Date/Time: 1 June 2019

Venue: Armstrong Building, Newcastle University

The Labour and Society Research Group in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University, will host the annual conference on the Chartist movement (1838-58) for workers’ rights and democracy on the 1st of June. Book a place ‌.

The Chartist conferences were founded at the University of Birmingham in 1995 under the inspiration of the late Dorothy Thompson and have become a staple feature of Society for the Study of Labour History’s calendar of events. As well as a strong contingent of labour historians, the conferences attract a broad spectrum of academics – historians, literary scholars, postgraduate students from multiple disciplines and the wider public – all drawn together by a shared interest in Chartist studies and a desire to foster new research in the field and in the study of British radicalism. Moving the conferences from one venue to another, mostly in northern or central England but notably at Newcastle in 2015, has been a key element in encouraging new scholars. Some of that important work has been published by Merlin Press as part of its Chartist Studies series and two Special Issues on Chartism in Labour History Review (2009 and 2013). In 2010 and 2014 the conference was held at the University of Paris IV–Sorbonne and at NUI Galway. The conference has always attracted a diverse range of research papers reflecting yet again the continuing expansion of interest in all aspects of Chartist history but has sought to embrace a transnationalist agenda that deepens our understanding of the international links between Radicalism and Chartism.

PROGRAMME
9.00–9.15 Registration.

9.15–9.30 Introduction and Welcome (Joan Allen and Richard Allen, Newcastle).

9.30–10.15 Tom Scriven (Manchester). ‘Chartism’s electoral strategy and the bifurcation of Radicalism’.

10.15–11.00 Joan Allen (Newcastle). ‘Chartist trials, 1839: Revisited’.

Break

11.30–12.15 Mike Greatbatch. (Independent/WEA). ‘William Parker: A Chartist Life’.

12.15-13.00 Joe Stanley (Sheffield Hallam). ‘Protest and Popular Politics amongst the Yorkshire Miners, 1786-1839’.

Lunch

2.00–3.00 Keynote Lecture: Robert Poole (UCLAN). ‘Peterloo and Chartism’ – title tbc

3.00–3.45 Mark Bennett (Durham). ‘Chartism’s legacy: the reform debate in Yorkshire, 1859-67’.
Break

4.15-5.00 Matt Roberts (Sheffield Hallam). ‘The Visual and Material Culture of Chartism’.