Andrew Thompson
Director, Centre for Imperial & Global History
University of Exeter

Though based in the Department of History, Exeter’s Centre for Imperial & Global History is very keen to reach out into other areas of the College and the wider University. We share interests with a number of colleagues based in other departments who work on aspects of the history of empires as well as different dimensions of global history. The possibilities this opens up for collaborative work, for productive exchanges across disciplines, and for supporting one another’s seminars and conferences, are striking. We have recently invited a number of such colleagues to join us as Associate Members (appended below). Many of them are already in conversation with us, and we look forward to continuing these conversations in the future and in some cases to joint projects emerging out of them. If there are other scholars who would be interested in linking with us who we have not yet made contact with, and who are not on the list below, we’d be delighted to hear from you.

Centre Associates include:

Dr. Gregorio Bettiza (Lecturer, Politics Department) works on International Relations (IR) theory, religion and civilizational analysis, non-liberal norms, and identities, with a particular area focus on American foreign policy, transatlantic relations and the Middle East. Before joining Exeter, he was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow (2012-2014) at the European University Institute (EUI).

Professor Regenia Gagnier (Professor, English Department) is Editor of the Global Circulation Project and Associate Editor of the journals Feminist Economics and Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. Her books have shaped the study of Victorian and modern culture with highly influential work on decadence, aesthetics and aestheticism, lifewriting and subjectivity, economics, individualism, and globalization. Her most recent book is Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859-1920 (2010).

Dr. William Gallois (Senior Lecturer, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies) leads the Middle East Humanities Research Cluster and specializes in the history of colonial North Africa and, more generally, relations between the European and Arab-Islamic worlds from the medieval to the modern period. His most recent book is A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (2013).

Prof. David Inglis (Professor, Sociology Department) works in the areas of sociology of culture, cultural sociology, sociology of art and aesthetics, sociology of food, history of sociology, classical sociology, modern social theory, sociology of the ancient world and cosmopolitanism. He is the founding editor of the journal Cultural Sociology. His publications include the 4-volume Cosmopolitanism (2010), and, with D Gimlin, The Globalization of Food (2009).

Professor Elena Isayev (Associate Professor, Classics Department) is a historian who uses the ancient Mediterranean, and in particular Italy, as a way to explore questions about society, belonging and perception. Her most recent book is Inside Ancient Lucania: Dialogues in History and Archaeology (2007).

Professor Steve McCorriston (Professor, Business School) is Professor of Agricultural Economics. He has acted as a consultant to the OECD, the UN FAO, DEFRA as well as private organisations. He is currently coordinating the Transparency of Food Pricing (TRANSFOP) project, a €1 Million EU-wide project funded by the European Commission, the Consortium involving 13 universities and research institutes across 10 EU countries.

Dr. James Onley (Senior Lecturer, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies) specializes in Gulf history, politics, society, and culture.  Prior to entering academia, he served in the Canadian Army for 12 years and was a UN peacekeeper in Iraq at the end of the Iran–Iraq War (1988). He is editor of the Journal of Arabian Studies and book series editor of Britain and the World. Among his many publications is his forthcoming book India and the Gulf: Trade, Society, and Empire, 1507-1947 (2016).

Dr. Martin Pitts (Senior Lecturer, Classics Department) is an archaeologist whose research investigates the consumption and circulation of artefacts as indicators of historical globalising processes, in terms of both overarching mechanisms and their impacts on local cultural practices. His most recent book, co-authored with MJ Versluys, is Globalisation and the Roman world: World history, connectivity and material culture (2014).

Professor James Ryan (Associate Professor, Geography Department) is a historical and cultural geographer. His research interests lie in three main areas: Geographies of colonialism and post-colonialism; photography, visual culture and geography; and the history of geographical knowledge and science. Among his recent publications is his forthcoming ‘Photography and Empire’, in John M. MacKenzie, ed., The Encyclopedia of Empire (London, 2014).

Professor Doug Stokes (Professor, Politics Department) specialises in US foreign policy, international security and transatlantic grand strategy. His most recent co-authored monograph is Global Energy Security and American Hegemony (2010). He is Director of Exeter’s Centre for Advanced International Studies (CAIS).

Dr. Paul Young (Senior Lecturer, English Department) His research and teaching interests focus predominantly upon the cultural dimensions of imperialism and globalization in the Victorian period. His first book is Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order (2009).