousseau and Mill, Arrow’s ‘impossibility theorem’ and interest rates have all enriched me in some indefinable way. Indeed, my experiences and meanderings have made me who I am. It’s not only important to have a diverse student and staff population for the sake of it, but because we bring a diversity of skills, experiences, and perspectives, personal and intellectual.

Professor Stephen Conway 

I am the first in my family to go to university.  My father was a skilled engineering worker and my mother a secretary.  I was fortunate, as my parents, despite having had to leave school at fourteen for financial reasons, both believed in the value of learning.  Denied opportunities themselves, they encouraged me to see education as the key to individual fulfilment and a passport to a better life.
 

As an only child, I probably spent more time reading than most of my peers (there was no internet then to distract me).  History became my favourite subject.  In part, I think that was because my father, who was forty-three when I was born, used to tell me a lot about his own experiences, including as a young man in the Second World War.  My parents were also very politically committed (especially my mother, who had been a Young Socialist); the constant talk of politics in my childhood home furthered my interest in history. 

I went to a local comprehensive school, which had little experience in sending pupils on to university.  My A level grades would have allowed me to go to Oxford, but lacking confidence in my abilities, I did not even consider applying. 

It perhaps did not help that my father died when I was in the Lower Sixth.  A dreadful blow at the time, I now think that his death shaped my life profoundly. It led, first, to a lot of soul searching on my part about whether I should go to university, or stay at home and support my widowed mother. My mother – very bravely – made it clear that she wanted me to take the opportunity available to me and not look back.  She was incredibly (and selflessly) supportive. My determination to succeed, now I think about it, owed a lot to my mother’s wish that I seize opportunities denied to her and my father.  Determination did not stop me suffering, at first, from ‘imposter’s syndrome’; in my lowest moods, I was convinced that I was not good enough and that everyone else was better.  

I am not sure when it happened, but I think it was sometime in my first year as an undergraduate historian. But I remember very distinctly thinking that I had to stop being intimidated and overawed.  I told myself that I was as good as any of my peers and had as much right to be at university as they did.  I’m not sure it was true; but, to my great surprise, I gradually came to believe it.

After graduating, I came to UCL to begin research leading to a doctorate (there was no requirement to do an MA in those far-off days). I continued to have regressions back to my earlier lack of confidence, when I feared that I was ignorant of the inside knowledge of how to do things that many of the other (privately educated) research students clearly possessed.  But, as when I was an undergraduate, I came to realise that my determination to succeed was far more important than any perceived disadvantages that I had.

I received my doctorate at a difficult time; cuts in public spending meant that there were very few new university posts.  I was fortunate to become a research assistant on a project in the department, and then a research fellow.  I did some teaching, and then became a junior lecturer. A few years later, I was made a reader, and then, a few more years after that, a professor.  I have served in most of the History Department’s administrative roles – department tutor, admissions tutor, chair of the board of examiners, head of department.  I am now the graduate tutor.

As I look back on a long career, I regard myself as incredibly lucky.  I had supportive parents and many fortunate breaks. My own contribution was determination – determination to succeed and determination not to give way to feelings of inferiority.

Dr Rebecca Jennings

History has always been a part of my life, so in some ways it was unsurprising that I became a historian.  Both my parents were the first in their families to go to university, travelling from Cumbria and Sheffield to London to study history at a time, in the 1960s, when the expansion in Higher Education was opening up new opportunities for women and for state-educated students like themselves.  University was a life-changing experience for both of them and my dad, especially, has some amazing stories about being a part of the student protests at LSE in 1968 and about the culture shock of showing his parents around London on their first ever visit to the big city from the farm on which he grew up. A university education, for my parents, was about gaining skills and a qualification which would allow them to improve their employment opportunities and standard of living and they both went into jobs in human resources with big companies. But they never lost their love of history and they tried hard to pass it on to my brother and I, who spent our childhoods being taken to stately homes and given ‘summer projects’ on the wives of Henry VIII!
 

I did inherit their love of history but studying history at university meant something very different to me.  When I set off to the University of Manchester in the 1990s, I was more concerned with how the experience would affect my personal life, than my education.  I had realised at quite an early age that I was a lesbian, but growing up in a small, conservative town in Surrey, I hadn’t told anyone until I finally confessed my secret to my best friend in sixth form.  Convinced that my family and friends would cut me off if they found out, I had decided to wait until I’d left home before saying anything, so the move to Manchester was my chance to start a new life in which I could really be me.  Purely by accident, I had picked one of the best possible cities to be gay in the 90s, and I spent the next few years going out in the gay bars and clubs of Canal Street, making friends and ‘coming out’ as a lesbian.  I didn’t have much time left for my studies and in any case I found it hard to relate to a curriculum which didn’t really speak to my interests in social and cultural history.  

In my second year, though, I was able to carry out an independent research project on a topic of my own choice.  I had already established, by searching the University of Manchester’s three-million-volume library, that there was only one book on lesbian history and I decided that I wanted to bring together my interest in history and my personal experience.  Students were expected to identify an academic who would supervise their project, and I knocked on a lot of doors before I found a kind tutor who claimed to know nothing about the history of sexuality, but who was willing to take me on.  That was the beginning of my journey as a lesbian historian, and I went on to do my final year dissertation, a Masters dissertation and a PhD in British lesbian history.

I encountered a few obstacles along the way, from the graduate tutor who refused to counter-sign my PhD application form because he considered my topic (and me) immoral, to the many academics and peers who suggested that my research area was more suited to a Women’s Studies department than to History.  It was a long time before I met any other historians working on lesbian history, but I found a place amongst historians working on women’s and gender history and queer history more broadly.  When I started publishing articles and books myself, I felt like there was so much work to be done that I didn’t know where to start, and that sense of there being so much more to find out and to say still drives me, twenty years on. This is one of the things I love about history, that there is always another way of looking at things and another person’s experience to reflect on and add to our understanding of the past.

To me, researching and learning history is a tool of empowerment and a means of achieving personal freedom.  History makes us question all the social structures and ideas we take for granted, because it shows us that people thought differently in the past and that the social and cultural attitudes we live with today emerged from a particular set of circumstances in the past. In doing so, it allows us to imagine an alternative future.  An awareness of our own history is also central to our sense of belonging.  For people, like LGBTQ people, who are in marginalised groups, capturing those experiences from the past helps to give us a sense of community and validation.  Those are the people I write for when I research and write history and I’m really proud that an LGBTQ person starting university now will find more than one book on lesbian history in the library and that some of those will be mine.

An Interview with Dr Yağmur Heffron

Please tell us about your current role in the department?

I’m Lecturer in the History of the Ancient Middle East. My teaching covers ancient Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and neighbouring regions from the emergence of writing (sometime around 4000 BC) all the way to the fall of the Persian Empire (enter Alexander the Great). More specifically, my research interests lie in religion and cultural contact in ancient Anatolia (Turkey) during the first half of the second millennium BC. You can imagine the “19th century” looks quite different from my end!

What drew you to UCL History?

I trained as an archaeologist, so what I found most exciting about UCL History was the department’s approach to material culture, which is incorporated into multiple levels of teaching as well as research. Being part of a community of historians who were as interested in objects as they are in documents was probably the biggest attraction for me.

On top of that, London is just bursting with museums and monuments, and of course UCL has its own incredible collections of all manner of “things”. Things can make the past accessible in quite unpredictable ways, and I’m particularly interested in the way text- and object-based histories dovetail.

Before coming to UCL, I always thought the students here looked so effortlessly cool, and they really are. I think it’s a treat to be teaching such a sharp, busy, and incredibly diverse community of students.

What is your life like outside UCL?
 

My life outside the office/library/classroom is mostly taken up by archaeological fieldwork in Turkey, which of course is still part of my ‘day job’ -  but life on excavation brings with it so many unexpected encounters, surprise excursions, and such an incredible range of social interactions that I feel I don’t often have to make an extra effort to go in search of adventure. 

Popular culture insists that archaeology has to be about mummies or treasure to be interesting, but in real life it’s the vegetable run to the local market that could easily turn into a full-blown adventure, or you could be politely sipping tea with the local dignitaries to suddenly find yourself on the cusp of a comedy of errors. 

Then there are the countless weddings, feasts, and special occasions one gets to experience, and a lot of sight-seeing. I enjoy the life that unfolds around archaeological fieldwork, when I’m transplanted into places and communities very different from my own, and also become part of a very mixed community of specialists who work together, and there is a constant transfer of knowledge and exchange of stories.

What working achievement are you most proud of?

During my time as Assistant Director of the University of Chicago’s Zincirli Expedition (south-east Turkey), one year we hired a small number of women to work as unskilled labourers on site, a job traditionally reserved for men in excavations in the Middle East. This inspired me to devise a pilot project on the inclusion of women into unskilled archaeological labour. The next year I generated some money to ensure a minimum quota of women were hired for the full season, so that we could maintain a mixed-gender local work force on site. During that season I made field observations and conducted surveys and interviews with the workers as well as the archaeologists, to gauge their responses to the inclusion of women in the workforce, and how this may have affected the dynamics of fieldwork. 

I’m (slowly) writing up the results, but I believe the project itself already gave some visibility to the issue of a gendered division of archaeological labour, and got the Zincirli community (locals, workers, archaeologists, students) to think consciously about the presence vs. absence of women in the workforce. I’ve since left Zincirli, but the project continues to hire women regularly, and I’d like to think that I’ve played a part in establishing this as normal practice. There are already growing trends of including women in the seasonally hired workforce for archaeological excavations in Turkey, and I plan to build on my pilot project to document this trend, which I hope will encourage hiring practices to achieve a fairer balance.

Do you have any advice for someone looking to build a career in academia?

I would say, invest in your colleagues - especially the people who have been students with you, because the experience of learning/training together is very precious. Take an interest in what people around you are working on, the research questions they’ve formulated, why their work excites or frustrates them - you will be surprised to find a lot of shared points of reference. ‘Networking’ in academia is important, but I think its real value lies in building relationships over time instead of strategic hobnobbing. My second piece of advice is inspired by what a senior (and wildly successful) colleague once told me, which was that the whopping majority of things you apply for will end in rejection. Don’t be discouraged. If you like what you do, and know you have a good idea, go after it.