Some of you may have been wondering, if you knew how temporary my lecturing rôle at Birmingham was, what has happened to me since it ran down by way of employment, and now that I have some pictures to go with the announcement it’s time to answer that silent question. Since August 2014, I have been and will for the next little while be the Interim Curator of Coins at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts.
My new place of employ, really pretty much next to the old one
Two of the cases of the Faith and Fortune exhibition, and a really big map, all down to Rebecca Darley and Daniel Reynolds with help from Maria Vrij and Ali Miynat
The Barber is to the University of Birmingham roughly as the Fitzwilliam Museum is to that of Cambridge, which is to say, a university museum blessed with an excellent fine art collection that has also been lucky enough to acquire a world-class coin collection. The Barber’s strengths are especially in Byzantine coinage, where they have—we have—probably the best collection in Europe, but because of staff leave and other factors this has been essentially inaccessible for the last couple of years, except in connection with the Faith and Fortune exhibition I’ve mentioned and in charge of which I now more or less am, but for which I can of course take absolutely no credit.
Shelves of the Coin Study Room, library currently undergoing audit and reorganisation
Anyway, part of my job is exactly to end that inaccessibility, and there’s plenty of people already wanting to come and do either research or teaching with it, which is great. Where my actual expertise comes in, however, is that much of this collection is catalogued but not to database-compatible standards, those catalogues are not on the web and almost none of it is published, so there is a lot to do to get it where its contents are as well-known as they deserve to be and can be searched and studied from outside. But, these are things in which I have past form, so I and a slowly-growing roster of willing volunteers will get something done on that; watch this space. Right now, to do much work on the coins will mean watching this space:
Coin trays open and doors to coin room firmly shut. Security, you understand. But the real question is probably, which contains more gold? And actually we have plans to get data on the coins at least…
… but this is going to change. There are also some exciting research questions I’m looking forward to getting at with this collection. About those you’ll doubtless hear more as they develop but while a number of them are substantially other people’s ideas (not least Rebecca’s and Daniel’s, collaborators whom one could not hope to better) with which I’m able to help, some are my own fascinations which I had never previously thought of exploring. Stay tuned and I will tell you more! And for now, this is where I am and what I’m doing.
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 
Congratulations – although I may now have to talk to you professionally…
Quelle horreur! But please do; I have the impression that the more departments I can somehow bring into contact with the Barber the happier people will be.
I have a cousin who finished his PhD in Medieval History. He looked around at the job market, said “Bugger this” and went off to do something else, telling me how wise I had been to treat history as an interest and science as a living. And this was forty years ago.
Well follow the money, but not always.I’ve been following your blogs for about a year and always found them thought provoking and hysterically funny { ok not hysterically but amusing in an acadamic way]No seriously i always read them being into althings AngloSaxon and early medievial.Working my way through Proff Richard North’s book on ” Heathen Gods in old English literature”.Phew ! if only the local pub quiz had a ” ancient history ” section instead of ” current affairs” or ” in the news”, one would be so much happier.
This is very good news indeed – many congratulations!
It will serve! Now watch me try to convert myself into a Byzantinist…
Well, I shall look forward to learning a thing or two about Byzantium myself in future posts.
Jon come to the (slightly Golden) Dark Side…..
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I would like to see a cool collection of byzantine coins. I don’t think I can make it to Europe though. Maybe there is something in the States.
Actually several! The most obvious one is the collection at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC, probably the best in the world, but there is also a good collection at Princeton, and at least one more northern university collection I’m now struggling to remember. And of course there is the American Numismatic Society, as I’m sure you’re aware. Access to all these is not necessarily easy, of course; parts of the DO one are always on display (and there’s much more there to see as well) but one can’t display thousands and thousands of coins usefully. But if you have a reasonable enquiry a visit can probably can be arranged in one or other of these cases.
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