2025 Manchester

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The Programme is out now!

Registration is now closed.

Questions? Contact Jerome: Jerome.degroot@manchester.ac.uk

Manchester 2025: PLACE in Historical Fictions

The Historical Fictions Research Network aims to create a place for the discussion of all aspects of the construction of the historical narrative. The focus of the conference is the way we construct history, the narratives and fictions people assemble and how. We welcome both academic and practitioner presentations. The Network addresses a wide variety of disciplines, including Archaeology, Architecture, Art History, Cartography, Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Gaming, Gender, Geography, History, Larping, Linguistics, Literature, Media Studies, Memory Studies, Museum Studies, Musicology, Politics, Queer Studies, Race, Reception Studies, Re-enactment, Transformative Works.

Staying in Manchester

A good place to start is here: https://www.meetinmanchester.com/hfrn-2025/

Manchester Piccadilly train station is central to the city and about 15 minutes’ walk from the conference venue. The airport is about 40 minutes from the city centre by cab – it’s probably better to get one of the very frequent trains to the city centre that are much cheaper and take about 25 minutes.

Manchester is a very walkable city but there are also plentiful buses and a good tram network. Information on public transport is here: https://tfgm.com/

Accommodation options

Visit Manchester has a good list of hotels: https://www.visitmanchester.com/where-to-stay

There are a lot of hotels in central Manchester. There are lots of Airbnb listings, too, but you should ensure you’re in the centre (sometimes their sites turn out to be way out in Greater Manchester).

The following is just a selection of hotels close to the venue:

  • Midland, 16 Peter St – right fancy, with a spa, on the site of Peterloo
  • Jury’s Inn, 56 Great Bridgewater St – high-mid price
  • Hotel Novotel, 21 Dickinson St – good cheap hotel
  • Premier Inn, 7-11 Mosley St – good cheap hotel
  • Hotel Ibis Styles, 3-5 Portland St, and Hotel Ibis, 96 Portland St – both basic but decent enough
  • Whitworth Locke, 74 Prince’s St – nice, serviced apartments
  • Hatter’s Hostel, 50 Newton St – excellent hostel in the middle of the action

Eating and drinking in Manchester

These low-mid budget restaurants are all 5-10 minute walk from the conference centre:


Pubs and bars: there are several around the venue but their quality is varied. These are some suggestions within a short walk:


The Northern Quarter/ Ancoats area is your main place for bars: look for Stevenson Square, Cutting Room Square, or Thomas St. There are at least 2 good Karaoke bars in Chinatown. Canal Street is the centre of the gay village.

Things to do in Manchester

Creative Tourist is a great resource: https://www.creativetourist.com/

Manchester Wire has music, food, art listings: https://manchesterwire.co.uk/

The Science+Industry Museum has brilliant standing exhibition: https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/

The Halle is the best orchestra in the UK: https://www.halle.co.uk/

Royal Exchange theatre, https://royalexchange.co.uk/

HOME, see above, has theatre, cinema and art: https://homemcr.org/

LOCATION

Friends Meeting House, M2 5NS

Call for Papers (now closed)

Historical Fictions Research Conference, Manchester, 13th & 14th February 2025

The Call for Papers is now closed.

The Historical Fictions Research Network aims to create a place for the discussion of all aspects of the construction of the historical narrative. The focus of the conference is the way we construct history, the narratives and fictions people assemble and how. We welcome both academic and practitioner presentations. The Network addresses a wide variety of disciplines, including Archaeology, Architecture, Art History, Cartography, Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Gaming, Gender, Geography, History, Larping, Linguistics, Literature, Media Studies, Memory Studies, Museum Studies, Musicology, Politics, Queer Studies, Race, Reception Studies, Re-enactment, Transformative Works.

For the 2025 conference, the HFRN will engage in scholarly discussions on the topic of place in historical fictions.

As the geographer David Harvey points out, the construction of identities together with notions of belonging, power and freedom rest upon understandings of place. Perceived differences and affinities across and between populations, as well as over time, are often spatially determined, and because dreams of the future and imaginaries of the past are inevitably linked to space and territory, the historical imagination cannot be separated from the geographical. A sense of place underpins cultural memory and the imagined community of the nation through time. Conversely, as Paul Gilroy has shown, place is also crucial to the diasporic imagination, and it is moreover through re-visiting the relationship between place and time that alternative pasts can be imagined. Place is central to discourses around nostalgia, notions of golden ages, and the politics of home and belonging. 

Place is integral to historical fictions as they attempt to reconstruct and re-present the ways and worlds of the past, helping to locate stories and characters in time and often conferring a sense of authenticity. Narratives of both progress and decline are usually anchored by location, and processes of change are often codified through the relationship between people and space. Place can be a device for exploring the otherness, the ‘horrors’ of the past. Alternatively, it can instil a sense of continuity and commonality between ages.  Landscapes, including urban spaces are ‘storied’ and are, in the words of Paul Readman “‘sites of memory’ – focal points for mobilising a collective consciousness of the past”. As Readman goes on to point out, the association between place and human pasts transforms the former into heritage which in turn is bound up with constructions of collective identities. As Raymond Williams notes, different rural and urban environments, including that of the house, express social and moral values. 

Places are thus political. They are often associated with conservative histories: with instincts of preservation, of stasis, and with property rights, inheritance, and the upholding of unequal social orders – ideas which, for instance, often under-pin the country-house narrative. At the same time, place can be used to posit new ways of looking at the past, to assert alternative geographical identities to that of the national and to awaken suppressed histories. As is shown by right-wing reactions to the British National Trust’s policy of revealing its properties’ economic roots, such perspectives offer radical possibilities, helping to re-centre the stories of marginalised communities and destabilise accepted norms and beliefs.

Papers are invited on topics related but not limited to:

  • The meaning of landscapes and/or urban settings in historical fictions
  • The use of mise-en-scène in historical film, TV or games
  • Country-house historical fictions
  • Nostalgia in historical fictions
  • Diasporic historical fictions
  • The use of settings in historical fictions
  • The portrayal of travel in historical fictions
  • The construction (or deconstruction) of place-based identities in historical fictions
  • The reparative potential of place in historical fictions
  • Post-national or transnational historical fictions
  • Maps or other spatial paratexts in historical fictions

Keynote Speakers:

Dr Dorothea Flothow, Associate Professor, Department of English and American Studies, University of Salzburg

Professor Ian McGuire, American Literature and Creative Writing, University of Manchester and prize-winning author of the historical novels, The North Water (2016) and The Abstainer (2020)

Beth Underdown, author of the historical novels, The Witchfinder’s Sister (2017) and The Key in the Lock (2022)

Further Details

HFRC 2025 will be an in-person event taking place at Manchester Central Library, The Friends’ Meeting House, Manchester and The International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester. All these venues are situated in the city centre. Piccadilly and Victoria Railway Stations are in the vicinity, and Manchester Airport is approximately 20 minutes away by train.

The organisers are Professor Jerome de Groot, University of Manchester, Dr Dorothea Flothow, University of Salzburg (Conference Manager), Dr Christine Lehnen, University of Exeter, Dr Siobhan O’Connor and Dr Paul Wake, Manchester Metropolitan University.

Proposals for 20-minute papers were due 7th July 2024. Papers must be presented in English.

Please note that a membership levy will be introduced alongside the conference fee this year. Further details about HFRN membership and its benefits will be shared at the conference.

References:

Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993)

Harvey, David, Cosmopolitanism and The Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)

Readman, Paul, Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)

Williams, Raymond, The Country and The City (London: The Hogarth Press, 1993)

Contact

Visit our website (https://historicalfictionsresearch.org/) for more details and regular updates. You can also write to HFRN conference manager, Dorothea Flothow at historicalfictionsresearch [at] gmail.com.