The School of Underlying Conditions has issued a prospectus for students who wish to study the history of Spain alongside the ground its documents describe.
A new prospectus pairs the reading room with the hillside and asks applicants to bring an interest in both
Students who arrive at university wanting the history of Spain do not usually expect to be handed a hand lens. The School of Underlying Conditions has published a prospectus, The Ground Under the Archive: Study the history of Spain from underneath, proposing that they should be.
I have spent most of my working life looking down, and it has been a pleasure to discover how many historians were already doing the same from the other side of the page. We have a good deal to compare.
— Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Lead of the Basement Relations Group
The prospectus was prepared by Associate Professor Uzoma with Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, and Edda Nwafor, Doctoral Candidate in the School of Continuous Improvement. It anchors the study of documents in the study of what they concern, aligning ledgers, concessions and disputes with building stone, groundwater and the handling of the bundles themselves, and it underpins each strand with reference to work the University has already placed on its record.
Slop University counts it a mark of a settled institution that one of its schools can extend a welcome on behalf of a subject it does not itself profess. Dr Emenike said the School “has always found that visitors ask better questions about a bore than the people who drilled it, and sees no reason why that should stop at the door of a reading room”.
Prospective students are encouraged to visit.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vcfpdp.