Editor’s note: This is the eighteenth entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. If you know of someone we should interview, or would like to be interviewed yourself, send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Hope Williard is a medieval historian and an academic subject librarian at the University of Lincoln. Here’s how she does history.
What’s your current position?
I am an academic subject librarian at the University of Lincoln, which is in the east of England. I started working for the university as an associate lecturer and library assistant in the fall of 2016. After about a year of doing these two jobs, a position appeared for a full-time subject librarian for history and the performing arts, and I applied. As of November 2021, I have been a librarian for four years.
You’re an academic subject librarian. What does that mean? How does it differ from other librarian positions?
My job is to help University of Lincoln students, faculty, and staff make the most of what the library has to offer. I support teaching, learning, and research in thirteen programs across our school of history and heritage and school of performing arts. I work with students at all levels of study in these programs, from first-year undergraduates to final year PhD students, helping them navigate the library catalog, find and use academic information and resources, and cite their sources. I work closely with faculty to ensure that the library resources are in place to support their teaching, and that students are guided through using these resources via tools like electronic reading lists. As part of the subject librarian team, I teach and develop workshops for our study skills and information literacy courses, and I also design and deliver workshops for faculty in my subject areas. One-shot teaching can be challenging, but I also love the puzzle of figuring out what the library can offer a particular course or subject area. Finally, I am also the liaison librarian for the University of Lincoln Doctoral School, our institution’s hub for research students, and regularly create and run workshops for them, and brainstorm ideas for how we can support them.
A subject librarian is both a specialist and generalist position. Some library jobs specialize in specific areas: to give some examples, an e-resources librarian looks after the library’s electronic collections and systems; an acquisitions librarian looks after the library’s finances, purchases, and subscriptions; and a special collections librarian looks after archival and manuscript collections. In some ways because of its association with specific subjects, my job is similarly specialist, but because of the range of subjects a position can cover, and the need to work as part of a team providing teaching and learning support services, it has general aspects too.
One thing I’ve been surprised by is how much of librarianship is about people. Stereotypically, librarianship is about books, and I love looking after our books and doing my best to ensure that our collections grow and adapt with the needs of our students and staff; but most of my work involves talking to people in the university about how to use and make the most of these resources.
At work in the Bodleian Library as a Humfrey Wanley Visiting Fellow, summer 2021.
Tell our readers what a typical day or week of work is like for you during the school year.
One of the most interesting things about being an academic librarian is that no two days are exactly alike. Some days, I sit down at my desk and open emails, and student research queries and staff requests for assistance with teaching materials will take my day in a completely different direction than I thought it was going to go. In general, the rhythm of the day and week follows the structure of the academic year—so in the lead-up to the start of teaching I will spend a lot of time helping academic colleagues get their reading lists ready, fielding last-minute requests for teaching materials, and scheduling workshops introducing students to the library and its resources. The week or two before term is also when I meet academics who are new to the university and introduce them to library collections and services. I might also do refresher sessions for colleagues who have been on leave or who want an update on what’s new in the library and how to use the electronic reading list software.
The first few weeks of teaching tend to involve a lot of one-shot teaching, where I will give a lecture or workshop on how to use the library catalogue, introduce the main resources for specific subject areas, and present an overview of our support services for students. Inevitably, the start of term also involves a lot of emails and final adjustments to reading lists and teaching materials.
As students settle into their studies, I start to get more appointment bookings and email enquiries. Answering student research enquiries is one of my favorite parts of the day. You never know what you are going to get, especially from students who are just starting to explore potential dissertation topics. I love hearing from students about their projects and the sources they are trying to find. Very often, I end up learning something new about our library collection or the subjects I support when I answer these sorts of questions. Our appointment services are currently offered both online and in person—especially with the online appointments, I tend to field mainly research enquiries.
Workshop teaching doesn’t happen every day, but it’s usually part of a typical week. I love that my job lets me work with students at a range of levels, from undergraduate right up to students who are about to submit their PhDs. Developing workshops for first-year doctoral students is especially rewarding. Sometimes colleagues from the Doctoral School (the university center for PhD students), will come to me with a request for a workshop—last year students doing PhDs in food technology asked for a workshop about presenting in online conferences. Sometimes I draw on my own experiences as a doctoral student—remembering how I struggled with formatting the final draft of my thesis, I ended up developing a workshop on Microsoft Word for Long Documents. Many of our PhD students have come back to education after careers in other industries, and so I’m always trying to learn about their needs and experiences so I can provide effective support.
Have you always been interested in history or the study of history?
Yes, I think I became interested in history not long after I learned to read. My mother took my sister and our to our local library all the time as kids and I learned to love history there. Part of it was an accident of the library’s floor plan: the history books for young readers were right at the entrance to the children’s section, and later, when I was about eleven years old and regularly exploring the adult books, I found that the science fiction and history sections were at right angles to one another. It was a section of the shelves that got little traffic and it made a perfect hiding place. I devoured historical fiction as a kid, and a lot of the books I remember—To Kill a King, The Ramsay Scallop, The Crystal Cave, just about anything by Rosemary Sutcliffe and Gerald Morris—were about the Middle Ages or based on medieval literature. So, I developed a fascination for the period and its stories.
Lincoln Cathedral from the campus bridge.
Was there a moment that made you want to study history?
I grew up in Rhode Island and had wonderful middle school social studies teachers who introduced me to historical research. Their classes participated in National History Day, which is a nationwide history competition centered around a particular theme. While we participated as part of the curriculum and as extra credit, we also entered our project into a school-wide competition for the right to compete at the Rhode Island state competition. In sixth grade, I wrote a paper on women immigrants in American history, which concluded by discussing the work and careers of the Tirocchi sisters, Italian-born dressmakers who lived in Providence in the twentieth century. My mother had taken me to see an exhibit about their dressmaking business at the RISD Museum, and she suggested I add them into the paper. I kept participating in our school competitions for three years, until in eighth grade I wrote a paper about women who sailed on New England whaling ships in the nineteenth century.
I was so shy I avoided talking to almost everyone, but somehow in the pursuit of late nineteenth century newspaper articles about whaling, I could ask for help using the microfilm machines at the Providence Public library, and made a few appointments to use the Nicholson Whaling Collection. I still remember how excited I was to pick up the diaries I had requested, and what it was like to sit down at one of the big tables in the reading room to look at them.
I won our school competition, and then the Rhode Island state competition. I got to go to Nationals in Washington, D.C., and part of the competition there was a conversation with the competition judges about my project. I remember being asked to explain the significance of these women and their stories, and telling them about how much I had loved doing the work. It helped, of course, that I won a gold medal for it—the external validation was enormously important—but the experience as a whole made me fall completely in love with research and storytelling.
A print from my desk at home—the Tirocchi sisters’ house is something of a Providence landmark, and my sister remembered me writing about them and gave me the print as a present a few years ago.
Tell us about your undergraduate and graduate experiences. More importantly, what is it like to go abroad for your MA and PhD? What motivated you to move to the UK for graduate school/work?
Shortly after I declared my major in medieval studies at Brown University, I realized that I was going to run out of courses I wanted to take, and so I decided to do a junior year abroad in England, where medieval materials seemed to be a little more plentiful. I was incredibly lucky to do my junior year abroad at Oxford University; where my program of study was very open ended—in conjunction with Carolyn Morningstar, the study abroad program advisor, I came up with a list of medieval topics I wanted to study, and she arranged for me to have tutorials in those subjects each semester. I loved writing an essay each week and then having a one-to-one conversation about it.
I came back to Brown for my senior year having made up my mind to do a PhD in medieval history. I didn’t know much about history as a profession—I remember saying I wanted to be an independent scholar in my first draft of an application cover letter and getting feedback that I might want to rethink that one…I looked at and applied to American PhD programs, but also Masters’ programs in medieval history at Oxbridge and elsewhere, which I had learned about during my study abroad experience. I didn’t receive acceptance in any U.S. PhD programs, but I was offered a partial scholarship for a program at Cambridge. Midway through my first term there (the deadlines are very early), I applied to U.K. PhD programs, and then was very lucky to get a full scholarship for a PhD at the University of Leeds. Without funding, postgraduate programs are horrendously expensive for international students—anyone from outside the U.K. or E.U.—so I was very lucky all the way through. But I didn’t intend to end up in England—my first goal was to pursue graduate school in history, and the U.K. just happened to be the place where I was offered the opportunity to do that.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Education of the Children of Clovis, 1861 (Wikimedia Commons).
Tell us about your book manuscript, Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms. Does it have a release date yet?
My book is about how the sixth century poet Venantius Fortunatus used friendship to survive and thrive amidst the political turbulence of the sixth century Merovingian kingdoms. Born in northern Italy, he came to Gaul as a young man, and settled at a monastery founded by a remarkable queen, Radegund, who left ruling behind to pursue a life of strict asceticism. Fortunatus was a prolific writer, the author of two hundred forty-nine poems written for specific people and occasions, an epic poem about Saint Martin of Tours, and seven (or more) biographies of other saints. Because so much of his work was for and about other people, it enabled me to explore how Merovingian elites manipulated the conventions of late Roman literary culture to form networks, which they made and maintained in order to navigate a post-imperial but not post-Roman world. I argue that their bonds of friendship were at the heart of horizontal and vertical social relationships in Merovingian society, and that this language shaped beliefs and behaviors, leading to social cohesion even within kingdoms repeatedly wracked by civil wars. I can see all of those things represented in The Education of the Children of Clovis, a wonderful painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a nineteenth century artist who painted a lot of reimaginings of ancient history. To me the painting captures the dynamism and violence of the court, the centrality of royal women, the presence of clerics waiting to record history and the blending of Roman and barbarian cultures that makes late antiquity so fascinating to study. The release date will be sometime in 2022.
My book is based on my dissertation, Friendship in the Works of Venantius Fortunatus. During my PhD I became interested in late antique letter-writing, and what letters tell us as sources. In many ways, they’re maddening—linguistically challenging, sometimes formulaic and impersonal, and often difficult to contextualize or date—but they offer a unique window into connections between people. One of the things I’ve tried to do in revising the book is pay attention to these connections, and to the people who made them possible. I’ve become particularly interested in the messengers who carried letters, who frequently get mentioned briefly and anonymously, if at all, but whose work was vital to attempts to communicate across distances.
A sign that hangs above Hope’s desk at home.
You’re a medieval historian. What are some late antiquity and early Middle Ages works/resources that have informed your work? Who are some scholars/historians that have inspired you?
I fell in love with the earlier Middle Ages in a first-year survey course Early Medieval Europe with Amy Remensnyder. There was an enormous range of reading for that class—I remember reading most of Augustine’s Confessions, Beowulf, and the histories of the sixth-century bishop of Gregory of Tours’ Histories—among other things. So, I had the great good luck to be introduced to the period by reading lots and lots of primary sources under the guidance of two brilliant teachers—Amy and Stephen Higa, the TA for our seminars—which got me hooked. There was something about Gregory’s world of Merovingian Gaul which would not let me go. Gregory is an incredible storyteller, but following the threads of his stories and characters is not always easy, and something about trying to make it make sense captivated me. Lewis Thorpe’s translation, which I read as an undergraduate, is a wonderfully readable and compelling introduction to Gregory’s world.
By the end of the class, I knew I wanted to study the Middle Ages, and Professor Remensnyder ended up becoming my faculty adviser in Brown’s Medieval Cultures and Civilizations degree. On her advice, I applied to study abroad programs in England, and had the great good luck to spend a year in Oxford, where I got to read more Gregory of Tours with Conrad Leyser, who encouraged me to read widely and develop my own arguments. When I got back from Oxford, eager to keep studying the Merovingians, I took classes on medieval Latin and the poetry of Venantius Fortunatus, a sixth-century writer, with classicist Joseph Pucci. Fortunatus wrote what are known as occasional poems—poems in commemoration of a particular occasion, and the small, vivid vignettes of daily life in the poems fascinated me. Joe’s delight in Fortunatus’ work is infectious; he had just published an English translation of the poems, and treated his students as fellow scholars and interpreters of Fortunatus’ Latin. In addition to his wonderful translation, there’s now an amazing full translation into English by Michael Roberts. Roberts’ two books The Jeweled Style, a study of the links between late antique art and literature, and the Humblest Sparrow, a study of Fortunatus’ poetry, continue to inspire me with their elegance and erudition.
As a PhD student I studied with Ian Wood, wrote a book called The Merovingian Kingdoms, which remains one of my favorite books about the period. Ian’s wide-ranging interests in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages made him an absolutely fantastic person to have as a supervisor, and he had a large group of students. We would have weekly gatherings to discuss work in progress, which are one of my very favorite memories of my doctorate, and which opened my eyes to so many new sources and approaches for studying the Middle Ages.
Finally, I have to mention the work of Peter Brown, whose work reminded me that history writing could also be beautiful. I would recommend starting with Through the Eye of a Needle, which is his book on how the late antique Christian church wrestled the contradiction between its wealth and power and scriptural teachings about poverty. For a general introduction to late antiquity, I love the narrative flair of James O’Donnell’s The Ruin of the Roman Empire.
What’s the best advice you have received or that you tell students about conducting research?
I try to work with each student as an individual and to adapt my advice to their particular circumstances, but if there is one thing I find myself saying a lot, it’s encouraging students to keep an open mind. Students can sometimes find dissertation work extremely intimidating, and sometimes they manage that fear by clinging to very fixed ideas about what their research is about. Which means that when they can’t find sources for that specific question, the research process becomes even more stressful. So, I talk them through some of the ways they can go about looking for sources, both via the library and in online archives, and along the way I try to encourage them to expect the unexpected. One of the fun parts of being a historian is that sometimes the question you start out trying to answer is not the one you end up answering. I try to share that joy whenever I can.
Taking a break from her summer fellowship at the Bodleian Library to run to the ruins of Godstow Abbey.
Tell us about your writing and rewriting processes. How do you get writing done?
Very slowly and very painfully! One thing that works for me is something I discovered when I started running marathons—a lot of serious runners will keep a training log that lists mileage or workouts, year after year; and they look back on these to see patterns or gain confidence. I started doing something similar for academic work—I keep a notebook where I write down the things that I have been able to do on a particular day. They are often very, very, small—there are sometimes days or weeks at a stretch where my academic diary says things like “wrote one sentence” or “proofread two footnotes.” Some days I am able to write bigger achievements like “spent 30 minutes editing a section of an article” or “wrote 500 words.” But when I feel like I’m losing momentum or motivation, being able to look back on things and see that I have made small and consistent efforts towards being the historian I want to be—that helps hold me accountable. It also helps me try to set reasonable goals, rather than getting upset and frustrated about failing to make sufficient progress, and avoiding my desk for weeks or months at a time—which is what I used to do before I kept a diary. It’s not a perfect system, but it works for me.
What don’t people understand or know about working in a university library? What has surprised you about working in a university library?
People don’t always appreciate how many different jobs there are in a library. A lot of the time, colleagues who are full-time academics will assume that I do things that are actually handled by other teams in the library. For instance, I can do some basic troubleshooting on our e-resources and reading list platform, but most of the time I refer questions or problems in these areas on to the library’s e-resources team. If a faculty member has ordered a book and wants to know if it will arrive in time for teaching, I need to ask my colleagues in our acquisitions team to liaise with our suppliers to find out if and when the order has shipped.
My biggest surprise has been just how complicated the publishing industry is. Due to U.K. copyright law, academic libraries over here can only purchase e-books which are licensed for us. Very often an academic colleague will forward a notice of a book sale to me, or send me their contributors’ or author’s discount; and I won’t be able to use it because it can’t be applied to the kind of books I am required to buy. More broadly, it seems that people outside of libraries often know little about the problems that e-book pricing models pose for academic libraries—I have found the work of projects like E-bookSOS incredibly helpful in trying to explain these things.
You’re an associate lecturer. What does that teaching title mean in the U.K. system? Tell us about some of the classes you teach.
An associate lecturer is a combination of a graduate teaching assistant and an adjunct professor. Most associate lecturers are PhD students or early career scholars and the vast majority of contacts are temporary. The position used to be called an hourly paid lecturer—you are compensated for the hours spent teaching. Grading, preparation, and office hours are not included in the calculated hours, just class time. The term associate lecturer can occasionally refer to permanent positions which are full-time and purely focused on teaching, but not very often. Sometimes an AL will have freedom and flexibility to design their own teaching materials and courses, but often they will be delivered seminar teaching according to a fixed program set by lecturers employed on permanent or full-time contracts. I’ve taught first year survey courses about the medieval world, a second- and third-year survey course on late antiquity; currently I am teaching a final-year module about ancient graffiti. There are so many amazing digital projects on graffiti across the ancient world and it’s such a rapidly growing field, plus it’s very different from much of my previous work. I have a great group of students and am delighted to be learning alongside them.
As a librarian, I teach information literacy, research skills, and referencing. A lot of the time, I am trying to meet students where they are—some students need very little coaching to adapt to designing their own searches, and some are much more hesitant. I always try to tie this teaching to specific assessments or work that students are doing in their classes—even something as simple as making sure my referencing examples are specific to their subject (and that they discuss a range of topics and are by a wide range of authors), is important for keeping engagement.
University of Lincoln Library book display for Women’s History Month, March 2020.
How well did your particular history training prepare you for your position at your library? Tell us about some of the work you have done at the library.
The biggest gift my training as a historian gave me was being comfortable with not knowing all of the answers. The last pre-pandemic photo I have on my phone is actually of a book display I set up for women’s history month, focused on women’s writing. Bringing people into the library by organizing and planning events is something that I have learned to do on the job. And the process of feeling like I am learning new things all the time is one of the things that excites me about supporting the subjects that I do. A U.K. PhD involves little coursework, so one of the other things my training taught me was how to seek out opportunities to learn—either by getting together a reading and discussion group, or by seeing out classes or training to learn what I needed to know. Within my workplace, I facilitate a small reading group on libraries and librarianship, where we meet once a month or so to read and discuss an article about current issues in the profession.
My background in teaching prepared me for some aspects of library teaching, but not all of it. History teaching often involves trying to teach students general skills—clear and effective written and oral communication—through classes on specific subjects; whereas in library teaching you start with the general skills and work towards specific applications. Outside of the classroom, I do a lot of work with students one-to-one on their research projects. This summer I took part in my university’s summer program to support undergraduate research, and was a co-supervisor for two projects, one on the networks of enslaved teachers in the letters of Libanius of Antioch, a fourth century teacher of rhetoric, and the other on the early modern music collections of Lincoln Cathedral. It was amazing to support our students with their research questions and progress, and both projects seem poised to lead to exciting future work.
Preparing to teach in person, October 2020.
How did the pandemic affect your work as a historian and as a librarian?
The pandemic dramatically changed my work as a librarian. From late March 2020 to October 2020, all of my interactions with students and staff were online, which I found to be a mixed blessing. I greatly enjoyed teaching and meeting with students online, and have some incredibly creative and talented colleagues at the University of Lincoln, so had a great community of people to learn from and ask for help. There are two ways in which aspects of my work were actually easier online. Firstly, a lot of our postgraduate students live some distance from the university, so online appointments worked very well for reaching them. And secondly, I found screen-sharing in a video call a lot easier than sitting at a table trying to share computers with a student.
As a historian, I relished the chance to sign up for and attend online events. Lincoln is a small city, somewhat off the beaten path, and before the pandemic I was rarely able to hear other historians speak, which I enjoy. It was tremendous fun to listen to a wide range of papers and topics, and made me feel more connected to historians as a community.
On the downside, there were (and are) tremendous difficulties with access to resources—one of our main suppliers of print books and e-books went out of business over the course of spring and summer 2020—and of course there were several months where we weren’t able to order print books at all due to shipping disruptions. Even now, in 2021, our library is still not able to offer a full interlibrary loans service, because we can’t borrow print books from our lending partners around the UK, and the Sconul Access scheme, which is a national program that lets members of UK universities access each other’s libraries, only reopened in mid-November of this year. So, access to research materials continues to be difficult, and has deepened my commitment to learning about and advocating for open access publishing.
You’re a member of several UK professional societies. Can you tell us which societies you belong to, the work you’ve done with them, and how your associations with them have affected your history and library worlds?
I am a member of the U.K. branch of the International Association of Music Libraries, where I joined the Documentation Committee earlier this year. The committee discusses issues related to music cataloguing and oversees big database projects like Cecilia, a project to map the locations and contents of music collections around the UK. And more! It has been a wonderful learning experience for me. Before I was on the committee, I started by going to IAML-UK’s seminars and study days for music librarians. The University of Lincoln’s music program started in 2015, so it has been incredibly helpful to have an incredibly friendly and knowledgeable group of people to ask for advice on growing and organizing our collections. I also attend the History Research Libraries Committee, a group for people who are interested and involved in collections used in historical research. It has been a wonderful source of ideas and inspiration and a chance to meet and share ideas with other history librarians.
Lincoln Castle at sunset.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work?
Historians are storytellers, but people sometimes seem to think we are simply fact-checkers or trivia buffs. Knowing facts and dates is important of course, especially the latter, since it helps a historian understand a sequence of events in order. But a timeline tells a pretty limited story and an isolated fact has little meaning without context. Particularly for the Middle Ages, where our supply of facts and dates is more limited than for historians who study other periods, I wish more people knew about the detective side of our work—with limited information, we put together a fragmentary puzzle to tell stories of how people lived and why they made the choices that they did. Sometimes we develop new tools for how we put those pieces together, and sometimes we get new pieces when librarians and scholars find unknown manuscripts, or archaeologists dig up something new, but we are always, always coming up against the limits of what we know and what we can know.
It’s my favorite thing about studying the period.
Photograph of Mrs. New and Miss Parker, Bodleian Library Records. Photo provided courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries.
If money, time, and distance were not issues, what’s a dream project you’d love to tackle? Or what’s a class you have always wanted to teach, but just haven’t had the opportunity to?
I would love to write a book about the hidden role of female library workers in medieval manuscript research in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In summer 2021, I had a visiting fellowship at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, where I was studying their special collections enquiries from the turn of the century, which were answered by a library assistant named George Parker, and his daughters Angelina and Evaline; the two women formed the library’s unofficial research department, transcribing, translating, and dating manuscripts and documents for scholars all over the world. The letters made for amazing reading–I had great fun writing about them on my blog. My research showed that there were other women doing similar work at research libraries around the U.K. (the dream part of this project would be finding the time and opportunity to explore their archives the way I was able to do at the Bodleian). We tend to think of research and scholarship only as publishing—scholars aren’t scholars if they don’t write—but what fascinates me is that these women were doing incredibly skilled work, being widely praised for it, having their transcriptions published under the names of others in important scholarly editions—and yet because there are no publications under their own names, they fly below the radar of the history of manuscript studies. I want to write something that brings to light their labor and expertise.
If you weren’t a scholar, what kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
I was a fairly serious classical musician through university so if I’d had the ability, being a professional violinist and violist would have been an amazing career. I cycled through a lot of job aspirations as a teenager, but honestly most of them were different varieties of historian. The farthest away from history I ever got was a few years where I was very interested in paleoanthropology—that I became a scholar feels rather inevitable.
Hope at the finish line of the 2021 Manchester Marathon.