Legacy of Leicester: Pivotal Achievements and Discoveries at University of Leicester

In 1955 the ground-breaking book ‘The Making of the English Landscape’ was published. The book was the work of William George Hoskins, a British local historian who founded the first University department of English Local History at the University of Leicester. Hoskins completely changed the way that people view the English countryside by showing how locations had changed over time to accommodate the agricultural, industrial and social developments of local communities. The Centre for English Local History is still an active research body with a unique ‘Leicester approach’ which considered local history in a national context.

In the Department of Genetics, Alec Jeffreys experienced a ‘eureka moment’ when he realised that DNA could be used to identify individuals. The potential for this new technique – subsequently hailed as one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century – was demonstrated two years later when it was used to solve the murder of two Leicestershire teenagers. DNA fingerprinting is now used by police forces, courts and governments around the world for a host of applications including cases of paternity and immigration

The science of X-ray astronomy began in the early 1960s, at the same time that a young Assistant Lecturer named Ken Pounds was helping to found the University of Leicester’s Space Research Group. The search for evidence of black holes was an early target of space research, and – remarkably – Leicester X-ray astronomers were able to play a leading role in confirming the existence of both now-established classes of black holes. Collapsed stars so dense that not even light could escape their gravitational pull had been predicted by Einstein, but it was only after rockets started carrying instruments above the atmosphere that distant X-ray sources could be studied. In 1975, a powerful X-ray source was detected by the Leicester Sky Survey Instrument (SSI) aboard the Ariel 5 spacecraft – causing great excitement among an international group of astronomers who had coincidentally gathered in Leicester that same weekend for a conference. Dubbed A0620-00, the X-ray source was identified as a highly unusual binary star system, one component of which was quickly established as a black hole: six times the mass of the Sun but about the same size as Leicester. Although not the first black hole candidate to be detected, A0620-00 was considered a particularly strong candidate because the relatively small companion star made studying the black hole easier than in other binary systems. Ariel 5 under construction (image: NASA)Further research by Leicester X-ray astronomers, again using Ariel 5, suggested that the extremely bright regions at the centre of many galaxies might also harbour black holes, but many millions of times more massive than A0620-00. That idea was subsequently confirmed when Leicester-led research using the European EXOSAT spacecraft revealed that these bright X-ray sources varied in strength in just a few hours, confirming a powerful energy source in a region so small to be only compatible with a super-massive black hole. For years, all known or suspected black holes fell into these two groups: stellar or super-massive. Theoretically however there should have been a third group somewhere between these two sizes. In 2010, as the University celebrated 50 years of space research, a group of Leicester astronomers confirmed an X-ray source called HLX-1 as most probably an intermediate mass black hole, a few thousand times the mass of the Sun – thereby continuing the University’s remarkable reputation for advancing the study of these enigmatic objects.

When James D Halloran joined Leicester University in 1958 as Senior Tutor in the Department of Adult Education, ‘mass communication’ was not an academic subject. But the field was changing rapidly: the Coronation had prompted a massive surge in television ownership and the launch of ITV had given people a choice of viewing. Jim Halloran taught evening classes at Vaughan College but found that he ran out of material so developed a module on the Sociology of Communication. This was turned into a paper published in a journal on Catholicism (there being no communications-related journals at that time) and then formed the basis of Halloran’s seminal book Control or Consent: A Study of the Challenge of Mass Communications, published in 1963. That same year, the Home Office set up the Television Research Committee, chaired by the Vice-Chancellor of Leicester, Fraser Noble - who appointed Halloran as the Committee Secretary. Initial funding for research at various institutions produced mixed results and confirmed Halloran’s belief that what was needed was a dedicated academic research centre. The Centre for Mass Communication Research at Leicester was consequently established in 1966 under Halloran’s directorship. It attracted a diverse group of academics from various disciplines, reflecting the absence of existing focus on communications research, but fortuitously leading to a multidisciplinary approach which benefited the centre. James Curran, a leading media theorist and author of Power Without Responsibility, has described Leicester as the “original hotbed” of mass communication research. For the first decade or so of the Centre’s existence, all its students were studying for PhDs, many of them drawn from India and other developing nations. Then, in 1978, the Social Science Research Council (predecessor of the ESRC) invited Halloran to design and deliver the UK’s first Masters Degree in media and communications. Thus was born the University of Leicester’s MA in Mass Communications, a degree which is still popular and relevant 35 years on. A distance learning variant was launched in 1995.

Norbert Elias is regarded today as the father of ‘figurational sociology’ and his groundbreaking book The Civilising Process remains as relevant as ever. He was described by Steven Pinker as “the greatest social thinker you’ve never heard of” Elias was born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1897 and fought in the German army during World War One then read for a degree in philosophy. His fundamental disagreement with then-popular Kantian principles led him to move into sociology, an academic field which was still only 30 years old. He took academic posts at Heidelberg and Frankfurt but when the National Socialists came to power in 1933 he moved to Paris and then to London (though he did not speak English). During this time he wrote his magnum opus, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, which was published in Switzerland in 1939 but remained largely unknown for thirty years. This work, which covered European history from 800AD to 1900AD, was published in two volumes: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilisation. By demonstrating how the formation of states and the monopolisation of power within them changed Western society forever, Elias was able to trace the ‘civilising’ of manners and personality in Western Europe since the late Middle Ages. In 1954, after years ‘on the fringes of academia’, Elias was finally offered a full-time post – at the University of Leicester – where he spent eight years building up a thriving Department of Sociology before retiring in 1962. During his time at Leicester he refined and developed the ideas first presented in The Civilising Process including his original notion of ‘figurational sociology’, the study of interdependent, constantly shifting groups of people. The Civilising Process was finally published in English in 1969 (vol.1) and 1982 (vol.2) but it was only in 2000, ten years after Elias’ death, that a single definitive translation appeared, incorporating the updates and revisions from his time at Leicester.