Storytelling and oral history

A report from the BBC's Middle East website looks at the tradition of storytelling and the role of the professional storyteller  in the Middle East, and how history (ancient and modern) as well as contemporary events such as the Arab Spring are being adapted by the storytellers.

Click HERE to read the report

The report also includes videos of modern professional storytellers performing
But will the traditional art survive in competition with modern technology?

Welcome to SOAS

Follow the History blog for updates on SOAS Library resources, book reviews, websites, news-stories and much more

You can go to the Information skills pages on the BLE for general research guides, guides to the various databases and subject specific research guides

You can also use the Subject Guide for History on the main Library website for internet resources selected by Library staff : http://www.soas.ac.uk/library/subjects/history/

If you have any queries about the history collections in SOAS Library, finding books and journals, or using any of the online resources, you can contact me:

Mary Seeley (Subject Librarian for History and Religions; Ancient Near East, Semitics and Judaica)
Room C3 (Library)
Email: ms28@soas.ac.uk
Tel.: 020-7898-4195

Russian Orientalism: 2 new studies

Read Rachel Polonsky's article "The paradoxes of Russian Orientalism" from the online Times Literary Supplement which examines the Russian view of "the East" and outlines the connections between the nomads of the Asian steppes and the European Slavs.
The article looks at how these issues are explored in two recent books - David Schimelpenninck van der Oye's Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian mind from Peter the Great to the emigration (2010) - in SOAS Library at A303.48247 / 733376 - and Vera Tolz's Russia's own Orient: the politics of identity and Oriental studies in the late imperial and early Soviet periods (2011) - on order

Gertrude Bell and Iraq

This article from the Jerusalem Post looks at the life and legacy of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) both as an adventurer and explorer, as well her role as a "political officer" in Basra in 1916 and involvement in the creation of the modern Iraqi state in 1920

Chocolate, women and Empire: book review

"In the mythology of chocolate, the power relations of production and consumption are subsumed by a more attractive narrative of exotic peoples and their surroundings… chocolate seems to generate a particular type of history writing … one which delves into the realms of fantasy and romance 

(pp. 85–6)."

Dr. Emma Robertson's "Chocolate, women and Empire: a social and cultural history" is reviewed by  Professor Barbara Bush (History Department, Sheffield Hallam University" in the Institute of Historical Research's "Reviews in History"

Dr Robertson is Senior Lecturer in History, also at Sheffield Hallam

If you want to read more on the imperial history of chocolate, the book is in SOAS Library at A338.17374 / 987393

Book review: Muslim expansion and Byzantine collapse in North Africa

Go to the Bryn Mawr Classical Review to read about Walter Kaegi's recent book "Muslim expansion and Byzantine collapse in North Africa".
The reviewer is Dr David Woods, Head of the Classics Department and a Senior Lecturer at University College Cork (Ireland)

Find the book in SOAS Library at UM949.501 / 738923

Ethnology Museums and the issue of exhibiting human remains

In colonial times, human remains were routinely collected by archaeologists and anthropologists and displayed in ethnology museums - this article from the Deutsche Welle website examines this issue in conjunction with a new exhibition at Vienna's Ethnology Museum which explores the context and legacy of the work of Hans Liechtenecker in Namibia in 1931 and his "Archive of Dying Races" that displayed human remains and featured oral recordings.
The Deutsche Welle article also looks at cases involving Australian Aborigine and Naga remains that have come to be displayed in museums