Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
In the immediate post-war period British women travelled in pairs and female friendship groups on foreign coach holidays, continental tours, rambles and cruises in unprecedented numbers, capturing their modernity and mobility in thousands of holiday snapshots along the way.
This Cultural Conversation draws on a range of 1950’s holiday albums charting women’s travels to Europe and beyond. It considers how tourist photos operated as significant meaning-making, memory-keeping objects in which self-hood, place, and sociability were performed and visually represented.
The audience are encouraged to look through and handle the photo albums in question and to bring along their own holiday snapshot or album as part of a wider discussion on how such photographs are important but often overlooked artefacts in the historical archive of leisure.
Dr Gráinne Goodwin is Senior Lecturer in History and course leader for the MA Social History. Her research focuses on the intersections between colonial encounters (specifically in British India), cultural production and gendered experience in the late-nineteenth century.
Gráinne's work has centred on critical late-Victorian figures such as the memsahib and novelist Flora Annie Steel and the social reformer Behramji Malabari, both of whom made important interventions on gendered notions of colonial modernity during the British Raj. Her work on these figures engages with current debates within new imperial history on the relationship between colony and metrople and on colonial networking. Although historically grounded, Gráinne's research is interdisciplinary in approach, utilising and contextualising colonial journalism, novels, business correspondence and print ephemera. This interdisciplinarity is reflected in her most recent project, which uses book history and histories of travel and tourism to analyse Victorian guidebooks and their publishing processes.
