Albion Urdank

Biography

Albion M. Urdank is a tenured Associate Professor of Modern British and European History, who received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1983. He has a research interest in British social and economic history, with an emphasis on the study of local and regional communities of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He has written a book on the wool weaving village of Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, in this period, titled Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale, and is currently engaged in a study in historical demography of this same area, one that compares the reproductive behavior of the Anglican laity to that of Protestant Dissenters. He also studies popular religion and is engaged in reading a voluminous collection of manuscript sermons, composed and delivered by an evangelical Baptist minister active in the locale.

Mr. Urdank also plans to undertake a regional study of pastoral society along the Scottish/English border in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This academic project derives partly from his fondness for training Border Collies and entering them competitively in sheepdog trials throughout California and the Western United States. Border Collies were bred originally in the Scottish borders and entered profoundly into the folk culture of that region’s communities. The Border Collie today is regarded as the most intelligent breed of dog and the premier sheepdog anywhere in the world. [“See Albion M Urdank, ‘The Rationalisation of Rural Sport: British Sheepdog Trials, 1873-1946,” in Rural History, (2006) 17, 1, 65-82 as an aspect of this research.]