Tag Archives | port towns and urban cultures

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Event: ‘A Port City Between Hitler and Stalin: Borderland Geographies, Baltic Identities, and Siege Mentalities in Königsberg–Kaliningrad.’ March 10 2020

When: 10 March 2020, 6.30pm Where: University of Portsmouth, Studio 1 Theatre, White Swan Building, White Swan Road, Portsmouth, PO1 2DT Free event: All welcome Free refreshments Book via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/96692191949 Port Towns and Urban Cultures and the School of Art, Design and Performance and are delighted to co-sponsor a free public talk by Assistant […]

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Dr Mathias Seiter sharing his research into Wilhelmshaven and Kiel 'sailortowns' (photo credit: Hilde Sommerseth)

PTUC at the SHiP workshop, Ghent 2020

PTUC’s Dr Mathias Seiter and Dr Melanie Bassett were honoured to be invited to the SHiP network’s latest workshop, hosted by the University of Ghent. SHiP, or Studying the History of Health in Port Cities, is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). They are led by Professor Angelique Janssens (Radboud University, the Netherlands) and […]

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Desire is projected across ‘empty’ space in Calvino’s Invisible Cities. 

Seascape with Distant Coast, by J. M. W. Turner, c. 1830-1845. © Tate. Image reproduced by permission of Tate and under CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported).

Port Cities and Desire in the Work of Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino’s (1923-1985) Invisible Cities is a work of fiction that continuously reimagines the city of Venice. It demonstrates that the same urban landscape may offer numerous different promises to its various spectators: of new lives and new possibilities, but also of new sensualities, transgressions, and experiments. This article will draw on a number of […]

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Boat Building at Bridport Harbour, c.19th Century.
By Permission of Bridport Town Council

The Naval History Blog: No. 8

Why maritime history matters: Maritime highways – A personal journey. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book aptly titled The Prize, Daniel Yergin quotes Admiral ‘Jacky’ Fisher as telling Winston Churchill, on the latter’s appointment to First Lord of the Admiralty in September 1911, ‘east of Suez oil is cheaper than coal.’[1] It later became clear […]

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Sailor with a lion cub (Courtesy of Brain Witts, Curator of the HMS Excellent collection)

The Sailor Zoo and Farm in Portsmouth: Re-enchantment and Necessity (Part 1 of 2)

In 1832 the Fourth Sea Lord of the Admiralty suggested there was a need for ‘theoretical instruction’ in gunnery. Thus what had been previously considered an art became a science.[1] Marine artillery embraced the science and technology of the age, and this modernisation of gunnery was aligned with a transition from sail to steam ships. […]

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