Constructing the university - Georgia Oman

History is written in buildings. By this I do not mean to state the obvious fact that most historians tend to avoid working en plein air, but rather that the shadow of the past can be felt within our built environment. As a PhD student, my own work explores the intersection of gender and physical space in British universities of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The ways in which buildings were designed and used in the past provides a lens through which to understand the wider social and cultural landscape of the societies in which they were produced. In the words of the writer John Gloag, ‘architecture is the most permanent and illuminating of unwritten records’.

My dissertation specifically looks at the ways in which attitudes towards the emergence of women as a new category of student during the second half of the nineteenth century shaped the physical fabric of the institutions to which they had so recently won admission. While the story of coeducation can be told as a tale of progress marked by the dates of pioneering ‘firsts’ achieved, such as women being admitted to courses and allowed to graduate, the narrative preserved within the material culture of buildings is more complicated, revealing as it does the difficulties inherent in translating the ideal of educational equality into practice.