Meeting documentation is archived here.
Introductory meeting and discussion of aims for network.
Resources shared:
People Directory (now linked on site)
Resource List (now linked on site)
Faciitated discussion on the intersection of practice research and historical topics.
Pre-meeting reading
- Bulley, James and Şahin, Özden. 2021. Practice Research - Report 1: What is practice research? and Report 2: How can practice research be shared?. Practice Research Advisory Group UK (PRAG-UK), London. https://doi.org/10.23636/1347 - please refer to section 1.1, EXPLORING PRACTICE RESEARCH, pp.4-11
- Robinson, Emily. 2010. 'Touching the void: Affective history and the impossible', Rethinking History, 14:4, 503-520, https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2010.515806
10-10:30 In-person informal networking
10:30-12:00 Work-sharing session
Stef Conner (via Zoom): Aulos presentation from her workshop 'Ancient Drum and Bass' from Moyseion Matera in Italy. Stef and her co-researcher Barnaby Brown (Lotos Lab) presented and demonstrated their group work around the 'Aulos', an ancient Greek wind instrument, and performed an example of an highly complex ancient Greek polyrhythm.
Author, illustrator, and TFTI PhD candidate Mike Smith recited an excerpt of a Middle English stanzaic romance and his work-in-progress translation, leading to a fascinating discussion about the possible approaches to translation and performance
Composer, singer and ACT/SBS Lecturer James Cave presented and performed an excerpt from his 'Field of Broken Ice', a creative response to the Viking Sagas incorporating live-mixed audio and live vocal performance.
We closed with a plenary discussion around the relationship between historical evidence, creative responses, storytelling, and alternative approaches to engaging with historical sources and narratives.
Embodying Histories was a series of online seminars in Spril 2026, exploring cross-disciplinary perspectives on embodied knowledge, research and practice in historical fields. The contributors came from across the fields of history, english, historical martial arts, theatre and performance, and draw on a wide range of methods, theories, epistemologies and practical expertise. The aim of the seminars is to promote dialogue and connections between historical performance research in music and its parallels in other fields.
An overview of the seminars is given below. Full abstracts can be found on the Baermann's Body project website. Recordings of the seminars are now available on the Embodying Histories YouTube channel.
Wednesday 21 January 2026
Lauren Mancia (Brooklyn College/CUNY): Embodied Epistemology as Rigorous Historical Method
Monday 16 February 2026
Evelyn Tribble (UConn):"The Genius of the System": Cognitive ecologies, embodied practices, and early modern playing
Wednesday 25 March 2026
Daniel Jacquet (Chicago): Playing with swords? Historically informed performance as a research method for the study of technical literature
Wednesday 22 April 2026
Ben Spatz (Birmingham) and Webster McDonald (University of Kansas): Unsettling Archives: Critical Fabulation and Historically Informed Performance
Wednesday 6 May 2026, 4pm GMT
Mira Benjamin (City) and Emily Worthington (York): Beyond Baermann’s Body: theory, technique, and positioning the creative practitioner in historical research
Embodying Histories was funded by the Baermann's Body AHRC project and hosted in collaboration with the University of York's Historical Practice Research Network and School of Arts and Creative Technologies, and the Performance and Embodiment cluster at the Orpheus Instituut Gent.