Representations of the Past and Current History in Media

October 7 at 17.00. Allan Little (BBC News special correspondent) and Charlie Taylor (Executive Producer of “The War That Changed The World”) will give a presentation on “Representations of the Past and Current History in Media” at the regular Research Seminar "Boundaries of History" of the Center for Historical Research and the Department of History of the Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg.

Allan Little is a programme presenter. Since joining the BBC in 1983, he has covered several conflicts and regions across the world. He worked in France and Africa. He reported on the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda and the overthrow of President Mobutu in Zaire. He reported from Baghdad for the 1991 Gulf war and from Kuwait in the period following the war, covering the Shia rebellions.  He was deeply involved in covering the Yugoslav conflict for the BBC. He worked as the BBC's Moscow correspondent, reporting extensively on the political and economic upheaval of the Yeltsin regime. Allan Little has won many awards throughout his career, including the Bayeux War Correspondent of the Year Award, and three Gold Sony Radio Awards. He won the Thomson Reuters prize for Reporting Europe for his Radio 4 Documentary “Europe's Choice”.

 Charlie Taylor is Executive Producer of The War That Changed The World, Charlie Taylor has has a long history of working with academics and communicating complex ideas to large audiences. He established Britain’s leading exploration of the history of ideas, In Our Time on BBC Radio Four and has also made history programmes, including on the history of architecture for BBC Television. He has won several awards for his programme making including the Critics Circle Award, The Legal Reporting Award, the Mental Health Media Award and Voice of the Listener Best Programme Award for In Our Time.  

 Participants will discuss how to make history interesting for a large audience. Charlie Taylor who works across history, science, economics, architecture, and social science will share his experience on how to engage a public audience and draw out the relevance of history to the present day and why the narrative fallacy in history is so attractive to programme makers. He will also tell about people’s attitude to World War One in different countries of the world including Germany, Great Britain, Serbia, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina. BBC Special Correspondent Allan Little will explore the nature of public interest in the West and East to historical legacy and historical memory, specific features of representing the past for the general public and with the help of such media as radio and television, as well as the problem of writing history of the contemporary historical turning points, such as the break up of Yugoslavia, the transformations of countries of the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the changing world order after 9/11, Afganistan and Iraq, and the referendum for independence of Scotland.

 

Moderator: Semyonov A. (PhD, Professor, Chair, Departament of History, National Research University Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg)

Address: Promyshlennaya St., 14a, Room 324
Contact email: ereutova@hse.ru