Peter Webster
Head of digital scholarship and innovation, Southampton uni library: DH, digitization, web archives, #GLAM.
Runs Webster Research & Consulting, making better digital services for research.
Historian of 20th c. British Christianity.
Own views, naturally.
- Look what arrived in the post, featuring an essay by yours truly.
- Really, this has always been the real skill, long before the current situation arose.
- As I have more time now for interesting things, I got this out and dusted it off a bit. websterresearchconsulting.com
- This morning I find myself, for the first time in 22 years, committed neither to any publications nor any speaking engagements (on my research, that is). Not sure what to make of this.
- If you're free on Monday, I'll be giving an online talk: "The edited collection as community: explorations in the history of a discipline" 6pm CET, hosted on Zoom by colleagues in Germany. QR code in the image, and/or Meeting ID.
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- A nice write-up of a very neat idea from my Southampton colleague James Macdonell: a Cabinet of Curiosities made up of 'objets trouvés' turned up during a recent project to review the whole book stock of the library. This pleased me a great deal this year. library.soton.ac.uk/digital-scho...
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- Reposted by Peter Webster#dhist Join the @ihr.bsky.social Digital History seminar on 9 Dec (midday GMT on Zoom) for Aleksandra Kaye and colleagues on 'Science Across Borders: Text-Mining and Network Analysis Insights into the Polish Diasporic Periodical Press, 1830-1930' ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2025/09/tues...
- It's a particular pleasure to talk about this project: to digitise some of the writings of James Parkes, twentieth century Anglican specialist in the history and theology of Christian-Jewish relations. His library came to Southampton sixty years ago this year. library.soton.ac.uk/digital-scho...
- Reposted by Peter WebsterSome films I was involved in making about religion and peacebuilding: on the #Corrymeela Community and the St Philip's Centre, #Leicester www.open.edu/openlearn/hi... Thanks to Riaz Ravat and Alex Wimberly for their interviews. #peacebuilding @openuniversity.bsky.social
- Reposted by Peter WebsterIf you missed yesterday's wonderful Deswarte Prize seminar - ' (Fe)male Voices on Stage: Finding Patterns in Lottery Rhymes of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Low Countries with and without AI' - it is now on the @ihr.bsky.social Digital History Seminar youtube channel youtu.be/iwT7PRy-eQs?...
- Reposted by Peter WebsterJoin the @ihr.bsky.social Digital History seminar on 4 November (12:00 GMT on Zoom) to celebrate the winning entry for the 2025 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History and to learn about gender and lottery rhymes in the medieval/early-modern low countries ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2025/09/tues...
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- For the avoidance of doubt: not named after me.
- Introducing the Southampton Digital Scholarship team mascot: Just who is Peter the Penguin? library.soton.ac.uk/digital-scho...
- Introducing the Southampton Digital Scholarship team mascot: Just who is Peter the Penguin? library.soton.ac.uk/digital-scho...
- Once again, it was my privilege to chair the judging panel for this, in memory of a much-missed colleague and friend. Those who knew Richard will be able to imagine how delighted he would have been to see the vitality of digital history.
- 📢 The 2025 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History is awarded to Scheltinga, Budts, and Puttevils for ‘(Fe)male Voices on Stage: Finding Patterns in Lottery Rhymes of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Low Countries with and without AI’ ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2025/09/2025...
- Nice write-up of what our two placement students got up to over the summer, looked after by my colleague James Macdonell. library.soton.ac.uk/digital-scho...
- Preparing for a lecture in January on what networks of authors in edited collections can reveal about the global history of evangelicalism in the 20th century. I take some of the approaches discussed here: peterwebster.me/2024/11/15/r... And apply them to this: peterwebster.me/2019/07/03/e...
- The proofs of this just landed. Open Access postprint in the quoted post, but DM me if you'd like the proofs instead.
- Reposted by Peter WebsterExcited to announce that the paperback edition of Age of the Spirt, a #history of #charismatic #Christianity, is out on 26 September (on my birthday no less!). Pre-order here or at your preferred retailer! Thanks to OUP for making this happen. www.waterstones.com/book/age-of-...
- Some details on my little fictional priests project.
- New post, and a new venture into Irish fiction (the series hitherto having featured British writers.)
- New post on the blog, and another fictional priest, from an author I've only recently discovered and have been enjoying enormously: Brian Moore. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) peterwebster.me/2025/09/01/j...
- New post on the blog, and another fictional priest, from an author I've only recently discovered and have been enjoying enormously: Brian Moore. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) peterwebster.me/2025/09/01/j...
- An excellent summary. And, worse still, as a sector we expect senior scholars to somehow just acquire the skills to manage this kind of complexity and contradiction.
- Very few people seem to understand university finances and, distressingly, this includes many academics and most policymakers. This is an attempt to condense the key points you need to know. open.substack.com/pub/profseri...
- I'm not saying we live in the country, but the opposition in my game of cricket on Thursday were two players short because they were busy with the harvest. #SoVillage #ABitAgricultural
- Reposted by Peter WebsterThe new book has arrived! Very pleased to add this to the 'Iris Murdoch Today' collection from @springernature.com, all eight of which were published in the past three years. Full details here: link.springer.com/book/10.1007...
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- Fired up with new energy for this little project, with lots of new characters to write about. It's a way of re-energising my writing. Right now, I don't have the time for big projects, but I can (for the time being) work by a series of vignettes; it's a kind of collage.
- Some work still to do, but here's a new way into my series of posts on clergy in modern English fiction. There are some new ones coming up, but suggestions of others I've missed are very welcome. peterwebster.me/the-clergy-i...
- I'm about to go out on a limb and say that few people now read the fiction of Alice Perrin. Does anyone want to contest that, before I commit it to paper?
- I realised that I didn't put out an OA version of another article on Iris Murdoch, from last year. 'Vocation, Hypocrisy and Secularization: Iris Murdoch and the Clergy of the Church of England' Studies in Church History 60 (2024) Summary post and free PDF at: peterwebster.me/2025/07/31/i...
- Surprising but most illuminating: Scorsese on his debt to the films of Powell and Pressburger. www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...
- A little blog post introducing some of the themes of this chapter: peterwebster.me/2025/07/30/c...
- My own chapter is at link.springer.com/chapter/10.1... "Christian Readers in England and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch, 1948-c.1982" It isn't Open Access, and is jolly expensive: ping me if you'd like the PDF by email.
- Some work still to do, but here's a new way into my series of posts on clergy in modern English fiction. There are some new ones coming up, but suggestions of others I've missed are very welcome. peterwebster.me/the-clergy-i...
- Some time to myself today, and I'm thinking through ways to refresh this long-term project of mine: thinking about the (many) Christian ministers in English fiction. It started here: peterwebster.me/2014/01/16/a...
- I now have the PDF of this, so do get in touch if your library doesn't have the book.
- My own chapter is at link.springer.com/chapter/10.1... "Christian Readers in England and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch, 1948-c.1982" It isn't Open Access, and is jolly expensive: ping me if you'd like the PDF by email.
- Great to see this: congratulations to the editors on bringing it to fruition.
- Some time to myself today, and I'm thinking through ways to refresh this long-term project of mine: thinking about the (many) Christian ministers in English fiction. It started here: peterwebster.me/2014/01/16/a...
