The Angus Library and Archive
The Angus Library and Archive is the leading collection of Baptist history and heritage worldwide. It’s own website is here. The ‘Opening the Angus Seminars’ provide an introduction to this rich resource, and some previous seminars are available to view online (see hyperlinks below).
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Our latest newsletter is here.
Latest Seminar:
30th May 2024 – Dr Cindy Aalders:
‘Life Writing as Spiritual Legacy: Lessons from the Steele Collection.’
The Steele Collection at the Angus Library holds the manuscripts of generations of religious women’s letters, diaries, and other life writings. In this paper I explore the afterlives of those writings. Looking beyond contemporary uses, it asks how manuscripts were preserved and how they functioned in religious communities after the death of their authors. Scholars of manuscript cultures have highlighted the ways in which an historiographical emphasis on print culture has obscured women’s engagement in eighteenth-century intellectual and literary worlds. What does a consideration of manuscript cultures reveal regarding women’s engagement in eighteenth-century religious worlds? While illuminating previously hidden activities of women as religious authors, this paper also considers the future readers of women’s manuscripts. By tracing manuscripts across generations, we find that as women’s writings continued to be read and cherished as spiritual legacy, they formed community memory and shaped religious identity.
Past Seminars:
Some of our earlier seminars are recorded – click the title below for more details.
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11th April 2024 - The Photographic Archive of the Upoto Mission - VIDEO HERE
‘The Photographic Archive of the Upoto Mission, Congo Free State: Some Reflections on Using Visual Sources to Expand Mission Histories’
By Dr Amy King – A recording of this video is available here:
“This talk will reflect upon my doctoral research undertaken at the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia, exploring the photographic archive of Upoto, a Baptist Missionary Society station established in what was the northern Congo Free State in 1890. My thesis was titled: ‘Visual Testaments: Re-collecting the Photographic Archive of the Upoto Mission 1890 – 1915’. This research project drew upon the unusually rich photographic sources connected with the missionaries who were stationed there in order to interrogate the historical evidence they contain. Methodologically I was interested in how this visual evidence worked with and against different kinds of textual and material sources which have survived from Upoto outside of Africa. My research was concerned with the kinds of unique historical evidence that photographs contain, and what visual sources can contribute to our understanding of the past. My doctoral thesis interrogated the visual strategies through which mission work at Upoto was represented for audiences in Britain in the late nineteenth century and the tensions between the public narratives of evangelical work and more privately documented experiences. It also examined the diverse, complex and evolving relationships between British missionaries and local Bapoto and Bangombe people at Upoto as the Christian community was established. My original study of the missionary archive from Upoto has generated new insights into the presence, actions and experiences of Congolese people who lived at Upoto during a period of immense social and cultural upheaval brought by colonialism”.
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16th November 2023 - Deaconesses: A History Hidden in Plain Sight - VIDEO HERE
By Rev Ruth Gouldbourne – A recording of this seminar is available here:
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9th November 2023 - Finding Spurgeon in the Angus and Beyond - VIDEO HERE
By Rev. Ray Rhodes – A recording of this seminar is available here:
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19th October 2023 - Female Missionary, a challenge for two nations - VIDEO HERE
By Dr Reid Trulson – A recording of this seminar is available here:
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18 May 2023: Re-evaluating William Ward’s Early Radicalism - VIDEO HERE
By Landon Adams – A recording of this seminar is available here:
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10 November 2022: Charles Spurgeon and Wintering at Menton
By Prof Sally Shuttleworth
No recording of this seminar is currently available.
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27 October 2022: Edith Gates — neglected pioneer
By Dr Chris Voke
No recording of this seminar is currently available.
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30 June 2022: William Carey and the Environment - VIDEO HERE
By Dr Saptarshi Mallik – A recording of this seminar is available here:
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31 March 2022: The Word Became Image: The use of magic lanterns in mission and evangelism by British Baptists
By Dr Karen Smith
No recording of this seminar is currently available.
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17 Feb 2022: Amnesty International and the rise of human rights activism in post-war Britain - VIDEO HERE
By Dr Tom Buchanan – A recording of this seminar is available here:
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3 Feb 2022: Pioneering woman – Margaret Jarman from Deaconess to Hermit - VIDEO HERE
By Rev Dr Keith Jones
A recording of this seminar is available here: -
18 November 2021: The Dark Heart of Empire: Missionaries and Mr Kurtz - VIDEO HERE
By Dr Julian Thompson
A recording of this seminar is available here:
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8 October 2021: Joseph Angus as Moral Philosophy Tutor at Stepney and Regent’s Park
By Prof Isabel Rivers (QMUL)
No recording of this seminar is currently available. -
30 September 2021: Bookseller, Author, Compiler: Three Women of the Angus Library - VIDEO HERE
Q&A with Dr Lynn Robson
A recording of this seminar is available here: