5 more weeks to go and we will welcome you at St Andrews to the 3rd GRAINES summer school on the theme “Interconnected”. With the organisation well under way and practical elements safe in Giada’s hands, we would like to start focusing on content and programme from now on.

Under Programme you will have seen that we have a sort of “skeleton” programme with some more traditional fixtures of summer schools: a workshop led by St Andrews colleague, Professor Andrew Pettegree, on early modern news networks; a workshop & reading group by Professor Fabricio Prado on early modern Atlantic trade and economic networks; or a key note lecture by Professor Philipp Ther on neoliberal networks around 1989. There are a few more, though subject to minor changes.

However, in the spirit of our GRAINES summer schools in the past and in the vein of our Call for Participation, we would like to give you room and space to actively participate and shape the content of the summer school, to share your research, practices, approaches & thoughts with the group.

It was great to see in all applications the willingness to share and contribute. We have suggestions for presentations (more a bit later, but be prepared they will be at the shorter end) as well as contributions to writing & reading groups (again, the format will follow a bit later).

As a first step towards shaping the programme further, but also to allow you to start interacting before the actual physical summer school (we only have 3 days together), we would like to invite you this week to start with some “Homework” (and there is more to come).

This weeks “Homework” (ideally by Monday 11 May) is the following:

Homework

Homework

Write one Blog Post, around 600-800 on your project. You can of course go back to your abstract and slightly remodel & rewrite it (it can be shorter than 600 words, but please no longer than 1,000 words; please include up to 5 essential readings around network, transnational history that are key to your work – share what you read and what drives your research).

In your Blog ideally introduce your topic, yourself, your potential contribution during the summer school AND (in addition to your brief bibliography) pick your most influential reading (monograph, article – please add bibliographical details: author, title, year, journal, pages) and very briefly introduce it and why it is key to your work in terms of inspiration around networks.

How does this work? We have added you to the WordPress website as editors. Many of you may be familiar with all this, it is very straight forward. On the right hand side you find the Log-in. Log-in, go via Dashboard to Posts. Click “Add New”. Create a nice headline, title and off you go: Write or paste your contribution AND Publish. You can always go back and edit later.

On your selected key readings. These will be part of the selected bibliography, the Reader, for the summer school. We will pick a few key readings around workshops that ideally all of us will have read. Other ideas for reading will be simply shared and participants can chose according to interest and research focus.

If you have a PDF of a journal article, you can add it under “Media” (add Media) and create a link on your Blogpost. Or you can send it to us via graines.interconnected@gmail.com and we can upload it for you and make it available.

Never written a Blog Post before? Do not worry! Blog rules are some ideas (Rules!) or some ideas from a recent module we taught this term. The IDEA is that we all get to know each other and our research focus and interests before we actually get together at St Andrews. Once we have all your Blog Posts by Monday 11 May, you can start reading and, ideally, networking by commenting on other participants’ research.

Please do get in touch via the usual email above if anything is unclear or should you have any technical problems in accessing the WordPress site.

Thanks a lot. Best wishes on behalf of GRAINES and the local organisers,

Bernhard