And So It Begins...

Name: Bridget Keown

Studying: MA, Imperial and Commonwealth History

Scholarship: Friend's of King's College US Master's Scholarship

Greetings!  

My name is Bridget, and I am currently working towards my Master's in Imperial and Commonwealth History at King's, with a focus on the First World War.  I am honored to have received the US Master's Scholarship funded by the Friend's of King's College, the US Alumni Organization.  The opportunity that this scholarship has afforded me has unquestionably changed my life and I will never forget the generosity of those kind people who have helped to make all this possible.

As the name of this blog will most probably suggest, I come from just north of Boston, Massachusetts from a city called Peabody (which is right next to Salem, of the Witch Trial fame).  I really love London, but my heart will always be in Boston and with our local baseball team, the Red Sox.  Spring training games start in a few short weeks, proof that New England winters can't last forever... 

I did my undergraduate work at Smith College, in the western part of Massachusetts, where I double-majored in History and Russian Language & Literature.  I spent my Junior Year Abroad at King's, working in the War Studies and History Departments, and, believing the world is too big to stay in one place for long, I decided to come back.  After graduation, I was lucky enough to get a job at Harvard University's rare book and manuscript library and Theatre Collection, and saved up enough money to make the move to London this past September.

I'm currently renting a room from a family in Stoke Newington, which I am delighted to report genuinely feels like home.  I love walking through Abney Park on Saturday mornings (I recently found out that the plan for it was based on Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston!), and, with the recent snowstorm, was able to build an enormous snowman on the Common with the kids in our neighborhood.  No one believed me that there were four feet of snow back home and that it took quite a great deal more than six inches to phase Bostonians!).  I also have a job at the Imperial War Museum where I help catalogue the First World War acquisitions, which is quite literally a dream come true for me.  Not only are the collections phenomenal, but I also work with some really remarkable people.

At King's, I am taking a course on the Dominions, looking at the colonies of white settlement in the British Empire, their sense of identity and place within the Empire, as well as their interaction with each other and with England; a course called 'Australia: War and Society in the 20th Century', which is fairly self-explanatory, at the Menzies Center at Australia House; and a course that focuses on concepts and debates in the historiography of the British Empire.  In the first term, I was also taking a course on the transition to colonialism in late 18th-century India, which was held at the British Library, using the materials of the East India Company.  Right now, I am thinking of writing my dissertation on the self-identity and racialization of Irish in the British Army during the First World War, but the details of the theory change on an almost daily basis, so stay tuned for further details...

London offers an almost overwhelming amount of opportunities for learning and exploring, and I feel duty-bound to take advantage of as many of these as I can.  Lately, this has involved becoming intimately familiar with the British Library, but I have managed a few adventures.    Having been involved in music and acting for years back home, my tastes usually tend toward theatres and concert halls over here.  I had the insane good-fortune to see David Tennant in A Midsummer Night's Dream in Stratford, which the rational part of my brain still refuses to accept as having actually happened. More recently, I saw Rowan Atkinson in Oliver! at the Theatre Royal--having grown up adoring Blackadder, he could have read the phone book and I would have been delighted, but the show really is fantastic. I was also able to catch a preview of Three Days of Rain, starring James McAvoy (student discounts really are amazing things), which has one of the most impressive sets and lighting design I've seen in a long time. I am going to try to get to the Barbican Center at the end of the month for a performance of Shostakovich's 1st Violin Concerto...details to follow!