‘Doing’ history: what may liminal space and transition time expose during a process of mentoring postgraduate tutors in the discipline of history? James G. R. Cronin, University College Cork Paper presented at the History School Research Seminar, University College Cork, 4 th February 2013. Introduction Historian, Marc Ferro, in his classic study The use and abuse of history, considers the role school history textbooks have had on conditioning and shaping historical consciousness. His study concludes with recognition that ‘progress in historical knowledge will come about not through the accumulation of knowledge of more events, but through the acquisition of a better methodology of comprehension’ (Ferro, 2003/1981, p. 363). For post-graduates, disciplinary teaching may be a source of anxiety for many new to it. During their transition time from under-graduate to post-graduate, frequently occurring in the first year of a doctoral degree, they may operate in a liminal space between their ‘student’ selves and their ‘teacher’ selves. Coming to disciplinary mastery involves acknowledging these stages of liminality. Here, ‘liminality’ is defined as a suspended state of partial understanding, or ‘stuck place’, in which understanding approximates to a kind of mimicry or lack of authenticity (Cousin, 2006a and 2006b; Land, Meyer and Baillie, 2010). The performance of teaching, as with learning, is initially imitative or mimetic. Graduates learning to teach a discipline initially model their teaching on how they themselves have been taught that discipline. A threshold concept for novice teacher-disciplinarians is learning to experience their chosen discipline holistically; not just as a cognitive field, but also as one requiring dispositional aptitudes. Here, disciplinary dispositions are defined as attitudes and beliefs, about the discipline; about themselves as emerging academic teachers and about building a capacity for empathy with their students as disciplinary novices. Over the past decade, the Indiana University History Learning Project has made significant contributions to enquiry into the teaching and learning of history in higher education. In a seminal paper, focusing on a history department’s ‘decoding’ its students understanding of the discipline, the Indiana University History Learning 1