Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Spring Term @ExeterCIGH Seminar Schedule
The Spring Term is now upon us, and so please find the Centre for Imperial and Global History seminar schedule below for your calendars.
Please direct any inquiries about attending to the seminar convenor, Dr Lyubi Spaskovska.
| Date and Location (Term 2) | Speaker | Paper Title |
| 20th January 2021 (Week 2), 17:00h
|
CIGH-CMHS joint event
John Siblon (Birkbeck) |
Commemoration as imperial hierarchy: The memorialization of African, Asian and Caribbean seamen after the First World War |
| 3rd February 2021 (Week 4), 15:30h | Cyrus Schayegh (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies,
Geneva) |
The Middle East in the world: a modern history in documents
|
| 24th February 2021 (Week 7), 15:30h | Kama Maclean (Heidelberg University) | Coercive Institutions and the crisis of collaboration in late colonial India
|
| 3rd March 2021 (Week 8), 17:00h | CIGH-CMHS joint event
Anyaa Anim-Addo (University of Leeds) |
“Miss Jenny” in port: leisure and labour mobilities in the post-slavery Caribbean |
| 17th March 2021 (Week 10), 15:30h
|
Joint event with Violence
Sarah Dunstan (Queen Mary University, London) |
Race, Rights and Reform: Black Activism in the French Empire and the United States from World War I to Cold War
|
| 24th March 2021 (Week 11), 17:00h
|
Gajendra Singh in conversation with Neilesh Bose (University of Victoria) | South Asian Migrations in Global History
|
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From remembering India’s first rock band to Ireland coming to terms with its imperial past, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
A Black History Resource Guide: steps towards decolonising the library
Annie Price and Nandini Chatterjee
University of Exeter
Annie Price is Common Ground Project Archivist, Special Collections, University of Exeter, and Nandini Chatterjee is Associate Professor in History, also at Exeter, and co-Chair of the History Decolonising Working Group. They chatted about the valuable new Special Collections resource, a Black History Resource Guide, which Annie has created.
Nandini: Hello Annie, thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me about Decolonising the library and archives and your engagement with it. Will you please tell me a bit about yourself – your education and your work?
Annie: Hello! It’s a pleasure, thank you very much for inviting me to talk with you. I’m Annie and I currently work as a project archivist at the University of Exeter Special Collections, which is part of the University Library. I didn’t always want to be an archivist or even know what an archivist was! History was the subject I most enjoyed at school, so I studied for a degree in History and German at the University of Liverpool. I became interested in the heritage sector and, following graduation, I volunteered and worked in several archive repositories and museums in England and Germany, gaining valuable experience in caring for archives as well as engaging with the public. I then returned to the University of Liverpool to qualify as an archivist, graduating with an MA in Archives and Records Management.
Since joining the small and friendly team at the University of Exeter Special Collections, I have worked on projects to catalogue the Syon Abbey archive and the Common Ground archive. My main responsibility as a project archivist is to arrange, repackage, and describe the different components of an archive. This is done by creating a hierarchical structure of sections, series, files, and items that provides contextual information about how the records were originally used. Each component is given a unique reference number and the descriptions are added to a database. Users can then search the database via an online catalogue to identify material of interest and request to view it in our reading room. I would just like to emphasise here that archives are available to everyone, and can be used as much for academic study as for general interest or pleasure.
In addition to cataloguing, I like to find other ways to enable access to archives – the essence, really, of what I think being an archivist is all about – including through giving talks, managing the University of Exeter Heritage Collections Twitter account (@UoEHeritageColl), and creating online guides to our collections.
Nandini: This brings us nicely to the Black History Resource Guide, which you have created this year. What led you to prepare this guide? Continue reading “A Black History Resource Guide: steps towards decolonising the library”
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From the single most important object in the global economy to crafting a global message of anti-racism, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From Bretton Woods 2.0 to revisiting the Zong Massacre, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
Churchill, Empire and Race: Opening the Conversation
A discussion between Professor Priya Gopal of Churchill College and Professor Richard Toye of the University of Exeter, looking at the facts surrounding Sir Winston Churchill’s words, views and actions relating to empire and race.
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
From Belgium’s reckoning with its brutal colonial past to Novia Scotia’s lobster wars, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
A Dutch Netflix Postcolonial Horror Story
Dominic Alessio, Yaffa Caswell, Charlie Klucker, Yeats McDonald, and Emma Nourry
Richmond, the American International University of London
Please note: this article is a co-production with undergraduate history and film students at Richmond, the American International University of London. It was written in a time of COVID as an experiment in alternate assessment forms when regular classes and seminars were not always an option. It was also a useful way for students to apply the lessons of theory and history to the present.
Please also note that there are spoilers below.
In 2020 Netflix produced Ares (directors Giancarlo Sanchez & Michiel ten Horn), its first Dutch horror series. The eight episodes in the series deal with the story of Rosa (Jade Olieberg), an Amsterdam university student of mixed ethnicity and working-class/lower middle-class background, who is invited to join a wealthy and powerful secret society called Ares. Apart from Rosa the other members of Ares appear entirely European and extremely rich and well-connected.
The secret fraternity Ares can be read as a metaphor for how white Dutch society continues to clandestinely benefit economically, politically, and socially from the country’s history of colonialism and slavery. We also believe that the Netflix production was especially prescient given that 2020 was also the year of the year of Black Lives Matter and that this series followed upon growing calls for the Netherlands to address various postcolonial lacunae in its academic curriculum, namely: its need to address the atrocities committed during the heyday of its imperial rule (Doolan 2016); its late and shameful late abolition of the institution of slavery in 1863; and the fact that the country had “failed to acknowledge the continuing influence of its colonial legacies” (Pattynama 2012: 176). Continue reading “A Dutch Netflix Postcolonial Horror Story”
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
From the threat of academic authoritarianism to when Louis Armstrong stopped a civil war in the Congo, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
Has the Clash of Civilizations Thesis Influenced America’s War on Terror?
Gregorio Bettiza
University of Exeter
Cross-posted from the Religion and IR Blog
Samuel Huntington’s theory that post-Cold War world politics would be defined by the “clash of civilizations” has generated much debate in scholarly and policy circles since it first appeared on the pages of Foreign Affairs in 1993. One of the main controversies has revolved around the extent to which Huntington’s (in)famous thesis would come to shape America’s foreign policy and its War on Terror since the attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11).
Some like Paul Avey and Michael Desch have suggested in a 2014 International Studies Quarterly article that Huntington’s ideas have had scarce purchase among US national security policymakers and, by implication, little impact on American foreign policy. Through the use of surveys, Avey and Desch found that across a range of theories which policymakers where most familiar with, Huntington’s clash of civilizations was the one they exhibited the greatest skepticism towards and influenced their work the least. (Other theories policymakers were surveyed on included: democratic peace theory, mutual assured destruction, population centric COIN, structural realism, expected utility.)
Others, especially critical scholars often drawing on Edward Said’s concept of orientalism, have tended to reach dramatically different conclusions. Within this scholarship the clash of civilizations is generally understood as a shared discourse that percolates across all levels of American society, from Hollywood productions to the corridors of power in Washington DC, consistently categorizing Islam and Muslims as the new post-Cold War ‘other’. The War on Terror is then understood as an enactment of these discourses on the world political stage. Continue reading “Has the Clash of Civilizations Thesis Influenced America’s War on Terror?”
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
From how the Soviets recruited Nazi war criminals to spy on the West to misremembering the British Empire, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
Postdoctoral Research Fellow – 19 Nov. Deadline
Job reference: R73691
Date posted: 22/10/2020
Application closing date: 19/11/2020
Location: Cornwall
Salary: The starting salary will be from £35,845 up to £40,322 on Grade F, depending on qualifications and experience.
Package: Generous holiday allowances, flexible working, pension scheme and relocation package (if applicable).
Job category/type: Research
College of Social Sciences and International Studies
This full-time post is available from 1st January 2021 on a fixed term basis for two years.
The post
The College wishes to recruit a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for a Leverhulme Research Project Grant, ‘Warnings from the Archive: A Century of British Intervention in the Middle East’, led by Dr Owen Thomas and Prof Catriona Pennell. This interdisciplinary project encompasses International Relations, History, and Political Science. It is a systematic archive-based comparison of two official inquiries, one hundred years apart, into British military intervention in Iraq: the Mesopotamia Commission (1917) and the Iraq Inquiry (2016). The project will deconstruct these inquiries to understand the contexts, values, cultures and beliefs that have shaped British grand strategy, the lessons learnt and lost from a century of intervention, and the voices heard and unheeded.
This Leverhulme Trust funded post is available from 1st January 2021 for two years. The successful applicant will work under the direction of Dr Thomas and Prof Pennell to conduct literature reviews, exploration of physical and digital archives, and discourse analyses. The post will include co-authoring peer-reviewed journal articles, disseminating findings, coordinating a workshop and journal special issue, producing an open-access digital catalogue of the project’s archival, and developing a project website (including podcasts and teaching materials). Continue reading “Postdoctoral Research Fellow – 19 Nov. Deadline”
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
From teaching anticolonial archives to race and empire in Meiji Japan, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
