Events

Battlefields Trust Online Talk: Remembering Black Tom Fairfax: Parliaments Yorkshire General

Monday 17th March 2025

This talk will examine how Sir Thomas Fairfax, the first commander of Parliament's New Model Army, has been presented to the public in modern times, especially through the form of literature, biography, novels, monuments and film.  The production of these media has not always involved historians, and yet it ought to be historians’ business to influence how historical characters are presented to the wider public. In recent times, as academic concerns for the quality of popular or public history have grown, historians have begun to engage more with visual media ‘as both a competitor and a collaborator’ in communicating the past to the public.  This talk will examine how well-informed popular images of Fairfax have been, and the motives underpinning presentations of Fairfax to the public.

Andrew is a historian of religion, politics and society in early modern England with research expertise on the British and Irish Civil Wars. He graduated from University of York in 1999 with a doctoral thesis examining the nature of parliamentarian allegiance in civil-war Yorkshire. Thereafter he was a researcher for the JISC-funded Virtual Norfolk Project at the University of East Anglia (2000-2003) and the AHRC-funded High Court of Chivalry Project at the University of Birmingham (2003-2006). He was appointed Lecturer in the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester in 2006, where he was promoted to Professor (2018) and Director of the Centre (2020). He moved to the Department for Continuing Education in September 2021.

For further information.

• Contact name : Battlefields Trust Online Talks
• Contact email : info@battlefieldstrust.com