This blogpost was authored by Dr Felicity Jensz, who is a colonial historian at the University of Münster, Germany. Dr Jensz visited the University of Bristol as a Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor in February 2025 to collaborate with Professor Hilary Carey in the Department of History.
The week that I arrived in Bristol to take up my Bristol Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professorship, the weather was bleak and more conducive to indoor activities than exploring new cities. Bristol had other ideas of me and the Light Festival drew me into the city to explore the streets and sights of the city that would be my home for a month. As a colonial historian with a focus on religious movements, Bristol offered me many opportunities to see where and how history was made publicly evident, such as in the cathedral and in the museums of Bristol. The physical exploration of the city and the broadening of my geographical horizons complimented my intellectual journey that involved both listening and lecturing within the School of Humanities.
One of the motivating reasons to apply for the fellowship was to allow for prolonged and frequent conversations with my host, Professor Hilary Carey, in our development of a large funding application. In my first week at Bristol, I accompanied Hilary to a Faculty grant writing work shed, where in-depth conversations with both grant facilitators as well as successful grant applicants allowed for the development of the grant framework and constructive feedback for our initial ideas. It was inspiring to hear of innovative and critically important research projects that were in the final stages of grant appraisal as well as to observe the process of project consolidation. Our own funding application process benefited greatly from this workshop at the beginning of my time in Bristol, with ideas further fleshed out and discussed on walks in the English countryside and a weekend trip to Stonehenge; the Neolithic landscape a pertinent reminded of the enduringness of different forms of history. Conversations with Kenneth Austin, Head of the History Department, and also with Sumita Mukherjee (History) and Florian Stadtler (English) provided further opportunities to discuss future grant ideas.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of being a fellow was to hear about people’s research in both structured lectures, of which I attended a variety, as well as more informally in conversations over coffee or dinner in wonderful places, such as: a café attached to one of the UK’s oldest outdoor swimming pools (Bristol Lido); or, in the café of the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, where a mummified kitten left a lasting impression. I really enjoyed giving a lecture to the School of Humanities on reports from German women deported from the German colony of Cameroon during the First World War. These fascinating first-hand reports open up a new perspective as how women navigated war and how their stories were used for German war propaganda. Discussing my paper with Africanists, WWI specialists, religious historians, and feminist scholars was inspiring and will improve the subsequent article, which back in Münster, I am still trying to find time to finalize.
Being in Bristol opened up different views on the world and provided me time to finish writing other research papers with the help of the humanities library at Bristol. One research article has since been accepted by The Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, an outcome that was facilitated through my time in Bristol. More generally, my time in Bristol provided many opportunities for collegial and insightful conversations, walks in the countryside, and for the generation of new ideas. The depths of winter may be now past, but the lights and inspiration from Bristol remain with me, and provide continuing impetus for the grant application being prepared.
